HUMANITARIAN WORK

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Today was one of those days that I found myself walking down a road I could not have imagined a year ago. This is Elder Kinghorn following Olga, our Interpreter and a woman we met on the bus. We had just walked about half a mile from the bus stop to this trail and then crossed some railroad tracks when I decided to stop and take a picture. Sometimes I just have to stop and "take in" what we are experiencing. What has become normal to us now would have been quite surprising when we first arrived in Ukraine. We were on our way to a major Hospital that treats spinal cord injury patients and we were walking on a dirt path that trailed past gardens of Sunflowers and summer vegetables. We could see the hospital in the distance but no multilevel parking garages, no ambulance entrances, no signs directing doctors to park in one parking lot and patients in another. In fact, there really aren't parking lots in the hospitals because there are so few people who drive. We have become accustomed to seeing a line of people as they come and go to the hospital from the bus stops usually carrying sacks of food. The woman with Olga said her husband is a patient at the hospital and she could lead us there. She explained to Olga that her husband had an accident and was paralyzed. This was his second time in the hospital and he had been hospitalized for two months this time. She had her hands full of two large bags which probably contained food. Most of the families bring food from home to leave because the hospital only serves borche in the evening. Now that I think of it I have never seen an ambulance entrance or an emergency room entrance in any of the hospitals we have visited. The second picture is what we saw when we actually entered the hospital.