Parish Lenten Mission – Ukraine Welcome Circle A Look Back and A Renewed Request

Dear Fellow St. Peter Parish Parishioners,

During Lent two years ago St. Peter Parish first began its participation in the Ukraine Welcome. The Welcome Circle asked for Parishioners’ support to bring a family from Ukraine where the war had brought a year’s suffering to the country.

The overwhelmingly generous contributions and great practical assistance from people in the parish made that effort a reality. In June 2023, the family of Roman, Olena, and Varvara was welcomed at Logan airport. We saw immediately how kind, industrious, resourceful, and resilient they are. We were able to be with them in their adjustment as they moved into an apartment, and began to learn English, establish their daughter in an excellent Cambridge school program, and secure good employment and health care access, navigating several challenges.

The family’s second year has been easier in many ways. Their housing has extended through another year. Roman has taken on new responsibilities with the moving company that employs him, and Olena has a good position in a multilingual child-care center. They have made friends in their work, school, and neighborhood, and are well connected with the local Ukrainian community, a source of great mutual support and friendship.

Your essential donations helped pay for rent, groceries, and household furnishings, English lessons and immigration related fees. You made it possible.

During Lent last year, the Welcome Circle asked for parishioners to welcome a second family, whose father was already in the US, but whose mother and two school-age children were still in a dangerous part of Ukraine near Odesa. Your generous donations made it possible for Alex to meet his wife, Yuliia, and children, Veronika and Yehor, at the airport last July. What a gift to see this very loving family reunited and to get to know each of them!

With this grounding of parish support, members of the Welcome Circle made the arrangements for appropriate school programs for the kids and organized the complicated paperwork necessary for people new to the United States. This family, too, has often been out ahead of us in their resourcefulness and resilience. Alex continues his work at a moving company. Yuliia is working ‘mother’s hours’ at a Marshalls near their home. Their children are doing very well in school and learning English quickly. Donations to the Circle paid for the family’s early rent and lease-up costs, groceries, and household items, English lessons, and immigration related fees.

None of this could have happened without the generous contributors who are part of St. Peter Parish. Both families are deeply appreciative of the financial support and all the ways that people in the parish have welcomed them. Both families came to the St. Patrick’s Day Breakfast and had a very good time. We will invite them to a Sunday hospitality soon and we hope that you will spend a bit of time with them.

This Lent as part of our Parish Lenten Mission: We ask your support again. There have been very significant changes both here and in the Ukraine. While there is talk of a truce, war continues to devastate communities throughout Ukraine, and the future is hard to know. That deeply impacts the families, who have left parents and siblings there. In the US, the immigration system is in an upheaval, and the humanitarian program that allowed us to sponsor these families is no longer open. As Ukrainians already here, they still have a period of protection based on their original entry and we are working with them to utilize all the different protections for extending their status.

Our hope is to continue to support both families in any way they need during the year to come. Most immediately, this will mean contributing to their monthly rent. Because of high housing costs in the Cambridge area, they still need that assistance. They have become much more independent, both financially and in navigating their daily lives. They are covering most of their living expenses. It looks like they will be ready to cover all their other costs next year, unless some emergency need arises.

We hope you will be able to renew your generosity this Lent, as we all try to continue heeding the call to welcome the stranger. On April 6 and 7, we will be at all liturgies to ask for your help, and to answer any questions you may have.

With deep appreciation,
Frank Hartmann, Carol Lacasse, Barbara Best, Michael Reidy, Rebecca Joyce, Lauren Curry

Donations can be made by clicking this link website www.saintpetercambridge.org or by check made out to “St. Peter Parish”, with ‘Ukraine Welcome’ in the memo line mailed to Saint Peter parish, 100 Concord Ave, Cambridge, MA 02138.

Thanks!