Mennonite Central Committee

First Person: Natasha Nikolaenko

From the January/February 2007 issue of "a Common Place"

I was 15 years old when I started praying about taking care of orphans. Ukraine has 450,000 children who do not have parents or are abandoned or neglected. It is horrible.

My whole family is also very much concerned about this new plague in our country, but the government has not allowed my parents to foster children because my father has diabetes.

One day I said to my parents that I could foster a child. My father said, “If you want to do this, you should start praying.” In my prayers I wanted all the arrangements to be in place by my 18th birthday, but it did not happen.

I was asking for three children and my father was communicating with the government on all the matters. One day he came with the news: “There is an opportunity for you to foster children! It requires taking care not of three, but of five children.” I was 20 years old.

We went to the children’s center and they started showing us little kids who were eligible to be taken into family care. Both father and I were there, praying as we were selecting the children who would come with us. We visited them in the shelter two or three times and then we took them home. It was February 21, 2004.

The youngest child was 6 months old, the oldest 2 years old. Their names are Vitalina, Veronica, Darina, Artem and Pavel. A few weeks after we brought them home, we learned that some of the children had health problems and all of them had weak immune systems. Vitalina had serious heart problems, liver problems and a cyst on her brain. The first year we had the children, I spent 160 days in the hospital with Vitalina or one of the other children. Now it is a little less.

I was in the hospital with Vitalina when I heard about a little boy who had been found on the steps of the women’s hospital. Every time I went to the hospital with one of my five children, I saw this little boy. Although he was registered in a children’s shelter, he spent the first year of his life in the hospital. I said to my parents, “Let’s take this one as well.” His name is Ivan. He often suffers from lung infections and bronchial asthma.

The children live in our house with my parents and my sisters. I was raising money for a family-type children’s home when our neighbor donated his little house for this ministry. We are now renovating the old building to make it bigger and suitable for the children. I want to expand this ministry and take four more children when the home is ready. I believe this is the ministry that God has planned for me.

My sisters, who are ages 20 to 11, are great coaches. They have all these games that they play with the children. I also get some help from people in our church.

I might not be able to give my children a lot of toys but I can mother them and offer them my heart. These children are worthy to be loved and it is not difficult to love them.

If God is willing, I may get married some day and have my own kids but first I want to raise these children.

Natasha Nikolaenko lives in Birke, a village south of Kharkov, Ukraine. She is a member of Sokolovskaya Baptist Church, where her father is the pastor. To help renovate a building for Natasha’s children, her family received a loan from a church-run fund that MCC supports.