Stories of tragedy and urgency have been pouring out of Ukraine, as it has become subject to a Russian invasion over the last two weeks.

One of those stories hits a little closer to home — Morgantown to be exact.

For several years Jennifer Hunt followed the stories of Ukrainian orphans in a Facebook group for potential host families.

Last year, three faces popped up in the group, with no family to host them for the summer of 2021. The three siblings wanted to stay together.

The orphanage where they live is designed much like a boarding school, with different buildings and classes. Even though they’re siblings, they don’t get to see each other very much.

Jennifer asked her husband, Jonathan, if they could do it. They were only going to take three of them, but a fourth sibling ended up being old enough to join the program.

The fifth and oldest sibling, who is 16, was not able to get fingerprints for his visa due to the embassy being closed because of COVID-19 restrictions.

Soon enough summer came and the four children, ranging from ages 7 to 13, joined the Hunt family.

The Hunts moved to Brown County 15 years ago. Jonathan owns a cleaning and maintenance business and Jennifer works in network marketing. They also homeschool. They have 11 children, four grown and seven at home.

The orphans quickly became a part of their family, even being around for two family weddings.

“Once they’re here they feel like a part of your family,” Jennifer said.

They spent their summer days cooking, hiking, fishing and swimming — they’d swim every day if they could, Jennifer said.

They’d be up at 7 a.m. riding bikes around the yard and collecting duck eggs. One day was spent at Kentucky Kingdom.

Arianna Hunt, 18, said that they always wanted to help cook, only knowing how to make eggs.

The kids are all very sweet, 16-year-old Kirsten Hunt added.

“They all have their own personalities, they’re fun to be around,” Jennifer said. “They’re just really cute, really great kids.”

When came time to send them home at the end of summer, she said that it was like leaving a child at college after break. They came back for Christmas.

After Christmas break, they flew back to Odessa, in southern Ukraine on Jan. 14.

Several weeks later, tensions between Russia and Ukraine came to a head when Russia launched a full-scale invasion on its neighbor on Feb. 24.

Russia had deployed an estimated 175,000 troops at various points near Ukraine’s border in December.

Russian missiles reached the capital city, Kyiv on Feb. 25.

Russia claimed its forces had taken over Kherson, a port city on the southern coast on the seventh day of the war.

As fighting entered its second week, the United Nations said that 1 million refugees had fled Ukraine since the war began.

The five siblings are among those fleeing the country and the Hunts are doing what they can to help make that happen. On March 3, their orphanage in Odessa had been evacuated and moved to Poland.

They are safe for the time being, but the Hunt family’s mission is far from over as the children remain thousands of miles away from them.

‘They can’t wait’

Host families in the same program as the Hunts are now working together to try and bring their children back to the United States.

The hosting program is orchestrated by the Ukrainian government and has roughly 300 children in the program who have already been hosted in different states in the United States.

One of the reasons the Hunt family chose to host with the program was not just to give the kids a good summer, but to give them an opportunity for a permanent family.

Roughly 70% of kids who are hosted by an American family are adopted by someone they meet.

With those host parents having had safety inspections done before and the orphans having familiarity with the family, they are trying to get kids back to where they were in the U.S. during summer and Christmas breaks.

Getting those specific 300 children back to where they were — either with extended tourist visas they were already granted over the winter or with new expedited visas — is the goal.

A tourist visa, which the kids have obtained for previous visits, is good for 90 days.

It would be a temporary extension of the existing host program, allowing for respite care for the orphans in the “extraordinary circumstances,” Jennifer said.

“It would just be nice if the kids that left in January could come back,” she said. “They were just with us.”

They are able to communicate with the kids on Instagram, sending text messages and video calls. Jennifer said they talk to them every day, all day long.

The first night of the invasion, the 11-year-old sister said she could hear missiles, but they had not been bombed.

Jennifer said that growing up in the 1980s and seeing Russia as a superpower, she knows that the Russian government will not just leave Ukraine.

