Stories that you confided to us
‘Everyone wonders how I can take a risk and give birth when there is war’
It happened so that a shell fell in the vegetable garden and shell fragments were flying apart. Grad rocket launcher shells fell onto the house and in the vegetable garden and in the gullies. A mine once fell on the road between my place and my neighbours’. The windows were burst open by the air, by the wave. At that very moment I was at home together with my five children. Well, we survived that somehow.
Surely it is scary when a shelling begins, especially in the evening. My mother-in-law and I are up late then. When the shelling stops, then we can go to bed to have some rest.
Four years ago, I lost my daughter. She died of inflammation. Children are the most precious thing we have, for sure. They help us. Sometimes they are naughty, but children are my joy.
My mother-in-law helps me to take care of the kids. She washes some children’s clothes regularly while I am in the house busy with the little one.
Surely it is dangerous when shells fly over the village. You can hear it when it flies and whistles. And you wait for it to land wondering where it falls so that we are not damaged. It is scary of course, but what shall we do? This is how we survive.
I used to receive good child care payments in the past, but now I get just pennies. I used to receive eleven [thousand] hryvnias every month, but the payments have been cut by six thousand. So, now I get little to nothing. A family of six persons can hardly subsist on five thousand these days. It is good that Rinat Akhmetov helps us with food.
Everyone wonders how I can take a risk and decide to give birth to a child at the time when shelling happens so often. When there is a war. Well, I decided to have a son. I delivered a child. There were some complications. The baby had the umbilical cord coiled around his neck three times. The umbilical cord was also entangled around his arm. He was not breathing. There were almost no signs of life, but I am thankful to the doctors. They started delivering their care, they cleaned his nose, put an oxygen mask on him and he began to cry.
There were episodes of shelling and shells were exploding. I lived on the upper street then and I could hear that rumble well. We hid in the cellar, but later I said that if it was destined so, we could be buried under debris in the house. If so, at least we could be found later, while nobody would be looking for us in the cellar. Who would be looking for us there if anything happens?
What are we dreaming about? We dream that this war ends as soon as possible. We are tired of all this. We go to bed in the evening and hope to get up alive in the morning, so that nothing bad happens. We are tired of this shellfire. The kids are nervous and stressed because of this shelling. We hope that it all ends soon. We suffer because of this. People suffer because of this. We worry about our children. We hope that our children will not suffer, and we do not want anything else.
When quoting a story, a reference to the source – the Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation – is mandatory, as follows:
The Museum of Civilian Voices of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation https://civilvoicesmuseum.org/
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