26 minute read
Profile
PROFILE
STORY BY SARA LOCKE A Light Mission
RENDERING MEANINGFUL CHANGE
M
ichael Mierendorf knows how to turn a moment, a mood, and a mission into a movement, and he’s using this power for good. The Emmy Award-winning filmmaker has spent years illuminating important issues and causes, revealing often overlooked narratives under the limelight—now powered by solar.
After spending his early years exploring acting roles at Omaha’s Community Playhouse, Mierendorf headed to Trinity University in San Antonio to pursue studies in theater.
“I think the early theater training was good. It gave me a good sense of storytelling and communication,” Mierendorf said. “I originally wanted to be on that side of the lens, but I quickly figured out that acting was too far removed from real life. I didn’t want to perform scripts. I wanted direct contact with the world.”
After graduating with a degree in psychology and a minor in TV and film, Mierendorf narrowed his depth of field, finding success as an investigative journalist and documentarian. He was among the first on the ground covering post-war Vietnam, compassionately covered the AIDS crisis, and chronicled war and famine in Africa with devastating clarity.
When Christopher Reeve was ready to begin work again—after a catastrophic accident left the Superman actor permanently paralyzed from the neck down—he returned to the call sheet with the Emmy Award-winning film Without Pity, written and directed by Mierendorf. The film sought to amplify the voices of disabled Americans and was a project Reeves was proud to be a part of.
Mierendorf has worked on a number of successful documentaries, including Broken Child, Deadly Memories, and Losing it All. Each addition to his filmography underscores the director’s ability to connect audiences with the journey of his subjects. While filmmaking proved a successful venture for Mierendorf, he desired to buoy his skill to something tangible. Determined to do just that, he utilized his talent and profile to help create equity, stability, and ultimately, a more connected and compassionate community.
He worked on the United Way board in New Jersey, and after returning to Omaha to care for his mother, received the Heart and Soul Award from the metro’s Stephen Center.
Beyond the awards, Mierendorf’s stewardship yielded invaluable experience and established him as a leader in his field. His next mission would require all of his skills.
While looking for volunteer opportunities on Taproot (an online job board), Mierendorf made a connection with Joe Kselman. Their backgrounds sparked a mutual interest.
“My Grandfather fled his home in 1939 when Nazis annexed Austria,” Kselman said. “He could only get to India on his visa.”
“After the war, he came to the States and had my mom,” he continued. “I grew up with his incredible stories about India and felt a real connection. When I finally traveled there in 2012, I was amazed by the beauty, but also by just how impoverished the untouchable caste villages were.”
Knowing he was there for a reason, Kselman analyzed his repertoire for ways to make a sustainable difference in the place he had grown to love. His eureka moment didn’t involve a single lightbulb flickering to life—it involved thousands of them.
“I had a background in Solar Energy. That was it, that was what I had to offer, so I tried to find a way to use it,” Kselman recalled. “We started an IndieGoGo [an online crowdfunding platform] to raise money, and my wife and I bought and installed 100 solar home systems in the village.”
Removing the village’s reliance on an unstable grid and outrageous utility bills meant freedom for those first hundred households. For six years, Kselman and his wife continued passionately fundraising and lighting the village, one home at a time.
The project, the board, and the funding grew, with only one puzzle piece still missing: an effective way to get the word out. That’s when Mierendorf volunteered his award-winning services to the mission.
“I have worked with hundreds of volunteers, but Michael was a game changer. He’s tremendously talented and just as generous,” Kselman noted of Mierendorf. “His ability to clearly communicate with our cinematographer in India, during COVID, mind you, so entirely via shared documents and Zoom calls, really made this film. But the way he could see and capture these people we were trying to help, without ever meeting them, really proves that beyond talented, beyond professional, he’s a passionate and compassionate human being.”
