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In Europe, it’s called “Camp Amerikraine,” a cherished annual meeting for Christians in Ukraine launched two decades ago with help from Christians in America.
A continent and an invasion away, a retreat some call “Camp Amerikraine in America” now brings together displaced Ukrainian believers in the U.S. for fellowship and solace from the trauma of war.
About 65 people — mainly Ukrainian members of Churches of Christ joined by American Christians passionate about Ukraine — gathered for three days of fellowship at Valley View Camp, about 25 miles north of Nashville.
Ukrainians in America yearn for that fellowship, retreat organizer Bohdan Yasinskyi told The Christian Chronicle, with help from interpreter Tamara McNiece. He compared the camp to the experience of foreigners visiting the embassy of their home country — a place where “they take care of you,” he said.
Yasinskyi came to the U.S. in 2022 at the onset of the Russian invasion. He lives in Tuscumbia, Alabama, after serving in ministry in the Ukrainian cities of Donetsk, Dnipro and Kyiv.
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Camp participants came from states that included Alabama, Florida, Minnesota, Tennessee, Texas and Washington, Yasinskyi said.
“I cannot go back to home to do it in Ukraine, but I can do a little island of Ukrainians here,” Yasinskyi said about the retreat, which he compared to Christmas, New Year’s and Disneyland.
Ukrainian Christians circle their chairs for an evening of singing, study and prayer at the Greenbrier Ukrainian retreat. (Photo by Ted Parks)
‘Ukrainians will never be the same’
This year was the second time Ukrainian Christians gathered at Valley View Camp.
Built by the Madison Church of Christ in Tennessee, the camp operates as a nonprofit with close ties to the congregation.
The Madison church, which supported Yasinskyi’s work in Ukraine, underwrote both Ukrainian gatherings and even provided cooks, said elder Brandon Adams.
In addition to classes, crafts, worship and even short drama, the camp offered two sessions about conflict led by Becky Kelly, a licensed counselor and a member of a different Madison Church of Christ, this one in Alabama. While Kelly focused on marriage, she pointed out that conflict was a topic with wider implications.
“Conflict is a natural part of every human relationship, and it’s a necessary part,” Kelly told the audience. “Conflict has a goal, and that is mutual understanding.”
Given the trauma many had experienced and the stoic character of Ukrainians, organizer Yasinskyi felt it useful to “sneak in” some therapy.
“In our country … people keep it to themselves,” he explained. They’re still in shock. “They will tell you, ‘I’m fine.’ … They reject the problem.”
War brought the potential for interpersonal conflicts, Yasinskyi said. Some people stayed in Ukraine, others decided to leave.
And within the country tension can flare between people far from the violence and those near it.
People want simple fairness, the organizer said. They’ve seen injustice on many levels. “This feeling gets stronger and stronger and stronger, and it’s like, eating you,” interpreter McNiece said.
“I think Ukrainians will never be the same as they used to be,” Yasinskyi said, his eyes moist. “Even when war will be gone, it’s not going to be the same.”
A harrowing escape
Participants at this year’s retreat recalled harrowing escapes from the Russian invasion. Olga Tkachenko, now a hairdresser in Tuscumbia, remembered waking up to the explosions of bombs in Mariupol, the port city in southeastern Ukraine that fell in May 2022 after a savage three-month Russian siege.
Unsure how long the conflict would last, Tkachenko took refuge with her teenage daughters Katya and Masha in the basement of a nearby building. Ukrainian forces then evacuated the basement. When the bus to the city’s drama theater was full, Tkachenko and her daughters were diverted to a theater nearby. Russia bombed the drama theater on March 16, killing 600 people, The Associated Press reported.
Tkachenko felt the shock waves.
With Russian forces closing in, Tkachenko decided to leave — on foot.
Hungry and weak, mother and daughters started walking at 6 a.m. She told her girls to pull up their hoodies to avoid seeing the bodies along the way. After 12 hours, they arrived at a Russian-controlled village, then the next day entered territory in Ukrainian hands.
