'Four moms with medical backgrounds' travel to Ukraine to help critical relief efforts

Heroines with a heart doing what they think is best for the people under attack.

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"Janet Semenova-Hornstein remembers the moment in early March when, watching the images of war in Ukraine, she knew she had to do something.

“My heart was breaking, seeing all those women and children,” she said.

A pediatric nurse practitioner in Scottsdale, Arizona, Semenova-Hornstein was born in the former Soviet Union, in Uzbekistan, and immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 7. Like her friend, Dr. Svetlana Reznikova-Steinway, who was born and raised in Ukraine and is now an emergency room physician in Mesa, she felt a connection to the region because of her family roots.

“Svetlana and I looked at each other and said, ‘What can we do?’” she said. “We both speak Russian. She speaks Ukrainian. We have medical skills. We were two moms living in Arizona, but we knew we had to take our skills and physically do something.”

Enlisting the help of two more friends with medical backgrounds — Dr. Cheryl Macy, an emergency room physician in Phoenix, and Carla Stark, an oncology nurse in the Scottsdale area — they began assembling donations of medical supplies. Within 72 hours, they collected 800 pounds of bandages, antibiotics and urgently needed medicines, including insulin, as well as $50,000 in monetary contributions.

At first, the friends thought they’d simply send the materials to Ukraine. But Aerial Recovery Group, a relief organization they’d been in touch with, asked if they could do something more.

“They told us they were nurses and doctors and had ties to the region,” said Jeremy Locke, chief of operations for the U.S.-based disaster relief organization that’s been working in Ukraine. “Because we had a need for their expertise, we asked them to come over here.”

In Ukraine, Locke, a retired Green Beret, and his team have been shuttling medical supplies to the front lines and escorting orphans from the hardest-hit regions to safer areas, like the western city of Lviv. Aerial Recovery Group offered to pay for the Arizona women’s flight to Poland and provide safe houses where they could stay as they provided medical assistance in the region."...

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