Ukraine (4)

7/7

This morning I felt a bit sheepish having added an extra region to my air raid alert app on my phone after last night’s missile attack – which meant I woke up my fellow travellers at 12.30 a.m. saying there was an air raid alert. As we had planned and discussed I headed down dressed and with our documents to the strongest part of the building at the bottom ( after being told to get going and not wait for the others). I then checked the app for details being the first time I had used it, only to see that it was another area! I went back up the stairs to the others who were still getting dressed (!!) and had to admit this. I felt so bad but they were very nice about it saying it was good to have a ‘drill’. Not sure about their ‘drill performance’ though?? I told my husband on the phone call that he should be happy to know that I could get out of bed and be down in the basement with all I need within about 15 seconds of an alert. Poor thing said he wasn’t sure how he should feel about that!

Later in the morning we met with our local contact to discuss arrangements. We also had a meeting with another amazing pastor who visits the frontlines and sits in the trenches with the soldiers to encourage them, pray with them, bring them gifts and supplies. He takes their numbers and promises to be there for them if they end up in the military hospital. Which he does and he has helped many of them get proper care for their severe injuries including transporting them to a higher level hospital with an ambulance they’ve bought. Sadly the military hospitals are so overwhelmed that he said a lot of young men are losing more limbs than they need to because they simply don’t have time to do more than amputate.

So he helps with getting them to private hospitals and paying for it. After our chat with the pastor I was going to get on a 17 hour bus to Odesa to join the CMA mobile clinic. That was a bit of a trial as no one spoke English, the information was very confusing, bus numbers didn’t match tickets and no one seemed to want to help. Anyway I finally got on what I hoped was my bus.  It wasn’t too bad as long as one didn’t need to use the disgusting toilet. The long stop at Khelmintsky which I didn’t know was going to be a long one was oddly at a bus station that had no food or drink.  The sceneray on the bus from Lviv to Odesa was mostly amazing though. Some of the bigger towns are ugly Soviet-style monstrosities of concrete block. But mostly it is green forests, golden fields of what, rows of barley and buckwheat, fields of corn and sunflowers, and quaint villages full of abundant vege gardens, cherry, peach, apricot, plum, and walnut trees everywhere.  It reminds me so much of my Ukrainian grandfather who as a refugee to Australia amused his Australian neighbours by digging up his lawn and transforming it into a ‘village garden’ of apricot trees, grapes and vegetables. It looks quite idyllic here and how I imagine it has looked for a very long time. Except for the occasional giveaway piles of concrete blocks and army barricades and giant chunks of steel known as Czech hedgehogs designed to stop tank access. Theyre not currently needed where we are driving but it wasn’t that long ago that all these areas were very worried. The other sad thing is that almost every village cemetery that we passed has at least a couple of fresh grave flying full size Ukrainian flags. A sign of a grave of a soldier killed recently in this war.

I’m sitting at Khmelnitsky station waiting for the bus to continue to Odesa. I look out the window and I see a little girl crying on a bus looking out the window at her dad. She makes a heart sign with her hands and starts to sob uncontrollably. Is she being sent somewhere safer while her dad goes to fight? He looks like military age. Even if that is not their story – that is many a story here and it is heartbreaking to watch.

At 1 am in the morning we have another stop at a service station. There is a bus load of soldiers who look like they may have just come back from the front and it feels surreal to be jostling with them at the servo counter. A sobering moment when I head to the toilet and out of the men’s comes a young man in his early twenties on crutches, missing a leg up to his hip. I’ve heard so many young soldiers are losing limbs and suffering life changing injuries in this war.

8/7

Arrived in Odesa at 5 a.m. on the bus not having slept much. Walked to the pick up point for the CMA mobile clinic I was joining today. We loaded the van and I wasn’t sure if I should be worried that along with the medicines they were loading bulletproof vests and helmets.  I guess they have to be prepared for anything. Half way into the very long drive they tell me they’ve changed clinic location because the place we were going to go to got shelled yesterday. It also meant we had to change the route. On the way there we could see smoke from shelling across the Dnieper River. My grandfather often spoke of the Dnieper and I never dreamed that my first sighting of it would be against a backdrop of bombs.

On the way home there was some smoke a bit closer on our side of the river and a field on fire from shelling…

Going both ways there lots of police and army checkpoints and roadblocks. For context we were going into de-occupied areas that had been under occupation by the Russians and suffered greatly during this time.  This included having their homes bombed and flattened, people killed by shelling, tortured and murdered directly by Russians, children kidnapped, women and children raped, household goods stolen.. It was over the river from currently occupied areas and the front where there was ongoing shelling and fighting. As we drove there we drove through villages and cities that had been bombed. A lot had been repaired but there were still plenty of damaged buildings around.

Posters warning people not to swim due to the sea mines were on billboards around the city. On the drive home I saw my first military tank that was on the back of a truck.