The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee has published a first-person account of a May 2026 visit to Ukraine. Its author, Myra Dahgaypaw, spent five days in the country and attended a conference convened in Kyiv by the Roma Women’s Fund Chiricli.
We are pointing our readers to the original rather than reproducing it: the full text lives on the UUSC website, and it deserves to be read there. Below is what the account records about the communities we work with.
What the account describes in the Odesa region
Dahgaypaw writes about Roma settlements facing severe water contamination, linked in the account to rising rates of tuberculosis and kidney failure. The harder barrier, she argues, is administrative rather than environmental.
Without birth certificates or passports, families are invisible to the state: rigid protocols deny them medical care, and proving one’s own existence can require penalties they cannot afford. Poverty, systemic discrimination and war converge into a cycle that strips people of the right to health and survival.
Partners, not recipients
The account is emphatic that the people it describes are not waiting to be rescued. It records a meeting with Women’s March Ukraine, an organisation supplying essentials to more than 45,000 women serving in the military while running art exhibitions honouring their resistance, under considerable pressure.
The Chiricli conference in Kyiv
The conference brought together researchers, health professionals and community leaders. Participants called for regular water monitoring, for Roma settlements to be included in state infrastructure programmes, and for meaningful dialogue with the authorities.
The account quotes their position directly: they do not need pity, they need partnership — international attention that amplifies local voices and resources local advocacy. That is the message we would ask readers to carry away.
Read the original
The full text, Living Through the Sirens: A Journey of Resilience in Wartime Ukraine, was published by UUSC on 26 August 2026. Written by Myra Dahgaypaw.
For background on the communities described, see our pages Roma in Ukraine and Protection of Roma rights — both in Ukrainian.
#Chiricli #RomaRights #RomaWomen #UUSC #HumanRights