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In 2015, Mykola Nyzhnykovskyi arrived in Canada a triple amputee. He returned to Ukraine a year later a “cyborg.”
That’s what his sister called him after seeing him outfitted with state-of-the-art prosthetic legs and arms he’s now using thanks to the hard work and generosity of a diverse group of Canadians.
W5 first met the 11 year old Mykola in Kyiv while reporting on the work of Canadian medical professionals who volunteered to treat victims of the war that’s been raging in Ukraine’s east since 2014.
*Triple amputee Mykola Nyzhnykovskyi plays table top hockey with Montreal Canadiens forward Brendan Gallagher (Brett Mitchell / W5)
At that time, Canadian surgeons removed shrapnel that had been lodged in Mykola’s face months earlier in a deadly blast that took his brother’s life. The boys had been fooling around with an unexploded munition left carelessly on an artillery range in the village of Volodarske about fifty kilometres from the front line of the military conflict.
Mykola was one of dozens of patients treated during the wartime medical missions organized by the Canada Ukraine Foundation (CUF). When Shriners Children’s Hospital in Montreal learned about Mykola’s plight, they decided to extend a healing hand to the child.
What followed was a year of care in Montreal, as Mykola and his mother Alla made the journey to a distant land whose language they did not speak.
Nine different medical specialists tended to his many ailments, more than five hundred hours of care were dedicated to his recovery, led by Shriners’ Chief of Staff Dr. Reggie Hamdy.
His physiotherapist, Rochelle Rein, recalled first meeting Mykola: “He was kind of curled into himself. Hard to express, but he was just very alone,” she told W5’s Victor Malarek.
Occupational therapist Sarah Cachecho had the job of helping right-handed Mykola learn to use his left hand and a new prosthetic arm. By the end of his year in Montreal, his progress was remarkable. Mykola had grown bigger, stronger and more determined than ever to master his prosthetics and walk again.
“Mykola can now dress himself, feed himself, brush his teeth, do whatever someone has to do in their daily life,” Cachecho said.
Krystina Waler, CUF’s director of humanitarian initiatives, says Mykola is very fortunate, because he’d never had received the same level of care in Ukraine.
“Rehabilitation there would have been non-existent, the physiotherapy, the occupational therapy,” Waler explained.
Shriners covered all the medical costs, while CUF arranged accommodations, travel, food and translators through donations and volunteer work.
“To watch life being brought back into him has been an amazing journey and I can’t wait to continue watching it,” said Waler.
Mykola and Alla returned to Ukraine in late 2016, but the Canadians are not done with him yet. He’ll be back at Shriners in Montreal every year for check-ups and new fittings for his prosthetics. And the doctors of CUF’s fifth medical mission to Kyiv in February 2017 will continue working on the scars on Mykola’s face.
Nobody can bring his brother Danyo back, but Canadian generosity and hospitality did help bring back two things that weren’t there when W5 first met Mykola: hope and a smile.
Steve Bandera, W5 Associate Producer
Published Friday, February 3, 2017
Please click here to see online CTV news report
On March 31st 2019, the Holodomor National Awareness Tour (HNAT) began its coast to coast travels across Canada, with a visit to St. Nicholas Church in Victoria, British Columbia and the BC Legislature on April 1st. We were welcomed to the Legislative Assembly by the Hon. Bruce Ralston: “Today in the House are a number of Canadians of Ukrainian origin who are here to launch a Canada-wide initiative to raise the knowledge of and awareness of the Holodomor. It is the death by starvation, literally translated from Ukrainian, of six million to ten million Ukrainians — the numbers vary because it was so horrible an experience, and records were very remote — in the winter of 1932 and 1933, unknown and kept secret in Stalin’s Russia, actually, until more or less the Iron Curtain fell in 1989.
The group here includes the executive director of the Canada-Ukraine Foundation [Holodomor National Awareness Tour], Roma Dzerowicz; the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Victoria branch chair, Robert Herchak; and fellow board members Anna Visnevka, Motria Koropecki and Andrei Fabrikov. Would the House please make all of them welcome.”
The Holodomor Mobile Classroom (HMC) is a fully self contained, wheel chair accessible RV converted into a state-of-the-art interactive audio-visual classroom. It features a 24 foot video wall made up of twelve 4k television screens spanning the length of the interior with seating up to 31 people.
A major part of the Holodomor National Awareness Tour’s mandate is to spread awareness about the Holodomor through our interactive lessons which complement high-school curricula, while teaching students about diversity, inclusiveness, tolerance and human rights, instilling upon them the need to raise their voices out of silence.
During our Cross-Canada tour we visited 44 schools and presented 156 interactive lessons. In BC we visited schools in Victoria, Vancouver, Chilliwack; in Alberta: Medicine Hat, Bow Island, Ponoka, Edmonton, Bashaw, Sherwood Park; in Saskatchewan: Saskatoon, Kenaston, Quill Lake, Canora, Yorkton, Strasbourg, Middle Lake, Imperial; in Manitoba: Winnipeg; in Ontario: Thunder Bay, Sault Ste Marie, Sudbury, Cambridge and Toronto; and finally Halifax and Dartmouth in Nova Scotia.
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The Health Advisory Team (HAT) aims to be the partner of choice for Ukrainian healthcare institutions, NGOs, and various levels of government health ministries to build capability and capacity within Ukrainian healthcare systems and communities. Through CUF supported and sponsored programs and projects, we promote health by enabling organizations, healthcare practitioners and healthcare promotion advocates to improve the healthcare in the communities that they serve.
The CUF Education Committee works to promote cooperation between Canadian and Ukrainian educators for the purpose of professional development and strengthening the standard of education in Ukraine. This is achieved by the creation of resources, facilitation of workshops and management of programs. These include the Jaroslaw Zajszlyj Memorial Fund, Melania Kovaluk Memorial Fund Scholarships Project, the Naukma project, and the COSBILD Scholarship Fund.
The CUF Civil Society Committee was formed to provide a framework for review and support of projects and programs that promote social justice and sustainable development in a free and democratic Ukraine. The mission of the Civil Society Committee is to support, enable and empower individuals and organizations in Ukraine to implement just, transparent, inclusive and democratic national policies, in efforts to contribute to sustainable development and enhance a learning culture for a civil society.
The Canada-Ukraine Foundation supports projects that contribute to the commemoration of the Holodomor and provide educational opportunities to spread awareness about the Holodomor. The Holodomor National Awareness Tour is a project of the Canada-Ukraine Foundation, supported by the governments of Canada, Ontario and Manitoba; to raise awareness of the Holodomor and to strengthen the public’s understanding of, and commitment to, human rights. The Holodomor National Awareness Tour, through its creation of the Holodomor Mobile Classroom (HMC), tours the country to raise awareness of the Holodomor and to promote core Canadian values. Bringing awareness of the Holodomor to tens of thousands of Canadians and demonstrating that lessons of this genocide are relevant in the world today.
