By Ronnie Mosley, CapturingGrace.org
Some grief enters like a storm.
Other grief settles in quietly and stays.
When I sat down with Svitlana “Sveta” Muzychenko in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, I met a woman whose words were simple, direct, and unadorned. She did not try to make her pain sound poetic. She simply told the truth. And somehow, that made her story all the more powerful.
Sveta is 39 years old. She grew up in the orphanage system from the age of three, one of five siblings taken from their parents. Her mother died when Sveta was still a child. Her father remained alive, but was absent from her life. From an early age, she learned what it meant to live without the protection of family.
And yet when she spoke about her childhood, she did not reach first for bitterness. She remembered friends, summer camps, and trips to the sea. She remembered standing at a machine all day in the factory when she was older. She remembered what it felt like to be alone. By her mid-twenties, that loneliness had become one of the defining realities of her life.
That was when a friend brought her to Last Bell.
Photographer and storyteller Ronnie Mosley visited Last Bell for three and a half intense days at the end of March. He conducted several interviews with our clients in order to tell their stories. Discover the story behind Capturing Grace and how the life of Ronnie’s daughter Christina continues to inspire this work at capturinggrace.org/about-us.