“I don’t know what will be done to just get (Russia) to stop the war,” she said. “We just need to get (the kids) out.”

Should they be able to come to America during the school year, Hunt said they’d hope to enroll them as students at Brown County Schools, since they’re used to that framework and having a lot of kids around them. Some of the kids do speak English.

At this point, permission from Ukraine’s Ministry of Social Policy is needed to even host the kids, Jennifer said.

During an interview on March 2, Jennifer said that orphanages would need to evacuate across the border.

Once across, the group of 300 already has a facility with 250 beds available waiting for those particular children until their visas are cleared.

Speaking with certain legislators, the Hunts were told the wait time for a tourist visa could be as long as September of next year.

Before the orphanage had been evacuated, Jennifer expressed the urgency of the situation in Ukraine and the dire need to get them over the border.

“They can’t wait,” Jennifer said. “They don’t have a lot of time. Some of the orphanages that could have evacuated a few days ago are already behind Russian lines.”

Other parts of the country are facing food and water shortages, destroyed bridges, she said.

“We don’t have any of these obstacles right now. We need to work while we have the opportunity,” she said.

The Hunts have been working on this process since the invasion began. A normal day the last three weeks has consisted of 18 hours worth of work and making contact with whomever can help, including legislators at the state and federal levels.

Ukraine is eight hours ahead of Indiana. At midnight Eastern Standard Time, it’s 8 a.m. in Odessa and they start to receive information the Hunts sent the night before.

The kids will be on video chats on Instagram constantly, with the kids in the Ukraine just keeping their “American family” on the screen, no matter what’s happening around them, Jennifer said.

Of the 300 kids in the program, 14 have been hosted in Indiana.

Jonathan said that those kids are who they can help the most since state representatives are shared.

Doing what needs done

At this point in their mission, the Hunts ask for prayer.

“We just need people to pray that this comes through,” she said. “Pray that all of the obstacles that are in place would just be removed.”

With everything changing every day, Jennifer said that they wanted to make the urgency of the situation known.

“We’re just praying they get out. Even if our plan doesn’t come to fruition of them coming here, we just pray that they get out of the Ukraine and get to safety and we’ll continue to work on our plan,” she said.

“If our plan’s not done now we won’t stop advocating for them. We pray that they’re moved to safety.”

A lot of children in orphanages do not have any advocates, with so many having the same need for advocacy.

Ukraine has an estimated 100,000 orphans in the country.

“There’s just so many kids to advocate for,” Jonathan said.

The couple’s 20-year-old son Christian said most don’t have a family social net.

When the war broke out, Jennifer said that a lot of the orphans who had family took the children back. Those with foster parents also took the kids.

“Kids who are left have no one,” she said. “These (five) kids at least have people who are at least still fighting for them. And it’s not just us, 300 kids have people fighting for them.”

“You spend all of your time extracting information, figuring out who to contact next,” Jennifer continued. “It goes until midnight and even in the middle of the night I’ll check my messages to see if the kids messaged me. Then it starts again in the morning.”

She said the entire time they’re doing their daily life, the urgency of the situation is on her mind.

“You’re working diligently knowing that you may not be covering everything completely. We also have 11 kids, Jon has his business. Spend all day doing (regular responsibilities); it’s always in the back of your mind.”

She said it can feel like there’s always something else you figure you should be working on and when something is not being accomplished it feels like something was overlooked.

“We have no specific reason to be interested in them other than to help them,” Jennifer said. “We’ll be their home.”

Jonathan said that with so many moving parts, if it all works out, the credit is not theirs to take.

“We’re just praying,” he said. “There are so many moving parts. Jen said our hope is in the Lord and it has to be. … If it works out, it’s God’s hand moving.”

“Maybe it won’t be able to be done,” Jennifer said, tears filling her eyes. “But I can’t stand before the Lord, having the opportunity to have done something good and not done it because it wasn’t convenient. … We’ll have to do what we have to do.”