“I could not imagine my future to be like that, where I would be raising my children amid shelling…”

Maya Homenko moved to Novoluhanske together with her son a year before the armed conflict in the Donbas. She grew fond of the village right away. It seemed to her that it was a perfect place to live in, but then shelling started...

-          I came from Vinnytsia region to visit a friend and then I stayed here. I got married and gave birth to a child. I had my elder son. I am a single mother to him. So, I stayed and I live here. I would not leave my family.

It was in 2013. The first impressions were rather good and I got myself a job right away. I found a job and everything was fine. Peace and quiet. And then the war began.

It changed the village a lot. This war changed us too, as now I am not confident about the future. I do not know what will happen and what to hope for. Will I get up in the morning or not? I want just a normal life…

You let your kid go to school and you are scared because shelling is scary. It happened earlier that children were at school and shelling started. It blew the windows at our school out. It blew all the windows at the kindergarten out too.

My elder son understands it. It affected him very much. He is afraid of the slightest sound of shelling. He runs to the bathroom and hides there. It was really scary.

We hoped to leave, but it so happened that we did not go. I cannot leave my family, my mom and my grandma. So, we stayed here. I wanted to go to my sister, to return to Vinnytsia region, but not yet.

The first challenge for moving is where to live. To leave the place you need at least some kind of solid ground, you need to have some housing. And a job would need to be found right away. It is like coming all of a sudden, but what to live on, with two kids and a husband? All this needs to be sorted out somehow, and it is difficult to find a job now. As long as we have some job here in the village, we will be staying here.

I could not imagine my future to be like that, where I would be raising my kids amid shelling. I always wanted a quiet and normal life for my kids, so that they do not see this war and this shelling. So that everything is good with your kid’s psychic state and so that your kid does not run and hide after any noise. I could not imagine such a life either for myself or for my children. Yet, it happened so.

So, that is how we hold up somehow. Some help comes from my dad and from my husband’s mother too. We have our own vegetable garden and it makes it a bit easier for us. We get what we grow.

We live on my husband’s salary because it is impossible to make a living on children’s social benefits. As a single mother I get as low as 21 hryvnia (UAH). Is it possible to feed a child on 21 hryvnia?

I dream that there will be no war, that the war will end, and that everything will come right, that Ukraine will become Ukraine, and that no one will change anything. Let everything stay in its place because so many people suffer. So many children became orphans, and because of what? Because of the war.