“Where should we go now?”—that was the question that worried Galina Vasylivna the most when she and her son had to leave Starovarvarivka in the Donetsk region once again.
Galina is 59 years old. She is raising her son, who has a Group I disability, on her own. Recently, they had been living in her parents’ house in the village. In August 2021, they moved to Druzhkivka. But when full-scale war broke out, they had to leave the apartment they had just purchased and return to the village.
Later, it was time to leave the village as well. The village head told Anna, an evacuation coordinator at Caritas Kramatorsk, about Galina. She began looking for housing for the family: she called the numbers listed in ads, clarified the terms, and made arrangements.
One of the numbers was answered by a woman who was willing to provide the family with a house in a village in the Vinnytsia region free of charge for an extended period.
The Caritas Kramatorsk team organized the evacuation. They packed their belongings, loaded them up, and set off. Now Galina is gradually settling into her new home.
“The neighbors here are very kind; they support and help us,” she says.
Everything is still unfamiliar: the house, the yard, the people around her. But she already has a place to put her belongings, a place to sleep, and a place to come home to in the evening. Her life is gradually being filled not with anxiety, but with everyday tasks: whitewashing the stove, buying firewood, and tending to the flower bed under the window.
And from there—little by little, getting used to it.
The Caritas Kramatorsk team is providing free evacuation services for people from dangerous areas in the Donetsk region as part of the project “Multidisciplinary Assistance to War Victims in Ukraine,” which is being implemented by Caritas Ukraine thanks to the generous support of the American people through the U.S. Department of State.
Based on materials from Caritas Kramatorsk