Kite flying in Ukraine: One N.S. veteran's mission to help children in a war zone

At a summer camp in western Ukraine, children run through a field, pulling kites behind them. Smiles light up their faces.

Their instructor, Seth Congdon, cheers them on. He might have the biggest smile of all.

The 49-year-old military veteran from Nova Scotia brought these kites to the kids. He wanted them to see the sky as a place of beauty and freedom, not just a potential source of danger filled with drones and missiles.

“Nothing should be above your head but clean air and shelter. And they’re literally being rained death from above," Congdon said.

"What better way to stand up, stick your chest out and say, ‘I’m here, and this is me, and I’m not going anywhere.’"

In July, Congdon travelled from his home near Lunenburg to Ukraine with fellow Canadian veteran Royce Roberts, bringing 130 handmade kite blanks to the summer camp for children living with the daily realities of war. For three weeks, the pair taught the children how to assemble, decorate and fly the kites in workshops Congdon called Reclaim Your Sky.

LISTEN | Seth Congdon's Ukraine mission:

Atlantic Voice26:10The freedom of kite flying in Ukraine

“We call them camps, but they’re really trauma rehabilitation programs,” said camp director Oksana Hrycyna, a Ukrainian-Canadian teacher from Toronto.

Forty of the 120 children who attended camp this summer had a parent killed on the front lines, she said. Others had parents who were missing or being held as prisoners of war.

From Hirtles Beach to Bagram

For Congdon, kites go back much further than Ukraine. He grew up in Kingsburg, N.S., flying them at Hirtles Beach with his mother, Marilyn Congdon, a well-known kite maker who has taught the craft across the Maritimes.

Congdon shakes hands with the colonel-in-chief of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry during a military tour in Bosnia in 2002. (Submitted by Seth Congdon)

When he grew up, kites took on another meaning. During his 15-year military career, Congdon served in Afghanistan in 2002 with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Returning from the Battle of Takur Ghar, he remembers seeing kites from the back of his helicopter.

“You could tell where the green zone was — the protected area around Bagram — because there were kites or people were wearing colour,” he said. “Colour was outlawed, and music was outlawed, and kites — absolutely outlawed.”

The kites stayed with him, along with everything else he saw in Afghanistan.

Weight of war

Months after he returned home, it all caught up with him while he was driving alone on a highway outside Winnipeg.

“I had to pull off on the side of the road, feeling every emotion at once — anger, fear, aggression— for about 10 seconds,” he said. “And then click, the switch went off, and I was like, ‘What was that?’”

He said he didn’t tell anyone, including therapists, for close to a decade.

Congdon was released from the military in 2014 and now works with veterans and first responders living with post-traumatic stress disorder. He uses creative work like painting, writing and building kites to help others process what they carry.

“We’re basically using art and creativity and positivity to heal trauma,” he said. It's that same idea that took him to Ukraine.

Royce Roberts, front left, and Seth Congdon, front right, pose with some of the Ukrainian campers and their decorated kites. (Submitted by Seth Congdon)

Despite a language barrier, Congdon said his own combat experience gives him an unusual connection with the children at the camp.

“We know what artillery sounds like. We know what bombs sound like,” he said. “That being a given, you can sit in that same place, and now, let’s talk about flying a kite.”

Most of the children had never flown a kite before, he said. In the workshops, they decorated theirs with flowers, butterflies, rainbows, hearts and, in some cases, warplanes.

Hrycyna said it was powerful to watch the campers fly their kites.

“They’re not cowering in fear, and they’re watching their kites playfully dart and dip and dive with the wind," she said.

"It really warms your heart to see kids being kids, and doing something so simple as flying a kite that they constructed themselves with their own two hands,” she said.

Congdon said that, despite growing up around kites, this trip to Ukraine helped him understand what they truly meant.

“Kites have been in my life my entire life, with mom and how she’s made them. But I never really truly got the significance. The gravity didn’t hit until, honestly, this trip,” he said.

Besides giving the kite workshops, Congdon raised $11,000 through local fundraisers for the camp.

Seth Congdon flies a kite at Hirtles Beach, N.S., after returning from leading kite workshops in Ukraine. (Erin Moore)

What came home

A week after returning to Nova Scotia, Congdon joined his wife, Janna, their two sons and Roberts’ family at Hirtles Beach to fly kites.

He said being able to go back into a war zone to help children has reshaped how he thinks about his military past.

“If a trauma or something really difficult, something that taxed your spirit to the point that you can’t function anymore, made it possible to do something like this, to throw yourself back into service for a positive return, then maybe it doesn’t make the trauma OK,” he said.

“But it makes the good thing possible.”

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