The film in question, Solar Village Project, compresses generations of struggle, years of effort, and boundless hope into a beautifully conducted nine-and-a-half minutes. In just three TikTok videos, viewers can meet the teachers, doctors, and citizens who are finding a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. They can explore the hospitals and schools given the power to function and discover ways to become part of a sustainable and long-overdue change.
Visit SolarVillageProject.org for more information.
“I HAD A BACKGROUND IN SOLAR ENERGY. THAT WAS IT, THAT WAS WHAT I HAD TO OFFER, SO I TRIED TO FIND A WAY TO USE IT. WE STARTED AN INDIEGOGO TO RAISE MONEY AND MY WIFE AND I BOUGHT AND INSTALLED 100 SOLAR HOME SYSTEMS IN THE VILLAGE.” —JOE KSELMAN
story
sean mccarthy
photography
bill sitzmann
design
matt wieczorek
Matt Wynn and Matthew Hansen were looking for a place to get a sustainable lunch on a warm Friday before Memorial Day, but had to settle for a busy coffeehouse. Hungry stomachs didn’t dull their enthusiasm for talking about how to save the field of journalism. At the Little Bohemia location of Archetype Coffee, they spoke about their nonprofit news organization, Flatwater Free Press, with the fervor of two tech-loving entrepreneurs who created a startup set to revolutionize an industry.
Their optimism is a rarity in an industry that has had little to be cheerful about over the past 20 years. The holdout loyalists of print newspaper have likely bemoaned at the thinning product of papers like the Omaha World-Herald. Those who complain too loudly, should note that Omaha is one city that still has a daily print paper.
A Nov. 30, 2021, article in the Washington Post reported that more than 2,200 local newspapers have shuttered since 2005. It’s a grim reality for an industry that, according to a Pew Research report in May, stated total weekday circulation for local papers has fallen 40% since 2015. The report did offer a glimmer of hope, stating that digital circulation increased by 30% in 2020. The numbers, however, have not been enough to prevent massive layoffs.
Media commentators routinely blame the newspaper industry for getting themselves into this state, claiming most were too slow to respond to the rise of the Internet. Most newspapers waffled between creating a paywall (limiting the number of stories a person can read for free), or letting people read their content for free. A growing number of news organizations, especially new ones, have decided to move away from a for-profit, advertising-based business model, and treat the institute of journalism as a public trust. Three local organizations—Flatwater Free Press, the Nebraska Examiner, and NOISE—have gone the nonprofit route.
Each of these news organizations gives their content away for free. For-profit media outlets that want to run one of their stories need only provide a citation or follow a few simple steps on one of their websites. If people like what they’re reading, they are obviously free to donate.
“It’s the future of journalism,” said Wynn, executive director at Flatwater Free Press. Matthew Hansen is the publication’s editor.
The two worked together at the Omaha World-Herald in the early 2010s. They had cubicles close to one another and routinely talked all things journalism. Wynn left the World-Herald in 2016, and in 2018, he became the deputy data editor at USA Today. After winning several awards for his WorldHerald columns, Hansen joined the Buffet Early Childhood Institute as managing editor in 2019.
While at the World-Herald and USA Today, Wynn took notice at the growing number of nonprofit journalism organizations. Wynn said the movement really took off during the financial crisis of 2008. He was interested in starting a nonprofit journalism organization in Nebraska, but didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of earlier nonprofit startups.
Wynn and Hansen studied nonprofit news outlets in Wyoming, South Dakota, and Oklahoma for almost a year before forming Flatwater Free Press in a similar vein. During a conversation with Hansen, Jack Marsh, co-founder of the nonprofit South Dakota News Watch, gave him the following advice: “Get the journalism right every time, and essentially everything else flows from that.” Inspired by the talk, Hansen wrote, “Get the journalism right every time” on a sticky note. Shortly after, Hansen’s wife—food blogger and former World-Herald food writer Sarah Baker Hansen—framed that note for him.
“I try to let that be my North Star as we do this stuff,” he said.
