A MAN born and bred in Rookhope is currently making a huge impression during his latest humanitarian trip to Ukraine.
Everywhere he goes, Kevin Roddam is celebrated and admired. Earlier this week, he was even presented with an award for the important and much needed work he is doing, leaving joy and hope in his wake as he travels around this war-torn country in his trusty van.
Kevin, however, prefers to push others, who are doing equally good work, to the forefront, ensuring the world knows and understands the sacrifices and stories of human endurance that are happening in Ukraine.
The country has a difficult past, with the ‘great bear’ of Russia continually casting its huge shadow over this much smaller country that only gained full independence in 1991. One of its many borders is shared with Russia and as the world now knows, the ‘bear’ invaded the bread basket of Europe in February 2022.
As war continues to rage, atrocities committed, fear rising, and with hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing towards the west of the country and many into other countries, including around 250,000 to our country, stories of human endeavour are slowly coming to light. One such story we will attempt to tell here after Kevin set up a ‘Zoom’ meeting between himself, a man called Serhii, his associate Oksana, two Ukrainian translators – Anna and Mira – and the Weardale Gazette.
It is a true story, which isn’t finished yet by a long way. A story of one man’s love for his fellow townsfolk; his strength, bravery and resilience against all odds, of how he masterminded the evacuation of these people into relative safety after the Russians invaded their quiet and simple country life.
Serhii was a farmer, a self-made man who worked very hard to build up a large farm, which helped to feed the entire nation. He became one of the largest producers in the country. He is married and has children, who he had high hopes would follow him into the business he built up.
He had thousands of acres, ten combine harvesters and he grew vegetables, corn and worked around the clock seven days a week. A strong man physically, he was to become the saviour of his friends, family and neighbours and had to be mentally strong to help them all to survive.
Serhii now lives in another part of Ukraine away from the town he was born in and has nothing left of the farm and business he worked tirelessly for years to build. The Russians have destroyed it all along with the houses, businesses, schools, churches in his home town. It is truly decimated beyond recognition.
In 2020, Serhii was honoured to be elected Mayor, of his beloved town of Vasylivka. He is an honest man and decreed from the beginning that he would not take any payment, he simply wanted to make his home town a better place with better facilities. He worked hard for his people and when the Russians invaded he refused to accept them.
Every morning he would raise the Ukrainian flag on the Town Hall and every day, the Russians would take it down again. But he remained resolute, faithful to his country and his own friends, family and neighbours. A decent, honest man who lives his life with Christian values. As Serhii and the townsfolk refused to collaborate with the Russians, life became more and more difficult, especially as the fighting, the bombing, the destruction was an everyday event.
His Deputy Mayor was tortured but survived, albeit affected for the rest of his life. Serhii is a man in a million, a man with a huge resolve and he doesn’t give up easily. He has lost everything he worked to build up, he has lost his farm business, his home and his town because it has been all but destroyed by the Russians and the fighting.
On the verge of tears, he described the schools he had helped to fund, and build, the houses, the shops and other buildings now nothing but a piles of rubble. At one point the children were being taught in underground schools in the town. Food became scarce, medicine hard to find, fuel non-existent. Serhii used his reserves on the farm to feed his people and fuel the vehicles.
Serghii needed to protect his people, especially the children. And so, he devised a plan to hire a fleet of buses – dozens of them – to transport his whole community to safety many miles away. He oversaw this huge operation himself, just as each bus was about to leave, he personally got on the bus to give reassurance to the men, women, and children telling them not to worry he would follow them, and now hundreds of his townsfolk are displaced persons but at least they have each other in a safer region of Ukraine.
And they have Serhii protecting them, fighting for them…shedding tears for them when they can’t see. Serhii and Kevin want the world to know what happened to the people of Vasylivka, Kevin wants the world to know about Serhii, about an ordinary man of the land who has put his own life at risk, lost the life he knew but still put the people of his town before himself.
“He is a forward-thinking visionary,” said Kevin. “The father of his people.”
Against all the odds, with no obvious fear of the enemy, who will stop at nothing to achieve their aims, Serhii has pushed on and taken his whole community under his wing and into relative safety and where he is still caring for them and their every need.
If anyone would like to help Sergii and his people, he asks them to pray for their safety and a time when they can return to their home town to rebuild it.
Kevin says “I am proud and honoured to call Serhii my friend, I affectionately call him the Big Man with the Big Heart.”
