ANDERSON - Inside a shelter for orphans in the Ukraine, a prayer had been scrawled on a wall. The “Wailing Wall,” they call it.

“Help bring the Ukraine out from under the oppressing communism. Take away the fear, hopelessness, depression, spirit of coldness and help bring freedom,” the message read.

Other heartfelt notes had also been written by the teenage orphans who stay at The Shelter, a Carmel, Ind.-based mission, and by those who come from America to assist the youth.

The prayers touched Kristin Camp, an Anderson woman who was among 13 Americans who mentored the youth, played games and during three summer weeks at The Shelter in Zhytomyr, about 200 miles west of the capital of Kyiv.

Camp feels her life has been altered by working with the teens.

“When you see these kids, it literally transforms your life,” she said from her westside Anderson home.

She was part of a group assisting Last Bell Ministries, based in Carmel as the shelter element of Eastern European Christian’s Outreach. Her husband, Kelly, serves on the ministry’s board.

In 2006, the then relatively-new ministry purchased a building to serve as a shelter, says one of its founders, Mary Millikan. She and her husband, Steve, a Carmel musician, had also taken a life-altering trip to the Ukraines working with a summer camp and other humanitarian visits..

“We wanted to do permanent work so when we started feeling this connection with Zhytomr and knew God was saying this was the place,” she said. “Very few agencies work with older kids. They say it’s too late for them, do something for the young kids. We just knew we were supposed to work with older kids.”

There are typical schools in Zhytomr but there are also orphanages serving the growing population of youth who have been abandoned or removed by the state due to parental abuse.

In 2006, the Ukrainian government adopted a state program to combat child homelessness and neglect and launched a Street Children Program that increased the number of foster families. In May of that year, a presidential decree outlined measures to protect minor orphans, children without parental care and support for foster parents.

By January of 2007, the U.S. State Department reported 64,192 children and minor orphans had been placed in foster care. The prevalence of orphans is of such concern that by mid-2007, more than 70,000 had been registered as orphans or without parental care in a country of 46 million people.

“Many times, the parents are alcoholic, non-functioning people. Sometimes a parent brings a child to an orphanage and says, ‘I’ll be back’ and never return. A lot of the kids hope their parents will return, either because they’ve been told that they’ll return or hope that.”

Ukrainians, though free of Russia since 1991, still lean toward former Communism philosophies in that they feel government should take care of citizens, she said.

Upon graduation from the orphanages at ages 15 or 16, students attend a ceremony where a bell is rung, symbolizing the end of life in that institution.