Grateful for the first shower in a month, Tkachenko said, she made her way with her daughters to Romania, Poland and, in May 2023, to the U.S.
Katya, 18, speaking through interpreter Liudmila Torshyna, remembered her “really big fear” as they walked.
“You understand that you are leaving your house” with no way to return, she said. “You don’t know what’s going on in your church. You have hopes that they are still alive.”
Broken and mended
Among the American Christians who have helped the Ukrainians find safety is Jeff Abrams, who recently retired from the pulpit of the Tuscumbia Church of Christ. He began making trips to Ukraine in the 1990s. Recently, he founded the nonprofit Rescue Ukraine.
He and fellow church members have helped hundreds of refugees relocate to Poland, France, the Netherlands and other parts of Europe. About 25 Ukrainians moved to Tuscumbia, a town in north Alabama, and 13 to Mobile on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. Others are scattered throughout the U.S.
That Ukrainians traveled to Tennessee from so many places says something about fellowship, Abrams said. “It tells you that these people see the need to get together.”
Abrams started Camp Amerikraine in 2003. The camp follows a long-held Ukrainian tradition of bringing people together for education and recreation. Oddly enough, the Christian camp hosted its first session in a facility once used by the “Komsomol,” a communist youth organization.
“There are just dozens, perhaps hundreds of these old camps around there,” Abrams said. In addition to cabins, amphitheaters and soccer fields, “you could see the old Soviet propaganda stuff, the murals on the walls, the hammer and sickle, the statues, the carvings or paintings of Lenin, Stalin.”
Amerikraine later moved to Dnipro, a city in eastern Ukraine known for its rocket industry. The camp made a temporary move away from Dnipro in 2014 after pro-Russian separatists seized control of parts of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region.
After the invasion began in 2022, Camp Amerikraine moved to a facility in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. Organizers added a second camp near Warsaw, Poland, for refugees.
Despite the many moves, the camp has maintained its Ukrainian culture, said Angela Hilton, a Ukrainian who interpreted for presenter Becky Kelly at the Tennessee camp.
“American culture is more individually set, and Ukrainian culture is more like collectivism,” said Hilton, a native of Kramatorsk who came to the U.S. in 2008. She recalled her years in Ukraine and the desire “to get together and just spend some time together.” Neither plans nor a tidy house was required to “have a cup of tea and, like, cook something quickly,” she said.
“I know some people from this camp with whom I have history,” Hilton added, “like from 20 years ago or 25 years ago.”
Katya, Tkachenko’s daughter, said that it was important to get together with Christians from other cities. At her first Camp Amerikraine in Poland in 2022, she enjoyed seeing how people from different places approached the Bible. “Sometimes people interpret it in different ways,” she said.
Playground equipment stands among the ruins of a school in Pokrovsk, Ukraine. “In my travels across Ukraine I have literally seen this heartbreaking scene repeated dozens of times,” said Jeff Abrams, a Church of Christ minister and founder of Rescue Ukraine, during a recent visit to the besieged Eastern European nation. “Today I saw at least six bombed-out schools.”
Speaking near the end of the second day of the retreat, Abrams talked about his recent visit to Ukraine and compared the material destruction — and, in some places, the rebuilding that has followed — to human brokenness and divine redemption.
“Even more significant than the brokenness of a building or a park is the brokenness of people,” Abrams said. “There are a lot of broken hearts in Ukraine. There are a lot of broken families. … We understand there’s brokenness all around the world. And our brokenness doesn’t have to define who we are.
“That’s our story. We’re broken, but with the help of God, we’re mended.”
This piece is republished from The Christian Chronicle.
Ted Parks is a Nashville-based correspondent for The Christian Chronicle. A contributor to the Chronicle since the 1990s, he teaches Spanish at Lipscomb University.