Anne Today, we’d like to share a special story about a wonderful chain of people achieving something wonderful. …. In this case, a stroller. (Adriana Araújo – thank you for this phrase, which describes perfectly what often happens with Bracelets and Peace and our friends.)
We’ll hear the story from Olga, co-founder of the Unity of Hearts.
Hello, my name is Olga Velchinskaya, and I want to share a story about a stroller that traveled halfway around the world and connected many people through acts of kindness.
This is not just a story about a stroller — it is a story about human kindness, mutual support, and how a simple desire to help can create a real chain of miracles.
But before I tell you about this amazing chain of good deeds, I’d like to share a little about my family’s story.
Our life before the war
Before the war, I lived with my daughter’s family in a small, wonderful town. It was a green, cozy place with kind, warm-hearted people who truly loved their town. It is located on the left bank of the Dnieper, in the Kherson region — the same place where the hydroelectric power station was later destroyed.
From the first moments of the Russian invasion, our town was occupied. Everything changed instantly. We immediately learned what it meant to be intimidated, what it meant to not have the right to leave your house. We learned what a humanitarian catastrophe was — when there is nothing left in the house, and you can’t feed your child. We learned what it was like to live in a basement in freezing cold temperatures — in February, in March, with a child who wasn’t even four years old yet. We learned what it meant when they shot at your legs just for stepping outside your gate.
We held on for six months. For six months, we hoped, endured, and believed. But then we realized that it was time to save the most precious thing — a little life. And we left everything. Everything we had. Everything we lived for — our home (which no longer exists).
The journey was difficult and painful, but we managed to get to Odesa. We didn’t want to leave Ukraine. No matter how scary and hard it was, we wanted to stay on our land. We wanted to continue living here in Ukraine.
Our move to Odesa
A while after settling in Odesa, I became a volunteer. Fate brought me together with Natalia and Julia, who turned out to also be from my town. We hadn’t known each other before, but our shared grief, our common past, and our shared desire to help others united us. Together, we became involved in volunteer work, helping those who, like us, were forced to leave their homes and seek refuge here in Odesa.
At the end of 2024, my friends and I decided to create our own organization, to have more opportunities to support people like us — those who had lost everything but didn’t give up. And that’s how our team was born. Unity of Hearts of Ukraine.
Fate also gave me another important meeting — with Steve Hodgeson, a volunteer from the UK who moved to Ukraine and dedicates all his efforts to helping Ukrainians. He constantly travels to England, Spain, and Germany, collecting humanitarian aid and bringing it to Odesa. We met and became very close friends. Now, he is not just my friend, but a true friend of our entire organization.
Thanks to Steve, I came into contact with a wonderful woman — Anne Robinson, from Bracelets and Peace. In one of our conversations, I shared with her the story of my family. I told her that my daughter was about to have her third child, a girl, and that she already had a small one-and-a-half-year-old boy. We needed a double stroller for siblings.
In that same conversation, I asked Anne if she could try to help us find such a stroller.
Anne didn’t hesitate for a moment. She immediately said, “Yes, of course, I will try to help.” And that same day, she posted about it on her Facebook page.
And a miracle happened almost immediately. A very kind family responded to her message. They said that they had a stroller that was perfect for siblings, and they were happy to give it away — from the heart, simply because they wanted to do something good.
Thus began the chain of kindness and the journey of this stroller. The family sent a photo, Anne forwarded it to us, and we immediately realized that this was exactly what we needed.
The stroller traveled a long way across half the world.
First, the buggy was collected from Bethany in South Shields.
The kindhearted Peter and Caroline Holmes, who, together with the wonderful team at UK & UA in Sunderland are helping Ukrainians in the North East, various people and organisations like Shveina Rota, as well as animal shelters in Ukraine, went to collect the buggy.
It was then taken to Helene Kell for storage.
Steve Hodgeson made another of his long journeys from Odesa to collect the next batch of humanitarian aid for Ukraine.
Steve loaded the buggy onto his big truck and headed to Ukraine. (Along with just a few other things to help just a few people!)
After traveling from western Ukraine to the south, the stroller finally arrived in Odesa. And today, Steve brought it to us.
Seeing it in person, my daughter and I realized that the emotions we felt when we saw the photo were nothing compared to the feelings we had now. The stroller turned out to be much cooler than we could have imagined from just looking at the photos.
But probably the greatest joy this stroller brought was to our older daughter, Nicole, who is 6 years old. Today, she spent the whole day happily pushing both her brother and sister in it. She couldn’t stop smiling and kept saying how AWESOME this stroller is and how she wants to push them herself.
“I’ want to express my huge gratitude to everyone who was involved in this chain of kindness, which brought us this much-needed stroller from one end of the world to the other.“
Thank you so much to everyone!
So, we think you’ll agree that this wonderful chain had produced a wonderful result!
