Hopeful Hearts
10 years of Service to Orphans around the Globe
Published On: February 01, 2012
On the evening of Saturday, February 11, I will join with hundreds of family members and friends in a 10th birthday celebration. I will lovingly examine hundreds of photos, searching the faces of precious children, remarking on everything that makes up a healthy and happy childhood. I will chatter with those who sit at my table about their travels, their 2011 life changes, and their dreams for this unique 10 year old. And of course, toward the end of this evening, we will each present what we believe and hope is a perfect birthday present. What makes this evening life changing will unfold after we part company, our diverse group of over 400 folks, whose daily lives involve selling cars or teaching school, writing prescriptions or writing the laws. We will each tuck away the memory of this gala evening when “loving hearts” are bound together, along with the destiny of over 1,000 orphan children across the globe.
The birthday we will have celebrated is that of Hopeful Hearts, a volunteer-driven organization whose mission is to provide basic living necessities for orphans. In 2002, Bob and Kathy Drane, along with six of their friends sat around a kitchen table and asked themselves what they could do for the nearly one million orphans living in Ukraine. Bob owned a successful commercial design business and Kathy sold real estate. They were business people, whose lives centered on church work, their daughter Jess, travel, and satisfying professional endeavors.
On a trip to Ukraine, they witnessed the suffering at an orphanage—hundreds of limp and pallid tiny human beings trapped in bleak corridors, resting on wet, urine-soaked mattresses. Those hundreds of staring, hopeless eyes were recorded forever in the Drane’s hearts. They asked each other, what can we do?
Ten years and seven countries later, Bob and Kathy Drane are leading a 100% volunteer-based organization that provides food, medicine, shoes, school supplies, and education for orphans in Ukraine, India, Sri Lanka, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Myanmar. They purchased a transition home for girls in Ukraine, built a school and a medical center in Haiti, and they are currently building a home for boys in Sri Lanka. They simply do what needs to be done, responding to what comes before them. There has never been an office or paid staff.
Each year nearly 900 “blessing bags” are filled with soccer balls, Barbie dolls,
U of L and U of K logo wear, watches, jump ropes, and Pringles and distributed between Christmas and New Years to orphans in Ukraine. Volunteers work from April to August filling each sack to the brim. Kathy makes that annual trip, with a joy-filled heart. As she studies the children’s faces and hears their excited voices she rejoices, “For that moment, they are just like every other child at Christmas.” Though their benefactors may never wrap these children in a warm embrace, they deliver Kentucky blessings into these tender lives each Christmas.
Bob and Kathy make other trips to oversee the delivery of medicine, school supplies, or winter shoes. They may look at a new site in India where girls are being educated or in Haiti where there is an infirmary to care for the many orphans whose medical needs continue daily.
Married for 33 years, Bob and Kathy have shared nearly one-third of their married life with the birth and development of Hopeful Hearts. Rarely is there a month where one of them is not traveling to these third-world countries; they have not spent a New Years’ in the US in the last ten years, and there is no end in sight. They have committed to provide for over one thousand orphans, and they simply will not quit this mission. Kathy says, “Children are counting on us, we must not fail them. We must continue to share this vision, encouraging the hundreds of generous friends who have supported these children to remain steadfast while continuing to provide them with warm, dry beds, full tummies, school clothes, and vocational training.”
I have been part of each year’s Hopeful Hearts celebration. I remember Kathy’s determination to help those families who sought to adopt Ukrainian orphans. Kathy and Bob created a path through the bureaucracy of Ukraine to bring back their daughter Olla, and from that journey shaped the path for more than 600 adoptions. I also reflect upon her endless zeal to make life better for those who would never be adopted. She reminds me that Jesus teaches us that “the poor will be with us always,” but she hastens to add that we are each called to some cause, some mission, some service. For Kathy, and those who serve and give to Hopeful Hearts, it is a call to ease the suffering of the orphans. In my home, on my fireplace mantel are tiny nesting dolls, their brightly painted faces and clothing a tender reminder of Ukraine, an old country, rich with beauty, music, art, and literature. Yet the children living in orphanages still struggle with cold water, dark hallways, drafty buildings, and few comforts.
As long as Bob and Kathy, and those who celebrate an evening of Loving Hearts each Valentine’s weekend, continue to give, serve, and share, there will be warmer beds, fuller tummies, healthier bodies, and hopeful dreams to fuel the potential of orphans across the globe. You can learn more about the mission of Hopeful Hearts at www.hopefulheartsfoundation.org or by calling 502-648-2253. I still have room at my table to celebrate a very special 10th birthday. Please join me.
Photography by Gerome Stephens
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