Tamara Mykhalevych, a Ukrainian refugee, leads a musical improvisational exercise during a conference last month at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Geneva, Switzerland. Mykhalevych teaches music and movement classes at the church’s Refugee Welcome Center. Janet Day-Strehlow, who chairs the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe’s Institute for Christian Studies, looks on. Photo: Lynette Wilson
[Episcopal News Service] When war came to Ukraine in 2022, Nataliya Kolody, a widow and mother of twin girls, was alone in a frontline town near a nuclear power plant in the country’s southeast. For three months, she waited before deciding she had to leave for her daughters’ safety, future and mental health.
“It was a very difficult decision because I had no experience living abroad. I had no relatives or friends who could support me,” Kolody, who’d lost both her mother and husband before the war began, said during a recent conference held at Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Geneva, Switzerland. “My whole life and all my interests remained in Ukraine. But I knew I must be strong for my children.”
“Switzerland gave us new opportunities and faith in the future,” she said, “but the most important thing is the faith that we are not alone.
“This is not just a church; this is a home for all of us here.”
The center reflects its name in the truest sense, providing a sense of community, warmth and the feeling one isn’t alone. “It’s a welcome center, is what it really strives to be, and what people feel when they come to us,” Christine Aghazarm, its director, said in a Zoom interview with Episcopal News Service, following last month’s conference.
The conference focused on the refugee crisis. Emmanuel’s parish-based Refugee Welcome Center began in 2022 in response to an influx of mostly women and children fleeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; in 2024, it assisted 1,000 refugees, the majority Ukrainian. In its first year, it received $15,000 from the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe’s refugee grant program, which began after Russia invaded Ukraine.
For a while, Aghazarm said, the church thought about offering resume writing and other job-search preparedness workshops, or legal assistance, but those services are offered elsewhere, and the refugees said that’s not what they wanted.
“We’ve just been flat out told that’s not what we want or need, it’s not what we are coming to you for,” she said. “They love that there’s this space where they can come, where our classes are small, where they spend time together. And our ears are always to the ground like, okay, you want to start a project, you know we’re all ears.”
The welcome center offers French language classes that complement those offered by local social service providers. It also sponsors cultural events, and it hosts yoga and other movement classes, music lessons, English classes and English-immersion camps for children.
Kolody first came to Emmanuel for a Ukrainian music concert and decided to attend services. “I didn’t choose this church by chance,” she said. “I felt that love lives here, and where there is love there is God.”
Worldwide, there are an estimated 42.7 million refugees, 73.5 million people internally displaced within their own countries, and 8.4 million asylum-seekers, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ 2024 figures. There are 5.1 million registered Ukrainian refugees.
The convocation, which in Western Europe includes Episcopal parishes and missions in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, has also been working with Anglican, Episcopal and full-communion partners across Europe to assist refugees. Its refugee grant program receives support from Episcopal Relief & Development. As of 2024, the convocation’s grant program has helped to support over 40,000 refugees in 11 countries with essentials, healthcare, legal aid, language classes and employment assistance.
Tamara Mykhalevych, who sings in Emmanuel’s choir, organizes music and movement classes for refugees at the welcome center.
A musician and choreographer, and a refugee who also fled the war in Ukraine with her sister and her two nieces, told ENS it’s important to do the thing one did before they left, to continue to make things, to play music, to dance, to do the things one used to do; it provides the link to one’s current and past lives.
They have to continue to do the kinds of things they did before … “This is the bridge to maintaining mental stability,” she said; the things that fill you up on the inside, “so you know who you are, and you are not empty inside.”
–Lynette Wilson is a reporter and managing editor of Episcopal News Service.