«I fear to think that the war has become a common thing for children’»

In the summer of 2014, I was finishing my graduation course at the institute. I studied on an extra-mural course at Mariupol State Humanitarian University. A couple of days before that, a bridge to Dzerzhynsk [Toretsk after renaming] had been blown up, and the entire city heard it. At that time, locals started to understand that it was war, that hostilities came to our place, like it was in Slovyansk shortly before.

During the very first night, as I came back from Mariupol with my diploma, mortar mines hit our district. At night, I heard the whistling and shells were bursting very close. I came to the window and heard that whistling sound. I heard the shell falling and bursting, but I did not see where exactly it was. It was very scary. I remember how I gathered the children in one room, put them to bed and began to pack things. At five in the morning, we were at the bus station where the entire Horlivka town seemed to come. The railway stations were no longer working. It was on 24 July. I remember people crowding near the ticket offices, with their children crying, and adults arguing while the ticket office remained closed.

I had a small amount of money with me, about 500 hryvnias. At that time, I was on my maternity leave with the kids. The younger one was two years old. I was waiting for the children’s allowances to be paid for July 2014, which were not paid to us. In August, we received the first humanitarian aid from the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation. I remember that back then they even brought big bottles of drinking water.

У меня доходов не было никаких. Я с двумя маленькими детьми без мужа. В августе те продуктовые наборы были единственным источником существования.

One of the biggest fears was that when the children were playing outdoors in the area of Talakivka village, God forbid, they would come across some shell, grenade, or something. Very often, the TV was showing horrible news reports how children found explosives and got injured or killed.

It is terrifying that we have to live during such time. My mother lives with us because her house in Debaltseve was damaged. It was damaged when the town was seized. It is not fit for living at all. After very heavy shelling, the town lived without electricity and without water supply for about a year. I don’t know how people lived there

It is scary that when riding a bicycle, children may find a grenade somewhere on the outskirts of the village. In the morning, they go out to take a bus to school and some shots from either an assault rifle or a machine gun are heard in the offing. Yet, they still go to school to these sounds. For me, as a mother, it is scary that children take it as a common thing now.