An Important Announcement

Hello Friends, Jed here.

There are some big changes on the horizon for Wide Awake International, and I want to share those changes with each of the valued members of the Wide Awake Community. Kim and I are so incredibly thankful for your generous partnership and it’s important to us that every person who invests in this work is up to date on decisions we have made. 

If you have followed this work for a minute, you know that we Johnsons have been living apart for the past year and a half. We are still very much in love, but the needs of our boys have taken me to the US to help our son Seth get the medical, emotional, and educational support we just couldn’t get for him in Ukraine. Kim, our girls who are still school-aged, and Vlad have been on the Homestead in Ukraine with our team and all the other boys. As you can imagine, living on two sides of the Atlantic with no airport in Ukraine has been a big stretch for us. 

This year apart was a test to see if we could even get the support Seth needed here in the States. He has begun to thrive with the right counseling, medication, and an amazing school (GO SAXONS). We can see now that it is 100% the right choice to have him in the US as he finishes up high school. There is now hope for his future that was lacking when he was home in Ukraine.  

Seth isn’t our only son whose needs haven’t been fully met in Ukraine. Boris’ medical needs seem to be beyond the scope or desire of our local medical professionals. We’ve beaten down the doors of too many specialists to count and no one is interested in seeing Boris as valuable and treating him as such. For example, it was recently suggested by an orthopedic surgeon that we just amputate his foot rather than try to do corrective surgery! Bmo also struggles with severe gastrointestinal issues that need intervention. For years we have wanted to more deeply address these issues, but we knew we would need more time abroad than a summer trip to the US to truly help him heal. Vlad also has some medical issues that are not able to be addressed well in our city in Ukraine. 

That all brings us to the big change up ahead. After much prayer and seeking wise counsel, we have decided that it’s time for us to all be together as a family. Kim, Hava, Evie, and Vlad will be relocating to be with us in Oregon at the end of the summer and we are feverishly working to find a way for our son, Boris (AKA Bmo), to come with us. There are currently some legal barriers to Bmo staying in the US as he is not a US citizen, but in our minds, his presence is non-negotiable. He is a part of our family and he has to be with us. Our need to be together in the States as a family gives us the opportunity to seek medical care and rehabilitation for Boris, Vlad, and Seth- the first three boys that God brought into our family so many years ago.  

This is not a sneaky way of breaking the news that the Johnsons are transitioning back to the States permanently. Our home and community is in Ukraine. We plan to live out our days on the Homestead in Ukraine with our people. This is a temporary solution to give our boys long-term health and the best chance of bright and full futures.

The homestead in Ukraine continues to thrive. Masha, our new Executive Director who has been transitioning into this role for the past few years, is doing a fabulous job leading the mission and developing our work and our voice in the wider community. The new house-building project you funded is rapidly taking shape, and our Ukrainian fundraising team is on track to raise 10% of this year’s annual budget for Dim Hidnosti. Our other boys all live with wonderful Ukrainian families and they are loved, safe, and on their paths of healing. It’s an exciting time in the life of our work on the ground in Ukraine. It’s painful for us because life on the Homestead with our team and with our boys is our heart, but we really feel God asking us to say YES to this next step of finding health and healing for three of our boys in the US. Saying YES to the next thing has been our strategy all these years and were aren’t about to change the strategy now, just because the YES looks different than we imagined. God has been faithful for more than a decade now and we know we can trust him. 

The amazing Wide Awake community has walked with us through times of moving, adoption, guardianship, building, war, refugee life, resettling, and the current exciting time of growth for the team in Ukraine. This next YES is a pivot for us that we honestly didn’t see coming and we can’t make this transition without your ongoing support. Here is a list of ways you can support the vision of thriving families for our boys:

1. We need a doctor and medical institution to agree to oversee Boris’s medical care and rehabilitation as a charity case so we can request a visa for his travel to the US. If you know a gastroenterologist, a foot and ankle surgeon, an orthopedic surgeon, or a general practitioner who might be willing to help our Bmo free of charge, please let us know and we can get you the pertinent information about his health needs.

2. We are looking for a home in Oregon with four bedrooms and not too many stairs.

3. We need the finances to relocate the Johnson’s home base back to the US for this season and cover the costs of living in America, which as you can imagine are quite a bit higher than in Ukraine.

4.  We need the finances for increased travel for Kim and I so we can take turns making regular trips back to Ukraine to support the team. They can run the day-to-day work in Ukraine without us, but they still need our presence. We have to make traveling to the Homestead a priority while we are away. 

If you have any questions or would like to know more please email me at jjohnson@wideawakeinternational.org and I will be sure to get back to you. Thank you for continuing to walk this journey with us as we say YES to the next thing God is asking of us.