Ukrainian best friends reunited as refugees in central Kentucky – ABC 36 News

NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. (WTVQ) – Many Ukrainian refugees are coming to the central Kentucky space due to the Ukrainian Pentecostal Church on Brannon Street. The church helps to set these refugee households up in furnished residences. Households like Lidiia’s and Margarita’s, two greatest associates from Ukraine.

The pair says after they met for the primary time, it was like they’d recognized one another their entire lives. Lidiia’s granddaughter Paulina interprets their exceptional story of friendship.

“They met one another taking these children out of Chernobyl on the bus, they have been working in a single group. They’d seen one another earlier than however that’s after they began speaking extra and understanding one another higher,” Lidiia recounts of when she first met Margarita.

Lidiia and Margarita say regardless that they didn’t know precisely what occurred on the nuclear energy plant, it was essential to every of them to assist the kids, animals and nation in any means they may.

The 2 have lived via a few of Ukraine’s darkest days, from Soviet rule to Chernobyl’s explosion up till the warfare with Russia, however via all of it have saved their mild. Lidiia fled along with her daughter and grandchildren very quickly after the warfare began, attending to Kentucky in late July. Margarita, her daughter and her grandchildren didn’t depart till not too long ago, touchdown in Louisville on Sunday.

“[Margarita] was residing on the ninth ground within the massive constructing and for her, all these bombs falling, she’s seen these bombs,” says Margarita about residing in Kyiv in the course of the starting of the warfare. “It regarded like a flame falling from a roof close by. When the air raid alerts have been going, they only hid within the hall.”

Each girls say if it weren’t for wanting to avoid wasting their households, they might have stayed in Ukraine.

“Each day, they’re remembering Ukraine, enthusiastic about it and crying. As a result of they’ve all their lives which were in Ukraine, an enormous a part of their soul in Ukraine,” Paulina interprets for Lidiia.

However, Lidiia and Margarita are comfortable to be in America, saying it’s the primary place that’s felt like house.

“Once we have been going via many alternative international locations in Europe, we felt prefer it’s not house there. It’s just a few place we’d keep for a few months, days, weeks,” says Lidiia. “Once we acquired right here, it seems like house.”

Lidiia and Margarita have religion that this isn’t their new everlasting house and are trying ahead to the day they will return house to Ukraine.

The Ukrainian Pentecostal Church is searching for donations to proceed supporting the refugee households coming in from Ukraine. You’ll be able to drop gently used or new furnishings off on the church on 1101 Brannon Street in Nicholasville. For extra info, go to the web site HERE and Fb HERE.