The majority of donations to Flatwater Free Press come from foundations. According to its 2021 budget, the Nebraska Journalism Trust, the 501(c)(3) charity that publishes Flatwater Free Press, had almost $800,000 in donations from foundations. About $80,000 came from individual contributors. Wynn is also the executive director of the Nebraska Journalism Trust. Wynn said fundraising is his primary full-time job but having survived newsrooms for the past 20 years was more of a challenge than fundraising could ever be. “Fundraising for journalism is the right thing to do,” Wynn said. “It’s right where I want to be.”
Flatwater Free Press and the Nebraska Examiner are two of the newer nonprofit news outlets in the state. North Omaha Information Support Everyone (NOISE) began in 2018 and covers news issues directly related to North Omaha, operating out of a few offices in the historic Redfield Building at 1901 Howard St.
Sitting in the break room of a largely vacant second floor filled with renovated meeting rooms and glass-enclosed offices, NOISE President and Executive Director Myles A. Davis said his organization was focused on community journalism. That, he said, is different from what he dubbed “activist journalism,” which pushes readers toward a certain goal.
“We want to give them [NOISE’s readers] all the information they need in order to be engaged,” Davis said. “Their level of engagement or type of engagement is up to them.”
Davis said NOISE began with a $25,000 donation from the Weitz Family Foundation and have also received more than $5,000 in donations from the Sherwood Foundation and the American Journalism Project. As executive director, Davis estimated he spends 80% of his time fundraising. He also estimated the NOISE staff spend 30% of their time fundraising to continue the organization’s operations and continued growth.
In April 2021, Gov. Pete Ricketts’ office denied press credentials to NOISE to cover his press briefings. Taylor Gage, then Ricketts’ director of strategic communications, said NOISE was not a mainstream news organization and was “an advocacy organization funded by liberal donors.”
The story made national headlines, and local and national media figures came to NOISE’s defense. In July 2021, the governor’s office reversed its decision and approved press credentials to NOISE. Davis praised the outpouring of support, specifically from Nebraska Examiner senior reporter Paul Hammel, but would prefer mainstream outlets devote more time to cover the issues NOISE covers. “We’ll continue to shine a light and give a voice to people who need to be heard,” Davis said.
Flatwater Free Press and NOISE have partnered to train the next generation of journalists. In June, the two organizations co-hosted the grand opening of the Omaha Journalism Project, which aims to train students in the field of journalism. One class involves a sixweek program about reporting and social media, and in the fall, a course will be offered on podcasting. Davis hopes to train enough community journalists so that each student could assume their own beat to cover for a news publication.
As a reader, it can be difficult to keep track of the news reported by outlets like Flatwater Free Press, the Nebraska Examiner, and NOISE. Fortunately, there’s an organization that broadcasts Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings on Facebook and YouTube. The subscription-based outlet 1st Sky Omaha routinely brings on reporters from Flatwater Free Press, The Reader, and NOISE to talk about the stories they’re covering.
Paul B. Allen IV sits at the bar of the Benson Theatre as a few students from Metropolitan Community College film a day in his life. Allen is the founder of 1st Sky Omaha and communications director at the Benson Theatre. Before moving to Omaha, Allen lived in California and Hawaii, but came to Omaha in 2010 to spend time with his grandfather who had cancer. Allen remembered flying into Omaha during a blizzard.
“I came in…shorts and flip-flops, “Allen said. “I was like ‘What did I do?’”
Allen chose to hang around Omaha and help put together a radio station for the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation. In 2016, he helped assemble Mind & Soul, a morning radio show focused on North Omaha issues. Along with spoken word artist Michelle Troxclair, longtime TV anchor Michael Scott hosted the morning show. In 2020, following a leadership change at the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, the morning show ceased operations.
