From May 7 to May 27, 2026, Magicians Without Borders conducted its eighth mission to Ukraine, extending through Romania in collaboration with our French colleagues Magiciens Sans Frontières. What follows is the story of three cities, ten organizations, and nearly one thousand people who showed us, once again, that wonder is not a luxury — it is a lifeline.
🇺🇦 Chapter One: Kyiv
We arrived in Kyiv and were taken in by Mariana and Arkadii — two teachers who have been our local anchors since we first came to Ukraine, and who, over the years, have become something more than partners. Family, in the truest sense. They drove us to their home in the countryside, outside the city. Arkadii had caught fish that morning and cooked it for us at the table. Mariana handed us jars of mushrooms she had picked and canned herself. We sat together and, for a few hours, felt like ordinary people at an ordinary table.
And then the sirens went off.
Over the course of our time in Kyiv, we woke up multiple nights to the sound of explosions that felt close enough to rattle the walls. Mariana told us that she and Arkadii go to the bomb shelter two or three times a day, every day — sometimes during a class, sometimes in the middle of the night. They have been doing this for four years. They are expecting their third child in August. Their life is going on, and it is going on in the middle of a war.
“We get to go home. They don’t.”
– Tom Verner, MWB Founder, reflecting on our time in Kyiv
Our programming in the Kyiv region began in the villages of Borivka and Nizhylovychi — communities where the visible signs of war are everywhere: drone nets wrapped around the power plant, freshly replaced school windows, children who weave camouflage walls together after class. We performed two shows. Many in the audience had never seen live magic before. At the end of one performance, a woman walked up, asked for a hug, and said: “This is so important for our kids in the times of war. Thank you.”
From there, our Kyiv schedule took us across the city and its communities:
School shows for primary-age children (ages 6–11), adapted to run in split sessions to fit bomb shelter capacity limits
A performance and workshop at the National Cancer Institute, in partnership with Zaporuka NGO
An evening show at Zaporuka’s Dacha — the halfway house where families rest while their children undergo cancer treatment in Kyiv
A workshop at “Our Kids” orphanage, a joint initiative of Polish, German, and Ukrainian humanitarian organizations
A show at ELEOS shelter home for mothers and children
A World School performance for families navigating long-term displacement
Sightseeing at Pyrohiv with Mariana and Arkadii — seeing Ukraine through the eyes of people who love it
“One moment from the school visit stays with us. After the performance, we ended up spending nearly 40 minutes with a group of teenagers in the school’s bomb shelter — the space where they go, sometimes multiple times a day, when the alerts sound. We performed some magic. And then we just talked. About their lives. About the war. About how they were feeling. They asked us questions. We asked them back. They opened up, slowly and then all at once, in the way that teenagers do when they feel genuinely seen.
We were in a bomb shelter. The conversation was one of the best we had on the entire trip.”
We also visited the Babyn Yar memorial during our time in Kyiv — a reminder that the land we were standing on carries layers of history and loss that stretch far beyond the present conflict. To perform in this city, in this moment, is to understand that showing up matters.
🇺🇦 Chapter Two: Lviv
We traveled from Kyiv to Lviv by train — by all accounts the most beautiful leg of our journey, crossing a country that continued to surprise us with its resilience and its color. Lviv received us with a full schedule and, unexpectedly, a celebration.
Our Lviv programming began with performances at local care centers and a show at Zaporuka’s Dacha for families managing cancer treatment away from home. We also performed at a recovery camp for internally displaced teenagers at Ottoman Resort — more than 50 young people in the audience, one of the largest shows of the entire trip.
But the centerpiece of our Lviv chapter was something we had been planning for months: a three-day magic education intensive with our partner organization 3D Charity, supported by Murphy’s Magic. 3D runs development programs for orphaned children in Lviv, and this was our first full education chapter with them — the kind of sustained, skill-building engagement that we believe is as important as any single performance.
One student stood out, though not for the reason you might expect. For the first two days of the workshop, she refused to perform. When it was her turn to practice a trick in front of her peers — seven other students, no audience, just the group — she hid under the table. She was that afraid of being seen.
On the final workshop day, as we were planning the order of the graduation rehearsal, she raised her hand. She said she wanted to perform. We asked her which trick she’d chosen. She told us. We put her name at the top of the list. She opened the show.
Two days later, we were already in Bucharest when our phone rang. It was Kateryna, the director of 3D Charity — calling live from the students’ real donor performance, streaming it from her phone so we could watch. The students were performing in a theater. The donors applauded long and loud. Afterward, Kateryna told us something that has stayed with us: that she considers herself someone who understands these children deeply, who has studied them and been alongside them for years — and yet what they did in those three days taught her that they were capable of things she hadn’t believed possible.
