We provided food vouchers to 1900 people in Avdeevka on Ukraine frontline
Published: Mar 17, 2016 Reading time: 2 minutes
Do you know what it means to be a young, six months pregnant woman living in the wartorn city on the very frontline? I bet you don’t.
We meet Irina during the distribution of food vouchers in the town of Avdeevka, which is believed the most dangerous place on the map of the conflict in eastern Ukraine now. People are quite calm here today, as they are used to the sound of war, but we can hear unceasing machinegun fire and few mortar explosions somewhere worryingly close to us. “I want to believe that everything will be better, but the situation is just getting worse and worse since February. Witnessing the intensifying dayto-day fighting makes me think: maybe we shouldn't relax, but start packing our stuff already?”, Irina says.
From January to August 2015, together with all the other employees, she lived in the chemical factory, she worked at. Irina doesn’t want her daughter, Sophia, to experience it, as her mom did, when she will see the world in three months. So she is ready to leave 
Avdeevka once the red light is on again. Irina lives with her mom and since she doesn’t work, due to the maternity leave, the family is going through hard times now.
“When I was working at the factory, I told my mom to not to apply for any humanitarian aid, because there were people who needed it more. But now I don’t think that we have any other choice”, Irina says. Thanks to the European Commission, Irina received a 900 UAH cost food voucher under People in Need and ECHO joint Food Security project. One thousand and nine hundred of the most vulnerable families in Avdeevka will receive food vouchers just in the following week.
