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30 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ВЕРЕСЕНЬ 2019 UNWLA Branch 136 of Naples, Florida Looking Back: Our First 5 Years by Valia Dimitri, Press Secretary March 12, 2019, marked our 5 th anniversary as UN- WLA Branch 136. This gave us the opportunity to look back at all our amazing accomplishments. We started out as 25 awe - struck, excited Ukrainian women not quite believing that we had just become Branch 136 of the UNWLA. Wow! We were hon- or ed and felt a deep sense of pride to be a part of this incredible organization. But being strong, ac- complished women in our own right we were ready to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Under the direction of our newly elected but highly compe- tent presid ent, Natalie Santarsiero, we made a commitment to promote our Ukrainian culture and create a strong awareness within the local community of the current political crisis and state of affairs in Ukraine. Through our efforts over the past 5 years, we discover ed many avenues to com- munity outreach. The first of these was The Naples Daily News whose reporter, Katie Eagan came to our meeting with a photographer to learn more about who we are. The end result was a full page article with beautiful photos, with all o f us dressed in our Ukrainian finery. Our pysanka and Ukrain- ian artifacts displays have been on display in four libraries over the past 3 years, and were very well received. We received numerous calls from the li- braries expressing how much their patrons we re enjoying the displays. We then began holding pysanka demonstrations and classes, again very successful and well attended. For this we were fea- tured in Spotlight (a local magazine), which pub- lished beautiful photos of our pysanka display. In addition to our cultural focus we’ve also been actively involved in educating the general publ ic about Ukraine’s continuous political strug- gles with Russia. Early on we participated in a pro- test against Russian conductor, Valery Gergiev, who was performing at Artis - N aples and who openly supported Russia’s annexation of Crimea. We also organized a s tate - wide Ukrainian Free- dom March to promote support for the Ukrainian people in their struggle to maintain their freedom from the clutches of Vladimir Putin. We were get- tin g noticed and taking our show on the road as we partnered with Hodges University Li fe Long Learning program. We created a presentation cen- tered on the ‘Women of Maidan’ documentary, which was presented twice. People were amazed when they learned the truth of what is happening in Ukraine and they wanted to know more. Their feedback inspir es us to continue on our mission. We then focused on the Holodomor. We set up displays about this horrific event, hosted a viewing of the movie Bitter Harvest , and held a m ajor educational presentation by Neolillia Lech- man, a member of UNWLA Branch 56, wh o is a re- tired teacher and scholar of the Holodomor. One hundred and twenty - five people attended this event. To further promote this endeavor, we have recently partnered wit h the Holocaust Museum and the Educational Center of Southwest Florida and are crea ting a major exhibition on the Holod- omor, a huge undertaking. The exhibition will run from July through November of 2019 (possible
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