Kennedy: Nurse to help Europe’s human hostages

Viktoriya Kashin, a 25-year-old Russian immigrant living in Cleveland, Tenn., has a life story that appears to have been scripted by a higher power.

While most people have personal narratives filled with detours and switchbacks, Kashin's life seems to be barreling ahead toward something really big. Recently, that "something big" has begun to take shape.

The young nurse is among the volunteers who are marching off to thwart human traffickers who are enslaving poor, young women (many of them children) from former Soviet-bloc nations to work as involuntary prostitutes in European brothels.

"It feels like my whole life has been leading up to this," said Kashin, who is almost halfway to her goal of raising $10,000 to travel to Greece and the Ukraine later this year to assist young sex-industry workers who have fled from their captors.

Some background:

When she was 8 years old, Viktoriya and her family moved to the United States from a small village in Russia where her forebears had endured persecution as devout Christians. Her grandfather was jailed for pastoring a church, she said, and her aunt published banned faith-based literature. Although the USSR had splintered by the time her family left Russia in 1994, Christians were still treated badly there, Kashin said.

In the United States, her family flourished. After a time, they settled into the tight-knit Eastern European immigrant community in Cleveland, and Kashin's father became pastor of the Slavic Evangelical Church there.

Meanwhile, Viktoriya thrived. The oldest of five siblings (she has four younger brothers), she graduated from Walker Valley High School, and in 2008 she earned a degree in nursing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. After that, she worked as a nurse at Parkridge Hospital and Women's East Pavilion.

When her mother died of cancer four years ago, Kashin became like a parent to her four younger brothers.

Eventually, though, she felt called to attend Hillsong International Leadership College, a Bible-based training academy in Sydney, Australia. While there, she learned about the A21 Campaign, an international volunteer group dedicated to fighting human trafficking in Europe. A21 derives from the group's goal to abolish human trafficking in the 21st century.

According to the United Nations, as many as 120,000 women and children are trafficked into European Union states each year. Poor kids and orphans are lured from Balkan countries with the promise of legitimate jobs, then kidnapped, drugged and forced to work in Greece's booming sex-trade industry.

"Girls as young as 13 are forced to sleep with as many as 40 men a day," Kashin said.

When Kashin heard about the A21 Campaign's need for front-line volunteers to be house parents at shelters built for sex-trade refugees, she realized that her resume of life skills dovetailed perfectly. After all, she is a Russian-speaking nurse with leadership training who learned after her mother's death how to help run a household.

Kashin had known for some time that she wasn't meant to put down permanent roots in America until she had returned to her homeland to repay a debt of gratitude for her new religious freedoms here.

"I love America; there is no better place to live," Kashin says with conviction. "I've been so blessed."

Yet, her heart broke for the poor young women of her homeland who are being lured into unspeakable tortures.

Some days, Kashin says, she must summon the courage to continue on her quest. "I still ask myself sometimes, 'What am I doing?' "

Later this year, though, she will spend three months in the Ukrainian countryside teaching young women how to dodge the agents of human trafficking. She will follow that with three months in Thessaloniki, Greece, working as a house mother in a shelter for up to 13 sex-industry refugees.

To raise the $10,000 needed for her travel and expenses, she has set up a website (www.wix.com/daisyspirit/vk) with the details of her trip and instructions for anyone who wants to contribute. She raised $1,000 on Facebook. For her 25th birthday, many of her friends pledged $30 gifts, the cost of one day of her journey.

"I just want to make a difference," Kashin said.

As for raising the rest of the money, Kashin says she's going to Europe, no matter what. The scale of human suffering is too great to ignore, she said. She is confident God will make a way.

Many people profess faith, then there are people like Viktoriya Kashin who actually possess it.