Today our meeting with Andrej begins with smiles and a piece of cake. He is a volunteer from the local Caritas who decided to help his people from the beginning of the war, even though he expected to do something else in his life.
We went to meet him because we wanted to tell him that we are not only here for them, but WITH them. In a city under attack, we are volunteers who are working nonstop to help civilians in all the ways they can since many months: from distributing food aid to delivering warm clothes in view of the gelid winter that is coming.
Suddenly, during the conversation, he is pleasantly surprised when we speak some words in Ukrainian and Russian languages. So, with his permission, we ask him some personal questions like why most people in these areas of the country continue to speak Russian.
"Russian is my mother language. I was born in Odessa but my grandparents have Russian origins, like "many" people in Ukraine. Since the war’s outbreak in 2014, we have started to use more the Ukrainian language, which has been chosen as the only official language in schools".
He goes on telling us that it is impossible to have such an immediate change between the two languages because they are not at all the same, although they are similar. From the beginning of the war until today, many people - especially in the western regions - began to distance themselves from Russia and to speak Ukrainian.

She was introduced as “Babushka Vera” and immediately she was “grandmother Vera” for us too.
A frail old woman from Mykolaiv, very thin, with white hair.
She was the first person we used to say good morning to when we woke up and goodnight before sleeping. As Vera, like us, slept in the basement shelter.
She had decided not to leave despite the war, because that city was also her home.
So, every night around six, she used to come to the shelter.
Maybe because finding ourselves and being together, the bombs that fell at night seemed less scary.
Or, maybe because, despite the great fear, she was not alone.
She had worn-out green plastic slippers that she left under her bed/sofa every day.
Who knows if they are still there.
Vera loved us!
She used to smile at us, always glad to see us, she hugged us and in the evening she used to chat and joke with us.
Once her son came to visit her, we saw her sitting in the backyard with her granddaughter. Who knows what she was talking about.

Inspired by people met in Ukraine and by Bob Dylan...

Oh, where have you been, my sweet soul son?
And where have you been, my darling loved one?
I’ve been to the country of the red Kalina,
I’ve walked yellow fields and swim blue skies
I’ve been in a land claimed by war
I’ve been in a country painted by fear
And I’ve been to a place that cry the presence of a dove

And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, and it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall

Olena lifts her gaze from the iron looking tense:
“Is it the siren?”
I look around,
I go outside in the courtyard and listen,
construction workers working,
cars honking in the traffic,
everything seems fine.

“No” I answer “I don’t think so”.

Olena slightly lets herself go
with teary eyes:
“I think I am going crazy, I hardly sleep, my life has been hard in the past, but I never imagined I would live a situation like this.”

“By now, when I hear the siren I sit down and pray, this is what is needed, pray for healing from the disease of power and money, which has infected the mind of the person who started it all.”