“‘Get the journalism right every time’... I try to let that be my North Star as we do this stuff.” -Matthew Hansen
Allen wanted to continue doing community-based journalism, so he formed 1st Sky Omaha in 2021. He started live broadcasting a morning news show on
Facebook with Troxclair and Mark McGaugh, better known as Buddi3 Da Gawd. 1st Sky Omaha now livestreams on Twitter and YouTube in addition to Facebook. Throughout the May primaries, local candidates came on to answer questions from the hosts as well as those posted by virtual spectators. Affectionally dubbed “chat chimers,” listeners react in a real-time setting to the topics of the morning. While heavily focused on the news, Allen said 1st Sky Omaha is primarily a discussion group for the stories uncovered by organizations like NOISE and Flatwater Free Press.
“We take the headlines and break down stuff, read between the lines, discuss it, and feature the articles from those groups,” Allen said.
To fund the ad-free content on 1st Sky Omaha, Allen has set up a subscription service on PayPal. He’s also applied for grants and teamed with other organizations like the Omaha Institute For Nonprofit Journalism. Allen said he preferred the nonprofit business model, but it’s still in its early stages of development and much could be improved. One of the biggest areas of improvement includes finding more experienced individuals to navigate the nonprofit landscape in order to secure more funding, Allen said.
Finding funds to keep nonprofits afloat is arguably the biggest challenge these news organizations face. Fortunately for the Nebraska Examiner, they have been given the resources to operate a staff of four full-time individuals for three years from States Newsroom, a North Carolina-based nonprofit dedicated to covering state government issues. All four staffers are former World-Herald stalwarts.
Cate Folsom is the editor-in-chief of the Nebraska Examiner. She began her career at the World-Herald in 1979 as a reporter for the Living section, which Folsom pointed out was then called “Women’s News.” In a telephone interview from her Omaha home, Folsom recalled how different technology was in her early reporting life. In 1986, Folsom was assigned to the Washington bureau. When it came time to file her story, she had to write her copy on a TRS-80, which Folsom said was routinely known as a “trash 80” by fellow reporters. The device was smaller than a laptop of today, and Folsom could only see seven lines of text. When she was done with her story, she had to go to a phone booth at the press gallery, place the headset into the TRS-80, and send the story over the phone.
“Things are different today,” Folsom quipped.
In June 2012, Folsom became the WorldHerald’s metro editor. In 2018, she was inducted into the Omaha Press Club Hall of Fame. In 2019, she retired from the World-Herald, and for a few months, she went to hot air balloon festivals with her husband, John Folsom. The retirement didn’t last long. She was approached by Paul Hammel in 2021, just as he was leaving the World-Herald, ending his tenure which began in 1990.
Hammel had learned about States Newsroom from the Iowa Capital Dispatch and their ability to attract veteran reporters from the Des Moines Register. As of July 2022, States Newsroom has 28 state nonprofit news organizations across the country, the Iowa Capital Dispatch among them and Nebraska the 26th newsroom to fall under the organization’s umbrella of news outlets. Folsom said she was intrigued by States Newsroom’s nonprofit business model and their dedication to policy-based news coverage.
“One of our goals is to cover what’s under-covered or uncovered now,” Folsom said.
Hammel, senior reporter at the Nebraska Examiner, has seen the newspaper industry’s decline during his 30 years at the World-Herald. In a phone interview from his Lincoln home, Hammel said when he joined the World-Herald in 1990, there were about seven full-time reporters that were dedicated to business reporting. There was one reporter who was just focused on the environment, and at least two full-time reporters worked in their Lincoln bureau. “It was a hopping place,” Hammel said. “There’d be people working there until 10 o’clock at night on a Friday night to put out not only the Saturday paper, but the Sunday paper.”
Hammel’s focus is on state and local government, which was his primary beat while at the World-Herald. Hammel brings nearly three decades of deep, established sources to The Nebraska Examiner, which helped them scoop most of the established news outlets this past January when Hammel, along with reporters Cindy Gonzalez and Aaron Sanderford, wrote about Mutual of Omaha’s plan to build a new headquarters on the site of the downtown public library. While the Mutual of Omaha story made big headlines, Hammel was just as happy publishing stories that major news outlets are likely to overlook, such as a March 3 story about a large percentage of applicants who were snubbed for grants from the state’s Environmental Trust.
