Every day three children are diagnosed with cancer in Ukraine. Specialists say there is no proper equipment or expensive drugs in children’s cancer wards. But there is a way out of this situation: wealthy Ukrainians should be aware of this important problem and start helping. Last Thursday a charity soiree and auction called Night after Christmas was held as part of the project Save My Life. All the proceeds will be spent on the purchase of equipment for the children’s department of the Ukrainian Oncology Institute.
“More than 1,000 children under the age of 18 are afflicted with malignant tumors. This menacing diagnosis is sometimes accompanied by untold physical suffering. What can we offer them here in Ukraine?” asks Hryhorii Klymniuk, chief pediatric oncologist at the Ministry of Health.
Such children can hardly expect any help from their native country. Only a fraction of parents manage to find sponsors and raise money for expensive operations. The rest wait for a miracle. “Sometimes it takes hundreds of thousands of dollars to treat children with cancer,” Klymniuk says. But the state only provides the bare minimum. “As recently as five years ago, pediatric oncology, as a field of medical knowledge, was not financed at all. When we estimated the number of patients whom we could cure in our clinic on the basis of state-provided funds, it turned out there were two,” Klymniuk recalls.
But as experts “reassure” us, there is hardly a country in the world where the state fully funds treatment for cancer patients, because it is too expensive. Private sponsorship, on the other hand, offers a fair chance of helping sick children. Tetiana Popova, director of the Siaivo Foundation, one of the auction organizers, thinks that lately the number of benefactors has been steadily increasing in Ukraine. As The Day has reported, there are people who are ready to offer real assistance. For instance, the campaign Children’s Hospital of the Future alone helped raise 240 million dollars. But the Night after Christmas auction did not produce a miracle of charity.
It looks as though the Christmas holidays made a hole in Ukrainian businessmen’s pockets. Only a few of the invited celebrities and politicians showed up, and they were reluctant to part with their money. There was very tepid bidding for antiques and personal belongings of celebrities. All the entreaties of auctioneer Andrii Dzhedzhula, such as “You are not buying antiques but a piece of health for a small child,” fell on deaf ears.
Artist Semeneko’s 1933 oil painting scarcely generated 200 dollars. Pop singer Viktor Pavlyk could not stand this mockery. Although he was invited just to sing, he offered 100 dollars more for the picture. Dzhedzhula paid 300 dollars for a rare mouth organ from 1949 and was about to present it to a “poor” businessman, who had offered $200 for the lot. But suddenly the businessman felt embarrassed and chipped in 1,000 hryvnias, and another 500 dollars came into the kitty.
Some of the lots were acquired by auction organizers. What really caused a ripple was Ruslana Lyzhychko’s tambourine, which went for 552 dollars.
The auction raised a little over 20,000 hryvnias. Naturally, this sum is not enough to buy equipment for the children’s cancer ward. But organizers of the Save My Life projects are not despairing. After all, the Night after Christmas soiree is only one of several planned events. “We haven’t raised enough money yet, but we hope to see a major inflow of funds later in January,” Popova says.
The campaign ends in the first 10 days of February. The project organizers have promised to post information on their Web site about the money raised and the way it was spent.
