Detroit activist's $600,000 gift supports better medical care in Ukraine's villages (03/28/04)

Detroit activist's $600,000 gift supports better medical care in Ukraine's villages

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - While Ukraine is considered a part of Central Europe, social conditions in some areas of the country would make it seem closer to South America - especially when it comes to access to modern medicine.

There are small, remote rural communities in Ukraine where a bus stops only once a week. Sometimes it brings a doctor from a town located up to 100 kilometers away, where a hospital responsible for a region encompassing some 25 villages may be located.

The United Ukrainian American Relief Committee, a Philadelphia-based humanitarian aid organization, decided that these parts of Ukraine needed to become the focus of their charitable efforts after it received a $600,000 award from the estate of an elderly Detroit-area woman.

"We wanted to go to the villages in the backwoods to get them basic medical supplies. In some villages you cannot find a blood pressure gauge in the entire village and even aspirin is not available," explained Vira Prynko, the director of the Kyiv office of the UUARC.

The UUARC, which was founded as a war relief organization in 1944, has provided humanitarian aid to political prisoners in the Soviet Union and disaster relief to émigré Ukrainians throughout the world. Since 1991, when Ukraine declared independence, it has shifted its focus to aiding children in this economically still underdeveloped country. It has also provided flood relief for victims in the Transcarpathian region. Recently the UUARC turned its attention to obtaining medical aid for the country's most needy with the accent on children.

The effort was spurred by a $600,000 donation bequeathed to the UUARC by Sylvia Blake, a retired Detroit public school teacher of Ukrainian origin. Ms. Blake, a native Detroiter who died in 2000 at the age of 83, stipulated in her will that the money should be spent to provide medical aid to children in Ukraine.

The UUARC invested the first $100,000 of Ms. Blake's gift in ambulances for 14 county hospitals located across Ukraine - from Kharkiv to Ivano-Frankivsk - five of which specialize in the care of children and newborns. All of them have extensive children's care facilities. Most importantly, the hospitals are located in out-of-the-way areas and have given the medical centers access to people in villages that previously had no hope of emergency medical services.

"You can't imagine how much simply one vehicle helps in these regions," explained Ms. Prynko. The UUARC Kyiv director underscored that she has carefully monitored what types of vehicles were purchased by the hospitals and how they have been used.

In the next stage of the project supported by the money provided by the late Ms. Blake, the UUARC will purchase basic emergency medical equipment for the vehicles and the hospitals. Eventually the UUARC hopes to go directly to the local village medical workers, generally nurse practitioners, to get them the basic medical supplies many still lack.

Before that, however, the UUARC wants to complete its funding of the county hospitals. Each hospital has developed a wish list of what it needs most and wants, including cardio resuscitators and artificial respirators for children. One hospital in Mykolaiv simply wants to replace a nearly century-old anesthesia-dispensing apparatus.

An expert from Ukraine's Ministry of Health, in cooperation with the UUARC, will now review the items to determine what is within reason, what is legitimate and, perhaps most importantly, what is affordable.

"We could spend the whole $600,000 right away, but we have decided to take our time," explained Ms. Prynko. "We want to understand the hospitals, the equipment and the market."

Markets - now that is a word that Ms. Blake would have understood, as it turned out, she knew how to play them. After spending nearly 35 years in teaching, she retired in 1977, but remained extremely active in her retirement. After obtaining an associate degree in medical record technology, Ms. Blake, whose parents were Andrew Blashchuk and Mary Korolishin Blashchuk, became engrossed by finances. Soon she was taking courses in investments, attending seminars and subscribing to financial publications. Before long she had made a small fortune in a hot stock market, which, ironically cooled off at about the time of her passing.

In a will written in the 1980s Ms. Blake, who had developed a special fondness for Ukraine after visiting the country in 1971, while it was still under Soviet rule, stipulated that all but $50,000 of her estate should be divided between the UUARC and St. Mary's Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Southfield, Mich. At the time of her death that amount was well over $1 million.

Ms. Blake's desire to help others, exemplified by her years in the teaching profession, her huge gift to the village children of Ukraine and the Orthodox church she attended in Detroit, went still further. She also had arranged with the University of Michigan, where she had done graduate work before World War II, to have her body accepted by its medical school for research after her death.

| Home Page |