This spring has been particularly long for the people of Ukraine. With the war causing families to be split up, fathers haven’t seen their children or their wives for over three months.
Spouses have had to live with tremendous anxiety. Wives could be a phone call away from hearing that their husbands have been killed in the fighting. And as the men stay behind, they worry about whether their families are safely settled far from home.
When I spoke to one refugee who’d come to France with her children, she said as time goes by, she’s finding it harder to stay connected to her husband. The once daily phone calls have become less frequent as she feels she doesn’t have much to tell him. He is stuck in limbo waiting to see what happens at home, whereas she is busy trying to find work and give her children the attention they need.
Thankfully, however, there are couples who have found a solution to remain close to each other even if they’re thousands of miles apart, as a tweet from Szymon Czyszek shows.
Petro and Oksana Galuga, residents of Kyiv, have been married 25 years, although they have known each other for 35. When the war began, Oksana fled to Poland with her children, leaving behind her husband, who is State Secretary of the Knights of Columbus in Ukraine.
Petro is busy is helping with the humanitarian efforts of the Knights in Ukraine. And as he shared in the video below, it’s hard on all the men who’ve been separated from their loved ones:
“Of course we all feel very lonely and sad that we are separated.” But he added that there’s something he and his wife do that helps solidify the marital bond. “We pray together, it unites us very much spiritually.”
While you can see that Oksana is very much in love with her husband, explaining, “Peter is very much in keeping with his name, Peter is the rock,” she is also extremely grateful for the work of the Knights in Poland. They contacted her as soon as she arrived in Poland to make sure she was okay.
Despite the current conflict, Petro is hopeful for the future, that along with his own family, all the other families “will eventually reunite.”
He also is hopeful that “Eventually the Lord will give us peace, and we will have the opportunity, the great opportunity to rebuild our country.”
As we pray for peace in Ukraine, we can also pray for all the couples who’ve been separated, that they may soon be reunited.
