Seasons of Charity

A team of Ukrainian fashion designers, together with Iryna Movchan, president of the Ukrainian Reform Educational Center, and Marta KOLOMIYETS, member of the board, UREC and Ukrainian Women’s Fund, returned from a charitable tour of the US and Canada recently. The Day asked Marta Kolomiyets, initiator of the tour, to tell about the project.

“It was organized by volunteer organizations — the Ukrainian Women’s Fund, Ukrainian Reform Educational Center, and the benevolent foundation Woman’s Health and Family Planning — to attract public attention to the problem of breast cancer in Ukraine, as it ranks first among cancers here, afflicting 15,000 women, of whom 20% die because they are diagnosed too late. We want people to read more on the subject, so they know the warning signs when they appear and also to encourage women to consult their physicians on a regular basis.

“To raise funds to buy mammographs, we — together with fashion designers Hanna Babenko, Victoria Hres, and Oksana Karavanska — visited five US and Canadian cities: Chicago, Detroit, Washington, New York, and Toronto. We exhibited sixty fashion designs, twenty per couturier.

“What made the project interesting was that our display gathered varying yet invariably emotional audiences in every city, numbering between 120 and 450 persons. And it was always an interesting experience. In Washington, the show was on the premises of the Ukrainian Embassy; in Chicago at the cultural center where greetings from Mayors Daly and Omelchenko were read (Kyiv and Chicago are sister cities). In Chicago, the ceremony was presided over by Mrs. Daly. In Toronto, the Ukrainian-Canadian Senator Raynell Andreychuk was guest of honor (she had been in the Canadian Senate for ten years). In New York, we were greeted by the wife of Senator George Pataki and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“I don’t have the exact figures, but I believe that we have collected about $100,000. After buying mammographs we will send them to district hospitals and towns lacking such equipment. Every time we will have to require a tender, so we’ll know what locality actually needs such machines and that there are people qualified to handle them.”