“We’re a feisty little news organization that tries to cover things that aren’t being covered any more,” Hammel said.
This past May, Flatwater Free Press wrote about Vinebrook Homes, an Ohio-based company that had purchased more than 250 homes in the Omaha metro area since October 2019. Virtually unknown three years ago, the organization is now one of the biggest landlords in the state. The story started with Matt Wynn just wanting to know about every piece of property that had been sold in Douglas County over the past few years.
“It’s data reporting 101,” Wynn said.
The Nebraska Examiner was the organization that broke the story about eight women who accused former gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster of sexual misconduct. While the majority of the women asked to remain anonymous, Republican State Sen. Julie Slama went on the record, stating she was groped by Herbster during a dinner for the Douglas County Republican Party. Written by Aaron Sanderford, the story was widely believed to be the reason why Herbster–backed by former president
Donald Trump–lost the election to Jim Pillen, who was actively supported by fellow Republican, Gov. Pete Ricketts.
During the night of the May primary, Hammel was present at Herbster’s campaign event. People he’d known and covered for years made little effort to mask their anger toward the Nebraska Examiner.
“They came up and said, ‘You guys killed our guy…unfairly,’” Hammel said. “They saw it as part of some grand conspiracy that had been cooked up by the Ricketts people; we saw it as not a very well-kept secret.”
In a phone interview from its headquarters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, States Newsroom Deputy Director Andrea Verykoukis said her organization generally has a “hands off” editorial policy among its 28 news organizations. The only time Verykoukis envisioned States Newsroom involving themselves in the day-to-day operations of publications like the Nebraska Examiner is if they begin straying away from reporting primarily on state government issues. Other than that, she trusts the local experts.
“Cate knows what Nebraskans need to read about their state government,” Verykoukis said. “Our whole goal is to have readers be able to access high-quality, nonpartisan news about their state government, because we believe that state government touches most people’s daily lives the most of any level, and that’s where the coverage was going away the most.”
Visit flatwaterfreepress.org, noiseomaha.com, 1stskyomaha.com, or nebraskaexaminer.com for more information.
Aiding the Ukraine
One Woman’s Helping Hand
FEATURE // STORY BY ANDREW J. NELSON Photography by Bill Sitzmann // Design by Matt Wieczorek
I
t was an otherwise uneventful early March afternoon in Omaha. Kelly Lytle was in her living room texting with a friend in Eastern Europe.
That’s unexceptional, as things go. Lytle, then 49, had spent much of her adult life immersed in the region, helping its people, particularly orphans, and has many contacts there.
The friend she’s texting is Iryna Shchoholeva, 22, who is like a daughter to Lytle. Shchoholeva is Ukrainian, and the Russians were moving into her city.
In 2016, Shchoholeva had spent the summer with Lytle and Lytle’s family in Omaha. She did many of the things 16-yearolds in Omaha do: eat soft-serve ice cream at Runza, go to the zoo, shop at Westroads Mall for clothes.
Nearly six years later, midnight was approaching in Ukraine, and Russian tanks were maneuvering in forested darkness by the dacha (Russian for lake house or summer cottage) where Shchoholeva hid just outside the city. Russians were firing huge cannons. It was so loud. Shchoholeva stared crying. She reached for her mobile phone and tapped out a message to Lytle: “I think I am going to die tonight. ”
Said Lytle: “I’m 7 thousand miles away. And I have absolutely nothing, not one thing, I can do–not one—but pray, and message her all through that night, to be with her that way, and to tell her…‘you are as much my daughter as if I had given birth to you. And I love you. And I will always love you. And we will be together again.’”
