Klavdiya’s Twelve Days: When Angels Feed Goats

Psalm 23:4 – ‘Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are with me.’

In the pre-dawn darkness of June 6, 2023, when the Kakhovka Dam was breached and the waters of the Dnipro River surged without warning through sleeping villages below, God was preparing to write a story that would challenge the boundaries between miracle and mundane. As the floodwaters swept through Kohanivka and surrounding settlements, what would emerge was a testament to divine provision in humanity’s darkest hours.

The destruction was catastrophic. The dam’s breach sent a wall of water through countless communities along the Dnipro River in the Kherson Oblast, leaving a trail of devastation that would forever alter the landscape. Homes vanished beneath the muddy deluge, families were scattered, and entire villages disappeared under the rising waters. Many lost their lives; countless more lost everything they owned. The region would never be the same.

Yet in this landscape of loss, one story would emerge that testified to God’s intimate care even in the midst of widespread devastation. It began not with thunder or proclamation, but with an elderly woman named Klavdiya Ivanivna, three unlikely animal companions, and a tiny wooden platform that would become their ark of survival.

A Heavenly Arrangement

As the waters rose with terrifying speed, Klavdiya found herself trapped, guiding her peculiar family—a goat, a dog, and a rooster—up a precarious ladder to her attic. In what could only be a Heavenly arrangement, she managed to shepherd all three animals to safety before the rising waters claimed her house key, dropping it into the muddy deluge below.

Their sanctuary measured no more than three feet square, a wooden platform near the attic doors that would become their home for twelve long days. In the mathematics of survival, this shouldn’t have worked—four living creatures sharing a space barely big enough for one, with no food and no way to summon help. But God has always excelled at impossible equations.

As if orchestrated by unseen hands, a sack of grain somehow floated to their precarious perch – a provision so unlikely it could only be seen as divine intervention. This floating feast became their manna, sustaining both human and animal alike. The goat ate the grain and produced milk, which sustained both Klavdiya and her faithful dog. In this miniature ecosystem of survival, each creature played its part in a story of divine provision.

12 Days of Snipers

For 12 days, while snipers patrolled nearby and the waters raged below, this improbable family survived on their tiny platform. Their story became a living parable of God’s provision—how He can multiply resources, create sustenance from scarcity, and preserve life in the most unlikely circumstances, even in the midst of man-made catastrophe.

When rescue finally came in the form of a local believer named Oleksandr, he found more than survivors – he found witnesses to a modern-day miracle. Their twelve-day vigil had become a testament to how God provides, not just in the grand moments of deliverance, but in the daily bread of survival, even when that survival seems mathematically impossible.

Today, Klavdiya’s story echoes the biblical accounts of God’s provision—the ravens feeding Elijah, the widow’s oil that never ran dry. It reminds us that divine care often comes packaged in ways we least expect, through means we might never have imagined. A floating sack of grain becomes manna; a goat becomes a provider; a tiny platform becomes holy ground. Even amid historical catastrophe that would forever change the landscape of Kherson Oblast, God’s provision proves greater than any human-made disaster.

Learn more at theimpossibledreambook.com.

The Impossible Dream shares real stories of lives transformed through the power of God’s Word, written by President & CEO Bob Burckle and Vice President Dirk Smith of EEM, which has provided free Bibles across Eastern Europe since 1961. The book highlights miraculous stories of faith and how Scripture brings hope to places once closed to the Gospel.