🇬🇧 The Call from Lviv

Rencontrer L'Arche

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🇬🇧 The Call from Lviv

update 07

Vincent Porte

May 31, 2021

Dear friends,

Kovcheh is the most eastern European community in Lviv, Ukraine.

Ukraine, no lie, we didn't really know, just a cool and efficient work colleague in Kiev. A match of the French football team too... that is to say very little.

And then we met Lesia, community leader of the Kovcheh community in Lviv. Very quickly, we started to talk by email, then by video. We felt a lot of enthusiasm and joy in her eyes. As in the eyes of Ala, Gertrud, Iwona and Pascale. Could this already be one of the common traits of people who commit themselves to a L'Arche community?

Lesia's words are simple and powerful: "This is where I want to be when I am with the core-members".

Lesia met L'Arche during a Faith and Light retreat with a friend. Three days with families and core-members in Ukraine, with the participation of a member of L'Arche Daybreak (Canada). That was about ten years ago, then she became a volunteer, then an assistant, then a workshop leader, then a community leader. This is her second term. Her view of the community has changed as she has taken on more responsibility, but she still enjoys being able to link the social dimension of her work with her spiritual life.

Lesia also explains that the community is not quite like other communities. We want to know more. Kovcheh has 53 core members, 5 day workshops in different parts of Lviv. The idea is to reduce the number of bus journeys for the core-members, because the transport network is not very good. The workshops are open during the week, and each core-member lives with his family in the evenings and weekends. The community has a house to temporarily accommodate up to 3 core-members and 3 assistants, when the families need a break. We ask Lesia how they keep the community going. The assistants meet twice a month to work together. In the summer, the community organises a festival in the streets of the city in which the inhabitants of Lviv participate. Finally, the core members of the different workshops meet in the summer for camps.

Like many communities, the quarantines and lockdowns have turned everything upside down. The house and the workshops were closed and the festival was cancelled. The community has to find its balance to continue living despite these constraints.

Kovcheh is the first community in Ukraine. It seeks to build and maintain links with other communities around the world. Lesia tells us about their volunteer programme with Canada, their trip to Poland and the links with the community in Gantt (Belgium) for funding. Lesia also talks about her dream of bringing community members from Belgium to Lviv.

Finally, we discuss our coming, which of course has to be adapted to the sanitary conditions of the moment. As far as communication is concerned, the assistants and core-members do not use pictograms or makaton gestures. We can count on one or more English speaking assistants in each workshop. We will have to decide whether to spend our time on one workshop and get to know the core-members and assistants, or to visit all the workshops over two weeks. We are also asking Lesia about meeting young people the same age as Daphne, Josephine and Barthélémy, perhaps taking part in courses in schools with other young people, and about our accommodation nearby. The health situation still prevents us from simply answering these questions. Let's hope that they will be answered as we get closer to our arrival.

Thank you Lesia for your time. We look forward to getting to know the community in real life.