Lytle lived in Eastern Europe, made multiple trips to Ukraine to assist children in orphanages there, and adopted three boys from Ukraine who are now adults in the Omaha area.
But getting Shchoholeva to the United States and safety would present challenges she had never dealt with before.
Lytle grew up in Bradenton, on Florida’s west coast. As a child, she, her mother, and her siblings escaped her abusive, drunken father.
At age 16, Lytle got a job in a bridal shop. She met a seamstress there, a refugee from Romania.
They became friends (and remain so). Lytle was with the woman and her family in their little apartment as she watched the overthrow of Romania’s communist government in 1989.
“We were watching her city…We were watching on this little TV with her, the overthrow of this communist government that had tortured her family and caused them to be refugees,” Lytle said. “So that probably had a huge impact on me.”
Lytle attended the University of South Florida in nearby Tampa, studying international development with a focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. After graduation, she lived in Budapest and worked for an organization analyzing aid coming into Eastern Europe, interviewing recipients. Lytle’s mother moved to Omaha.
Lytle returned to Florida for graduate school, aspiring to move to New York City. But in 2001, her mother was diagnosed with lung cancer.
“I always like to say I took a sharp left on the map,” she said. “I ended up staying in Omaha.”
Eastern Europe, however, never left Lytle. Becoming a freelance writer and communications consultant in Omaha, her efficiency left her with some time on her hands. She approached John Jeanetta, who was the U.S. coordinator for a partnership between the cities of Omaha and Artemivsk (now named Bakhmut) in eastern Ukraine.
In May 2005, she traveled with Jeanetta to Artemivsk, visiting a trio of orphanages and a children’s hospital. It was the first of many trips.
“Kelly toured all those different places…and figured out what they needed besides clothing and vitamins and cribs,” Jeanetta said.
The hospital needed an industrial-sized washer, water heaters, and mattresses not made of straw. She talked to donors.
Lytle “had a transformative impact on those systems over there,” Jeanetta said.
It was the orphanages where Lytle felt most connected, having been a vulnerable child herself.
“What I saw was that the need in Ukraine was…as great or greater than it had been for Romania in the 1990s, especially for vulnerable kids,” Lytle said. “And that really is my soft spot, for orphans.”
Lytle started Operation Ukraine, a volunteer organization working with orphanages. She adopted three boys, at ages 8, 9, and 16. They are now 22, 23, and 30.
Shchoholeva, like Lytle’s sons, grew up with her brother in an orphanage. Born in a village near the city of Chernihiv, in northern Ukraine. Her mother was dead. Her father was missing and presumed (and, later confirmed) dead.
She entered Lytle’s life through a program where orphans could spend the summer in the United States or Western Europe. She initially stayed with a family in Texas but when that didn’t work out, a friend of Lytle’s asked if Shchoholeva could stay with the family. “Of course.”
“She stayed with us over the summer and just became part of the family,” Lytle said. “She’s marvelous.”
They remained close after Shchoholeva returned to Ukraine. Shchoholeva went to college, earning the Ukrainian equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in business. She got a job with the Puma corporation. In November, Lytle made her most recent trip to Ukraine, visiting the city of Bakhmut and also Shchoholeva. They talked of her possibly studying English at University of Nebraska at Omaha to help her get into graduate school.
Shchoholeva didn’t believe war would come. Life was so normal in Chernihiv. How could there be war? On the night of Feb. 23, she went out with friends, going to bed at 4 a.m. An air-raid siren blared one hour later.
She called Lytle, who told her to grab documents, clothes, and food. Shchoholeva stayed with a family friend at a dacha 15 minutes from the city.
Chernihiv, population nearly 300,000, is on the main highway from Belarus to Kiev, key to the Russian advance in the early days of the war.
At the dacha, the days were quiet but the nights terrifying.
“It was the worst. They did a lot of shooting at night,” Shchoholeva said, sitting in a Starbuck’s in Omaha in June, with Lytle translating Shchoholeva’s Russian into English. “Everyone slept very badly because you never knew when the next bombs would come.”
