In the face of the influx of minors sometimes unaccompanied, particularly in Poland, several international institutions are concerned, evoking the risk of trafficking, separation of families and disappearance.
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You have to roll an hour to the south from Krakow. Take the winding roads climbing to the mountains. This is there, in a Polish winter sports station won by the spring, than about thirty children from a private orphanage from the Lviv region, in the Ukrainian West, were moved in early March.
A holiday center has been graciously made available by its owners, a couple of Polish. In one of the rooms at Anastasia, Ivanka and Ania, aged 6, 7 and 9, have fun on the beds. In the morning, they went to school. These three sisters were placed in orphanage a year ago with their brother Volodymir, 3 years, as a result of facts of sexual abuse. Ania knows it’s the war that brought him to this corner of Poland. “She is not worried, knows Natalia, the 26-year-old educator who shares the room on siblings. The big ones talk a lot about them and we pray three times a day.”
aged 2 to 17, the children of the orphanage “have been withdrawn to their parents definitively or temporarily because of problems of addictions, negligence or abuse,” says Wendy Lynn Farrell. This 39-year-old is an active member of a Baptist community of Springfield, in the state of Missouri, whose church is the main financial support of the orphanage, through the Children’s Paths Foundation (“Children’s Trails” ) Itself adopted a Crimean teenager in 2013. She is part of the craftsmen of the evacuation of children in Poland.
Today, Wendy’s goal is to bring the group to the United States, with the downstream of the Ukrainian authorities and “the time it’s calm”. “In Springfield, our community knows these children and can support them. They will not need anything,” she justifies. Children have not been registered as refugees with the Polish administration, “not to limit our chances,” she explains.
“Risks of traffic”
Leah wants to go to the United States. At the same time, this 15-year-old teenager, placed since 2014, does not hide his anxiety. “My father and my brother are in Lviv but my mother lives in Maroupol [in southern Ukraine] and I have had no news from her since March 5, she says. She does not receive plus messages or calls. “
“Most children have no relationship with their parents and they did not worry about their fate,” says Mykola Shagarov, the director of the orphanage, himself refugee Poland. This 46-year-old Ukrainian declares that everything is done “in compliance with the law” and that “the adoption processes are suspended during the war”. He knows that there are “traffic risks” in this period of crisis.
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