By Kristen Jordan Shamus, Detroit Free Press | Reporter Kristen Jordan Shamus and visual journalist Mandi Wright of the Free Press, part of the USA TODAY Network, are in Poland, near the border with Ukraine. They followed a group of U.S. doctors who traveled to Poland to treat Ukrainian children with burns and congenital abnormalities, the first such trip since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. The doctors, from Michigan, Texas, Massachusetts and Missouri, operated on 20 children in the past week. Shamus and Wright this week will tell the children’s stories.
‘Where is the music?’ Quiet of Poland Perplexes Burned 4-year-old From War-torn Ukraine
LECZNA, Poland — Four-year-old Yelizaveta Nadolniak lives in a fantasy world, where she’s been told the sounds of war in her homeland — bombs exploding, the air raid sirens — are simply the bass and timbre of rap music playing nearby.
The tiny Ukrainian girl with wispy blond hair asked her aunt, Ludmila Nativa, “Where is the music?” when they crossed the border earlier this month into eastern Poland, a country at peace, where the days and nights are quiet.
Yelizaveta, whose nickname is Liza, is among 20 children from Ukraine to undergo complex plastic and reconstructive surgery on burn scars, war trauma and congenital anomalies in mid-May in this small Polish town, about 20 miles from the border.
Doctors Collaborating to Help Children fill gap
These surgeries can vastly improve the quality of the children’s lives, restoring their ability to bend their arms and legs, use their hands and turn their heads and prevent crippling deformities. But because they’re not life-threatening injuries, the kids can’t get treatment for them now in Ukraine.
A team of U.S. doctors from Michigan, Texas, Massachusetts, and Missouri — part of a nonprofit organization called Doctors Collaborating to Help Children — traveled to Poland on a humanitarian mission to fill the medical void.
Liza doesn’t remember much about the night of the fire, when she was burned across her torso, neck and both arms, Nativa said.
Her family lived in an older home in a small village near Mykolaiv, the southern Ukrainian city that has been heavily attacked by Russian forces. It was soon after the war began when faulty wiring sparked a blaze that caught the entire family unaware, Nativa said.
Liza’s sister and another child were pulled out of the house before they could be badly burned, but when a window was opened to get the children to safety, it supplied more oxygen to the flames, she said.
“Tiny Liza was lying in bed at the time of the fire, so when they opened the window … the fire grew,” Nativa said. “She lost consciousness and luckily does not remember most of what happened.”
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: US doctors travel to Poland to treat war injuries of Ukrainian kids.
Read the full, sad, story here:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/where-music-quiet-poland-perplexes-090835587.html
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Afghan Sisters Who Defied Family and the Taliban to Sing “lost everything” and Now Battle Depression
By Sami Yousafzai, CBS News
Islamabad — In 2010, two Afghan sisters rebelled against their family’s wishes and their country’s traditions by not only singing, but singing in public, even posting videos of their music online. Singing and dancing are largely taboo in Afghanistan’s deeply conservative society, for men and women. The pair were reprimanded lightly by a local court, but it didn’t stop them.
Khushi Mehtab, who’s now 32, and her younger sister Asma Ayar, 28, kept performing at local shows and posting their videos, and they gained significant popularity.
But just as they were rising to fame in Afghanistan, the U.S.-backed government collapsed and the Taliban took back control of the country in August 2021.
“We were banished”
“I couldn’t believe how suddenly everything collapsed and changed 360 degrees,” Ayar told CBS News. “The next day, we saw the Taliban patrolling the streets. We tried to hide our instruments but there was no one to help us. On the third day after Kabul was captured, Taliban forces knocked on the door and took my 18-year-old brother. They knew about our profession and told him that we should go to the police station and repent.”
“I separated myself from my family and got to the airport to escape. Amid the chaos, a Taliban guard stopped me and stuck the barrel of his gun into my forehead,” said Mehtab. “At the time, I thought, ‘I’m a singer, which is sinful to the Taliban, they will surely shoot me,’ but luckily he got distracted with another person. I ran toward the airstrip but didn’t manage to catch an evacuation flight.”
“We were banished from our inner family circle for our choice of making music. The [previous] court ruled in our favor, but now the Taliban and some family members were against us, so we dumped our musical instruments,” she said. “It was liking throwing away our dreams.”
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If you or a loved one is struggling or in crisis, help is available. You can call or text 988 or to chat online, go to 988Lifeline.org.
Read the full story of how they escaped and how they’re doing now here:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/afghanistan-taliban-sisters-singers-lost-everything-suffer-depres
sion/
Photo: Khushi Metab
June 1, 2023| Thoughts and Prayers| Barb Dye