The night she texted Lytle might not even have been the worst. Once, a neighboring dacha was hit by a shell, causing its collapse. Once the shelling stopped, Shchoholeva and her friends ran out, removed wreckage and freed the family trapped on the ground floor. They survived.
Shchoholeva and her friends knew they had to leave. Stuffing themselves in an old Hyundai, it took three attempts before they finally made it to Lviv, near the Polish border. What should have been a seven-hour drive took three-and-a-half days.
Shchoholeva split up with her friends, crossed into Poland on a bus, and stayed in an Airbnb efficiency apartment Lytle rented for her in Krakow.
L
ytle booked herself a flight, Omaha-Chicago-Munich-Krakow. She met Shchoholeva at the Airbnb.
“We had a good long cry,” Lytle said. “And we didn’t know what the plan was.”
She could not leave Shchoholeva alone, not at the edge of a war zone.
“I couldn’t just lose her to the chaos of war,” Lytle said. “And that was a real possibility.”
The next step was a train to Warsaw. The Krakow station was glutted with people fleeing Ukraine.
“I’ve never been standing in a sea of new war refugees,” Lytle said. “It was just masses of people with one backpack or one plastic bag of stuff…it’s all these single moms and young people and all these families without their men except for their grandparents.”
Word was the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw was overwhelmed. So Lytle and Shchoholeva flew from Warsaw to Riga, Latvia, and got an expedited appointment at the U.S. Embassy there. Shchoholeva received a tourist visa and arrived at Eppley Airfield April 2.
She is now in an accelerated English program at UNO and living with Lytle and her family in Omaha.
As Lytle’s 50th birthday loomed this summer, she asked friends and loved ones to donate to a Ukrainian cause rather than buy a gift. Or, if not that, a cause important to them.
“It’s nice to have people respect you for being a good person. But that’s not why [I] do it,” she said. “I get such joy and such fulfillment from having been able to help people…I hope I can have as many more [birthdays] as possible so I can keep doing this.”
That passion, Jeanetta said, has allowed Lytle to mitigate an otherwise dreary existence for children in Ukrainian orphanages.
“The lives that Kelly has impacted through basically her volunteer work in Ukraine over the past 20 years, I couldn’t even begin to calculate the number of people who have benefited,” he said. “She has truly transformed the lives of the people she has touched. Deeply.”
Shchoholeva said she would like to return to Ukraine. Her brother is there. She doesn’t know when that will be or what will be waiting for her when the time comes. Update: Iryna Shchoholeva has returned to Ukraine, leaving Omaha on July 25. The reason can be summed up in one word: homesickness.
“She got back to Chernihiv and she’s staying with a friend and her sister who live in a very small apartment,” Lytle said. “I think she is glad to be back with her friends. She sent me a lot of pictures of the destruction in Chernihiv. I think that was eye opening for her…The biggest challenge now is to find work of some sort.”
That could be tough. The Ukrainian National Bank estimates the unemployment rate there to be 35%, according to the Kyiv Post. Rents are sky-high in safer cities because that is where everyone wants to be.
“It’s rough. Life is a struggle, that’s for sure,” Lytle said. “The war has totally destroyed the economy...Food availability in cities is getting tighter and tighter, and with winter coming there is a lot of fear as to what this is going to be like.”
Shchoholeva loved learning English at UNO, making new friends from all over the world.
Lytle is in the process of bringing a 37-yearold woman and her 13-year-old daughter to Omaha. She knows the family from her travels to Bakhmut, the eastern Ukrainian city Omaha has partnered with – the woman is the oldest sister of Lytle’s oldest son. The mother is getting a passport, a slow process with so many Ukrainians trying to get them. The woman’s husband is not able to leave because of the war.
Lytle says: “Their city is being destroyed. They won’t be able to go back.”
Kelly Lytle
