Updates after a long silence

It has been six months since our last update to you. The reasons for this silence have been two-fold. The winter months in Ukraine were, as you all know, brutal, with our team living in Kyiv with a maximum of two-three hours of electricity per day, and no heating, as temperatures dipped to as low as -25 degrees Celsius. Whilst we worked throughout that time to continue to provide emergency help in the form of generators and heaters to our communities in Kharkiv Oblast, our housing repair and purchase project had to be paused as the combination of a lack of electricity and the thickly iced roads throughout the country meant that travel became near impossible.

However, when Spring finally came in March and April we renewed our work, focussing predominantly on our home purchasing project begun in late last year, when we bought a house for a family of nine from eastern Ukraine. We have been liaising over the last months with a shelter for internally displaced people based in Dnipro, and together we have identified two families with whom we will work for the next phase of the project. We are now actively searching for new homes in safer regions of Ukraine, with the aim of finalising the purchases in the next few weeks.

One of these families consists of Viktoriia, her son Andrii, and her grandmother Vira. Originally from Donetsk, Viktoriia and Vira originally fled the city in 2014, when it was first occupied by Russian forces, moving to Selydove, a smaller town still in the Donbas, but to the west, which remained under Ukrainian control. There, Viktoriia met her husband and had Andrii. When the war started, fighting quickly spread to Selydove, and they fled to Dnipro, where they spent the next three years living in a single room in a shelter. During this time, they all contracted Covid, with Andrii becoming especially sick; he is still dealing with the consequences today. He was also diagnosed with autism. Last year, Viktoriia decided that the situation was untenable, and decided to try to find rented accommodation. They now live in a small, two-room apartment nearby to the shelter, with a shared kitchen. The rent each month comes to more than their combined benefits as internally displaced people, and Viktoriia is therefore regularly forced to either sell possessions or to take out a loan, since she is unable to work as the full-time carer of both Andrii and her grandmother. With the rest of the family living under occupation, and Andrii’s father no longer present, there is no source of external support. Meeting Viktoriia and hearing her story, we immediately knew that we needed to help her in any way we could. Their requirements for housing are complex, driven in part by Andrii’s need to be close to a specialist school and hospital as a result of his autism and the impacts of long Covid, as well as other factors, and we have spent six weeks so far searching for accommodation. As Viktoriia regularly tells us, the most important thing for her is that they will have a place that they can call their own.

We are also helping Mariia and her three sons to find a home. Originally from Lysychansk in Luhansk Oblast, the family moved immediately at the start of the war. Over the past four years, they have been forced to move six more times as a result of landlords hiking rents. Two of Mariia’s sons are also autistic, and Mariia herself is currently receiving treatment for cervical cancer. This has once again meant that the search itself has been tricky, and more protracted than we had anticipated, given her need to be close to a hospital which can provide the treatment that she needs. We hope very much that in the next few weeks something will come through.

At the same time, we are continuing our repairs project for internally displaced people across the country, with a focus on providing basic repairs to make homes liveable, with a stress on access to water and gas. Nobody in Ukraine has any misconceptions about the fact that the upcoming winter will likely be as hard, if not harder, than the previous one, and so our focus this summer will be on winterization of as many homes as possible.

Thank you all for sticking with us – even through our protracted silence. We are here to stay, come what may, and will continue, for as long as you support us, to adapt to whatever the next months and years bring, always remaining flexible and efficient as we do so. I hope very much that in the next few weeks we will be back with another update on Viktoriia and Mariia, and their house hunts!