Ukraine: Moments of Joy in a Time of Dread
Stories from delivering aid to villages in Kharkiv region
During the last week of September 2022, I joined several humanitarian organizations based out in Kharkiv to deliver aid to people in need in the region. The teams I worked with include H.U.G.S. Ukraine, Frente BrazUcra, Davaj Ukraine, Suveren, Ben 4 Ukraine, and members from Red Cross Kharkiv. Around this time, Russian soldiers had only been pushed back as recently as a few weeks before, according to some of the villagers who approached us emotionally and in tears, telling us about how their village would keep getting hit by rockets.
We hit the road with 155 packages the first day, each with food that would be enough for one week. The first several villages we visited were just north of Kharkiv, a couple kilometers shy of the Russian border. On this route were Derhachi, Slatyne, and looping around on the way back, Ruski Tyshky, Cherkaski Tyshky and Tsyrkuny. We started this route with a police escort, since they were familiar with the people who lived in these nearby villages and knew who would be in need of humanitarian aid.
As we approached the first village, I was absolutely stunned by the amount of destruction; artillery and missile strikes had completely decimated so many homes here. Yet this was purely a residential area; a small village. At one point a local asked to escort me to the backyard of one of the houses, where he showed me a large rocket that had landed in the grass there. With the amount of rocket attacks they’ve had to endure, some of these villagers have to just accept it as a fact of life. I tried to imagine how anyone in the West would react if a rocket had landed in their backyard.
From this moment I began to realize the realities of this brutal war. A civilian population terrorized by the actions of a cruel dictatorship committing crimes against humanity, with no regard for human life.
Some villagers were not able to come to the meeting points where we distributed the aid we had available, being handicapped for example, so in addition to the police, we had some village members escort us to individual homes. In one of them lived a handicapped man, who could hardly walk and needed to use a crutch to get around. He was living alone, and then I realized that all the villagers we’ve been coming across were old people. People who, for various reasons, had nowhere else to go and no one to take care of them.
I was especially impacted when we were in Cherkaski Tyshky, and a villager asked me to walk with him down the street to deliver a supply bag to one of the old women. We waited for a few minutes while he kept yelling for her to come out, before popping inside to see what she was doing. She had been sleeping and had a difficult time walking, hearing her reply from the other side of the window. Then I noticed her windows; broken and not even completely sealed off from the outside, with just a large rug covering one of them from the inside. With the cold autumn days and winter fast approaching, I feared for how she’d survive, living alone in this house, and dependent on humanitarian aid deliveries.
On another day in Chervona Polyana, a village just thirty kilometers south of Kharkiv, we delivered aid to a very cheerful local population. Two local women were in charge of paperwork, making sure the humanitarian supplies would be fairly distributed to the villagers in an orderly way. I noticed a few kids in this crowd, in a happy mood, with smiles on their faces. Looking around at those lining up, I would often notice them laughing with each other. With each person being handed supplies is an opportunity to have a personal connection to another human; an emotional encounter that leaves a lasting impression. The reactions on their faces are burned into my memory.
At this time of the year, it was critical that we also deliver warm winter clothes to the local populations in this region. We went to Vysokyi, twenty six kilometers southwest of Kharkiv, to deliver winter clothing, food and other supplies. This town houses IDPs, or Internally Displaced People, who had been evacuated from other regions of Ukraine under Russian occupation. One of the elders in charge gave us a tour of the accommodations, including the rooms used to house sick people, as well as the shelter. He showed us how they burn wood in stoves for heating, and we tried to figure out how to deliver heaters to them.
This town, Vysokyi, had so many young children. My team spent a considerable amount of time playing with them in the park; rolling on the grass with them, wrestling and picking them up to throw them. It was my first time seeing so many children in one of these small towns, and I couldn’t stop thinking about how they were processing this war; how they handle their emotions when a missile strike can be heard loudly in the distance, or the constant fear of needing to shelter each time there’s an air raid siren. But on this day, it was mostly smiles and happiness, and it was touching to be able to witness their ability to carry on with life and play, even when the frontlines of this war is not that many kilometers away.
There’s no way to know how the children in Ukraine will end up processing the life they are living now during wartime; it also depends on their personal experience. But one thing I’m certain of is these kids are still full of life. And the same is true for the other people I met in all these villages. It reminds me that no matter the circumstances, life must go on.
Thank you for sharing this information about Ukraine. What a brutal war.