When she was 19, Tanya Kravhenko used to have the worst migraines ever in her home city of Odessa in Ukraine, where medication was hard to find. The pain would floor her, leaving Tanya unable to leave her house for two to three days at a time.
So her then-husband had a solution: He shot her up with opium.
“He asked me to try just a little bit when I had these headaches,” Tanya told me in halting English. “And when I tried it, oh my god….”
Tanya injected opium every day for the next six years – except for those five months she was in prison.
Like many recovering addicts, Tanya’s turn to drugs came after some rough times.
Tanya grew up in an affluent family, the daughter of a successful lawyer and a homemaker mom.
“I had an amazing relationship with father but not with momma. She was a good person, but.”
Then Tanya’s father suddenly died when she was 15, and it hit Tanya hard.
When he died, I died with him,” she says. “My life was finished. He planned everything for me. I didn’t worry about anything.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Every evening, I went to the cemetery and talked to him.”
And his death also affected her mother deeply. Tanya’s mom went into a deep depression, crying constantly – and never talked to her daughter about their feelings.
At 16, Tanya started running around on the streets with friends who did drugs, but didn’t like when she popped her first pill.
Somehow, Tanya finished school, and did so with honors, and dreams of becoming an English teacher. But her college entrance exam scores were low, so her education stopped there.
That’s when Tanya met the guy who became her husband and gave her opium for the first time when she was 19. He also gave her a child, Stanislav, who’s now 23. (“I love him a lot,” Tanya says, eyes misting.)
The marriage fell apart after a few years – Tanya believes he was a drug addict — but Tanya’s own addiction got worse and worse.
Tanya’s mother and brother took away Tanya’s son and started going to church regularly to pray for Tanya, who just got deeper into her addiction.
That’s when Tanya started coming up with schemes to rip off friends and neighbors, “selling” them home security systems, taking their money but never delivering on the goods.
Attractive and personable, Tanya had no problems with the scheme – until her victims started going to the police.
Tanya was arrested, and she went into prison weighing only 84 pounds. She often wouldn’t eat for three or four days in a row.
“I had only this much money every day. Should I use money for drugs or food? I always chose drugs,” she said. “I just smoked and did drugs.”
Tanya got out of prison after five months, and within five minutes of her release, she took a taxi to the drug dealer.
“I felt very bad. Inside I felt very bad.”
Tanya went home high, and her mother knew it.
“She said, ‘you know, we can’t help you. If prison and isolation can’t help, we can’t help.’”
Tanya says she felt totally hopeless. “I really wanted to be a mother. But nothing worked. That’s why I feel huge shame and guilty and pain all the time.”
So Tanya shot up even more drugs to try to erase those feelings. And she reached the conclusion: “I’ll stop drugs when I die.”
That’s when a friend took her to a 12-step fellowship meeting – and Tanya says she just didn’t believe people when they stood up and said they had five years clean and sober.
“I said, you’re crazy, everybody is a liar! I don’t believe you. It’s not true. All people who come to [these] groups are crazy.”
But then she was hit with a thought: What if it’s true?
“Again, and again, I returned. And then one day, I believed it was true. I wanted to be sober. I wanted to be clean. I wanted to be a mother,” she said.
“God did something. And I wanted this. I looked for ways to be sober. I wanted to be sober more than I wanted to be drug addicted, maybe a little bit.”
Tanya kept going and going to the meetings, but she kept using drugs. But one week, Tanya put together three whole days clean. And group members bought her a cake and threw a big celebration for her.
Shortly after that day, Tanya awakened in the middle of the night, sure that someone has shaken her shoulder. But no one was in the room. Tanya says she walked to her window, prayed all night and had a conversation with God.
She said she heard an actual voice say, “You are mine.”
The next day, she moved back in with her mother, brother and son. And Tanya has stayed clean for the next 17 years after that.
That’s when Tanya decided to help fellow recovering addicts, and she decided to do that through churches. So Tanya went to school, to seminary and she started leading groups for recovering addicts in church.
And Tanya was focused – a bout with TB cost her one of her lungs, but Tanya persisted, and eventually landed a job as a psychologist in a Christian orphanage. Tanya also got married again and has a second child, whom she also loves dearly.
While at the orphanage, she ran into Christian ministry leaders who went to the US every year to find money. And eventually, Tanya met Scott Reall, the founder and director of the YMCA Restore Ministries program. And both of them knew it was time to start Restore Ministries in Ukraine.
Restore Ministries, started by Scott at the Green Hills YMCA, helps folks with all sorts of issues – sex-drug-food addictions, trauma, grief, guilt, codependency. The intro group, Journey to Freedom, helps folks go from contemplation to the action of changing.
Tanya re-learned English, and in the last few years, she and some volunteers have put hundreds of Ukrainians through Journey to Freedom.
Tanya is here for a week or so to tell her story and to try to raise funds for what she does. The website is www.Jtfukraine.com.
They only need $25,000 for her salary and her partner’s salary. And some folks are trying to get together an extra $7,000 to get Tanya an office, so she can stop running the operation and groups out of her apartment.
And the current Russia-Ukraine tensions make Restore Ministries that much more important, Tanya says.
“It’s emotionally difficult. I feel anger. Right now in my country is war,” she says.
“Journey to Freedom is more important than it was one year ago. Now we have a lot of pain.
“They lost hope, they’ve lost jobs. They’ve lost faith.”
But not Tanya, who now at age 42, has 17 years clean.
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