Kristy Engel is a global consultant with a health care focus. She is trained as a pediatric nurse practitioner and served for 12 years in the Dominican Republic leading teams and working with public health issues, as well as in Haiti and Liberia. Last December, Kristy took a small medical team to Ukraine. She recently returned from another months-long trip to help meet medical needs among Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).
I returned to Hungary/Ukraine in late January 2023 to serve alongside our partners who provide mobile medical clinics to IDPs (Internally Displaced Persons) living in shelters in the far-western regions of Ukraine, near the Hungarian border.
While there, I was able to help provide care to around twenty different shelters, organize the donated supplies and medicines, consult patients alongside several visiting medical teams, develop a clinic record-keeping system and a cloud-based patient registration, while also visiting patients for follow-up care after our medical clinics. I even held a well-child clinic at a nearby church one evening so that parents could bring their kids, after they finished work. I returned to the U.S. in mid-May.
It has taken me a couple of weeks of rest and digesting all I experienced in Ukraine to be able to begin putting the experience into words. One part of my brain is full of the data…numbers of patients, medicines given, diseases seen, etc. The other part of my brain has taken a lot longer to digest the emotional trauma and suffering that I saw around me daily. These are the things that I WANT to share so more will understand, and yet I find the most difficult to express.
Most days, when we went to a shelter to hold a clinic, we were met by compassionate, helpful and yet traumatized IDPs who weren’t sure what tomorrow would hold for them. Often, the first patients we saw in a clinic would be crying because they had just found out in the last 24-48 hours that a family member had died in the war…a son, a husband, a father, or grandson.
I remember when a woman entered weeping because she had just learned that both her husband and son had been killed.
We saw teenagers who were cutting themselves…marks left on their arms in an attempt to “control” something in their lives.
We met teen orphans who were now in charge of their younger siblings in a facility far from anything they knew as familiar. All they knew was that they were now in charge, and it weighed heavily on them.
I remember telling a woman that she was pregnant and the look of shock on her face, trying to reconcile how to raise another child without the father close by because he was on the front lines. She had three other children with her and had recently arrived to a shelter because it was too dangerous to stay in her home in Eastern Ukraine.
A young man came to see me who was gaunt, pale, and couldn’t stop fidgeting. His eyes darted around the clinic, and he rarely made eye contact. His nails were bitten down and there were dark circles under his eyes. He had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression several months earlier but said the medicine wasn’t working. Even when he was prayed for, he couldn’t close his eyes, but continued to look around, just watching.
I remember counseling a mother who had a child with autism. They were living in a shelter, and she was desperate to find any help for her son. She kept asking me, “What country can I go to where they have good support for us; where my child will get the help he needs?”
I held (and hold) each of these desperate stories (and many more) close to my heart.
I pray for their peace and safety and that the war will end so rebuilding can begin.
I circle in prayer the leaders of Hungarian Baptist Aid and Transcarpathian Baptist Charity, so that they may feel cared for, strengthened, encouraged, and that they may have the resources they need to continue serving others.
I thank so many of you who consistently pray for me and support me, even when you aren’t exactly sure where I’m at in the world!
