With winter approaching, temperatures in Ukraine are already dipping into the teens. As recently as last month, Russia had already destroyed 30 percent of Ukraine’s electrical power grid, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Millions of Ukrainians will lack heat this winter.
“Millions of Ukrainians uprooted from their homes by the current war are facing winter in displacement or are living in damaged homes or in buildings ill-suited to protect them from the biting cold, with disrupted energy, heating and water supplies and lost livelihoods,” UNHCR spokesperson Olga Sarrado said in a Nov. 11 press briefing.
UBTS is responding to the crisis through six humanitarian We Care Centers where UBTS students and graduates are among volunteers, Pyzh told Baptist Press during a recent trip to the U.S. The seminary is working to get power generators to establish warming stations and phone charging sites.
“The big challenge, immediate challenge, is to go through the winter,” Pyzh said, “because you don’t have electricity, you don’t have heating, you don’t have water, you don’t have anything.”
We Care Centers are working to winterize homes that are too damaged to provide adequate shelter, restoring roofs, windows and doors. An additional seven centers are planned to be operational by January, UBTS reported.
UBTS, which resumed classes after spending the first months of the war as a humanitarian aid shelter, is renovating a garage into a bomb shelter, expanding bomb shelter capacity there. Student enrollment is 2,000, Pyzh said, with most students attending classes onsite and living in Lviv. Dormitory space comfortably holds 70 students, he said, but they are filled beyond capacity.
“Sometimes we spend more time in bomb shelter than anywhere else,” Pyzh told Baptist Press. “It’s an underground garage, but we’re using it as a bomb shelter, because you cannot operate if you don’t have enough room for students in the bomb shelter.
“We do have a lot of air raid sirens now. After Oct. 10, we’ve been under attack quite often.”
Southern Baptist Send Relief, individual churches and other groups have sent donations to UBTS in support of humanitarian aid since the war began.
“Thank you for praying for us and helping us,” Pyzh has said. “Pray for God’s miracle, because it will take God’s miracle to stop the war.”
This article originally appeared on BaptistPress.com.