That is the education chapter. That is what it exists to do. Here are our graduates from the workshop.
Our final day in Lviv happened to fall on Vyshyvanka Day — Ukraine’s national celebration of its traditional embroidered shirts. The entire city was dressed in their vyshyvanky. We bought ours. We wore them to the final workshop. We felt, in that moment, like we were exactly where we were supposed to be.
Kateryna and 3D Charity have indicated that they hope to continue the education chapter in September, after the summer season. The seeds have been planted — and from what we saw on that livestreamed stage, they have already begun to grow.
🇷🇴 Chapter Three: Bucharest
The final chapter of this mission took us to Romania, where we joined our colleagues from Magiciens Sans Frontières — the French organization that is Magicians Without Borders’ sister organization, conducting their second trip to Romania and planning to remain through early June. Together, across two days, we delivered four performances for communities that rarely have access to this kind of programming.
We performed at a psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents — an environment that challenges every assumption about performance, and where the response from the young people and their caregivers was one of warmth and genuine joy. We performed for children from vulnerable backgrounds at Asociatia Valentina, where seven magicians performed for thirty children in a packed space that somehow felt like exactly the right size.
And we performed for Ukrainian refugee families at the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS).
Before the JRS show, we had the chance to speak with Lydia, a Ukrainian woman from Kherson. She told us about her home — a house she and her family had built brick by brick over seven years, on a modest budget, saving and building slowly because that was the only way they could. They were weeks from moving in when the Russian invasion began. They had to leave. She has been in Romania for four years now. Her boys attend the school that JRS has set up. She is working. She is building a life, again, in a country that is not hers.
And she is waiting to go home to a house that may no longer be there.
After the show, she told us that the kids had really needed it. That the joy in the room had meant something. We told her that telling us her story had meant something to us, too.
The final show of our Romanian leg — and in some ways of the entire trip — was a performance for young people with autism at Autism Voice Romania.
We had been advised, before the show, that direct physical interaction should be limited to three children — those who were comfortable being touched or held. The show began. The energy built. The kids were responsive, engaged, present in a way that surprised even the staff. Our founder Tom Verner closed the performance with his signature routine: a slow-burn act of pretending to fail, paper tearing and not coming back together, the bumbling magician getting laughs — and then the reveal, the paper restored, and a 25-foot rainbow streamer unfurling across the room. The music that had opened the show came back on.
And the children started standing up.
One by one, then all at once, they came toward us. They took our hands. They took each other’s hands. They formed a circle — all of them, together — and we danced.
“These children almost never touch each other. Let alone strangers.”
A caretaker at Autism Voice Romania, after the show
We closed the trip at Jucărie şi Magie — Bucharest’s magic shop, and one of the finest in Europe, built over twelve years by owners Bogdan and Florentina, who have poured their hearts into a space that radiates love for the art. There, we shared MWB’s mission with Romania’s local magic community. The reception was warm, the conversations were rich, and the potential for future collaboration is real.
A Note on Our Founder
Tom Verner — 25 Years, and Still Showing Up
Through every village and shelter and school and cancer ward and theater on this trip, our founder Tom Verner was present. In Kyiv, he performed in bomb shelter hallways with teenagers. In Lviv, he taught magic to children who had never believed they could do it. In Bucharest, he danced in a circle with autistic children who almost never let strangers touch them.
Tom has been doing this work for 25 years. This May, he celebrated his 80th birthday in the field — not at a ceremony, not at a gala, but here, in the places where MWB has always belonged.
His presence on this trip is not a footnote. It is the mission, embodied.
A final thank you
All of this; the smiles on the children, the gratitude in a teacher’s eyes, the hugs from caretakers, the embrace of a nurse between shifts, the autistic kids who almost never touch strangers dancing in a circle with our hands in theirs, all of it exists because of you.
Our donors are not a footnote to this work. They are the reason this work happens. You are the ones who allow us to carry light into the darkness of war, to place wonder in front of suffering, to use magic — real magic — as an antidote to a reality that is, for so many of these children, unbearably hard.
Thank you. For believing that joy is not a luxury. For making it possible for us to show up, again and again, in the places that need it most.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
P.S. — We close with a conversation. On the final evening of the mission, Carlos and Tom sat down — tired, full, grateful — and spoke about the three weeks that had just passed. It is short. It is unscripted. And it captures, perhaps better than anything written here, what this work feels like from the inside.
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