Shelling and sleepless nights… We provide aid for displaced people in Ukraine
Published: Jul 22, 2015 Reading time: 2 minutes
Liliya Petrovna left Debaltsevo on crutches and then forgot them in a parked train carriage in Slavyansk where she was living with other displaced people, before she moved to a collective dormitory in the town. “But it’s nothing,” she says, “I’m trying to jump around on one foot. We’re getting help – we’re not alone”. Liliya had fled Debaltsevo with her family – grandsons and great-grandsons – two days before the heaviest shelling of the city during the whole conflict in eastern Ukraine.
“It was two days before…how do they call it? The firing range…they fired and fired, until they had destroyed the city. People say it was terrible after we left. We came to Slavyansk and lived in a train carriage, then we were sent to the Izyum district in Kharkiv region. We got a house in a village but there wasn’t any work, nothing – just wild boars next to the forest. And we have 10 people in our family…So we decided to go back to Slavyansk”.
Volunteers in Slavyansk found a beautiful house whose owner agreed to host IDPs. The house was also damaged during the summertime fighting in the town. But People In Need (PIN), in partnership with the European Union (ECHO) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) have repaired it, so now it looks more like a country villa than a collective dormitory.
Still, Liliya Petrovna misses the two-storey house which she left ruined in Debaltsevo very much. “It was right next to the railway line – the biggest railway junction in Debaltsevo. At first we were scared, hiding out in the basement, but then we moved up to the second floor. It was very scary – the house jumped off the ground, we thought everything would fall apart.” After that, the family could no longer stay in the city. They fled to seek a peaceful life.
“Our children were suffering really badly – they cried, they didn’t sleep at night. Now, of course, they feel better. There are good people here. God bless them. We suffered a lot, we moved so many times – from Zaporizhye to Kharkiv to Slavyansk. In Zaporizhye there was no work, and we had to stay in a local hospital. There are four men in my family – all of them want to work. So we are back in Slavyansk. The Czech organisation People in Need are helping us here. They bought a washing machine and a heating boiler for us. Now it’s warm here”.