If you missed part one of this series of posts, please take a moment to go back and read Advocating: You Can Do It Too (pt 1). McKennaugh is sharing with us her story of advocating for three children in Ukraine. We left off with Katia’s story making it into the Above Rubies E-zine.

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I got a flood of emails from people that wanted to help. Many acted like they wanted to adopt her. My hopes would rise. Then I would copy her typed-up medical record and paste it into an email along with my thoughts and observations about this little girl. Usually potential families stopped here. Taking care of a child who couldn’t even bend at the waist or knees? A child who was fed through a tube and couldn’t open her own clenched hand? They turned away and I can’t say I blamed them. But my heart ached for Katia and I thought, “Somewhere, somewhere there must be a family for you!”

The first e-zine article generated donations for the yet-to-be-found family, but no family itself. (I now would not recommend for people to take donations before a child has a family. I could have had a very stressful situation on my hands if Katia never received adoptive parents!! I think that pledges are a much better idea to accept! Then you are not responsible for people’s money.)

I watched the stats on my site slide downward and knew that the e-zine had not reached Katia’s family…this time. I continued blogging and begging for a family for her. I made a short video for her. (Note: Katia is called Levina in this clip & the link at the end of it is no longer associated with me—I stopped running the website and the domain was purchased by someone else.)

I was a determined kid. Once again, I sent a request to Above Rubies. I asked them to place something else about Katia in their next e-zine. This time it was a poem.

To make a long story short, Katia’s adoptive parents saw that poem. They contacted me. I copied the medical record. I sent it to them. They read it.

They didn’t say no.

They came. To Ukraine. To Katia. By this time, I was 15. She was 7. She didn’t know I changed her life. She didn’t know she had changed mine. How? She showed me that anybody—even backwoods girls who hardly knew a soul—could make a difference.

If they only tried.

I wasn’t done trying. Yuri and Viktor, two other disabled children I had met in Ukraine, needed homes, too.

Somewhere along the way here, I had become a columnist for Homeschooling Teen e-zine. I published an article there about Yuri and Viktor. I was contacted by a lady who said they would adopt Yuri. I was thrilled. The next few events made me slightly wary that something wasn’t quite right, though. We kept in regular contact for a while, then I didn’t hear from them for a couple months. I sent them an email asking how everything was going. They said they had run into problems with US income requirements and would not be able to adopt Yuri.

A sent another article into Homeschooling Teen. Yuri and Viktor remained without a family. For a time, I lost my perseverance. Yuri and Viktor waited in their cribs. Waited for me to speak up for them.

And I didn’t.

Then, out of the blue, I got an email from a man who was surfing the web and had found my Homeschooling Teen article, though it had now been months since it was published. He couldn’t adopt Viktor, but he wanted to help him in any way he could. Could he send aid to the children? No, I responded, aid wouldn’t get to them. But I asked him if he would spread the word—Viktor needed an adoptive family. He jolted Viktor and Yuri back to the front of my mind and I thought, “These boys are depending on me!”

Stay tuned for the final installment of this article. Do you think you could do what McKennaugh did? Would you find the possibility exciting or scary? Or both?