The first shell hit our house in August 2014, and the second one in 2015, as far as I remember. It hit the basement of our building, and an apartment under us, one floor down, and our neighbours next door. It got right into their wall and connected two flats together then.
When the first shots began back in July, I took the children and first left for Russia. I stayed there for three months and realized that no one needed me there. I packed up and came to Ocheretyne. Some good people found me a place where to live. We agreed with the owners that we would pay only the utility bills. We have been here with my husband and children for more than three years now.
The last time I was at home was a year ago. In our children’s room, when you enter, you can see a crack going all the way across the wall. Even a hand can fit inside it. We don’t have furniture. Wooden beds swelled and went out of shape because of hot water. I only managed to save the baby bed. We had a corner sofa, which also went out of shape and unglued. There were cracks in the windows and the window frames sank, settled down from the shelling.
How can we restore this housing? And they still keep shelling there. There is no way for us to restore it. We installed the windows ourselves. We were saving up and collecting money for those windows for about three years. We now pay the housing costs both here and there. My husband gets a small salary and I myself am unemployed. I do not work because my child is sick. Maksym has medium severity anaemia. This is low haemoglobin. We learned about it before the war, in May of 2014. He gets sick very often because of this.
A treatment course was prescribed to us in Donetsk, but we could not go for it, for an in-patient course, because the war began. When we returned from Russia, there was a lot of shooting here. The children were very worried. In 2016, they came under shellfire. I was at home, and they went out to play outdoors. It was calm and quiet and suddenly the shelling started. The children ran in frightened and started screaming. I went out to check and saw that three shells landed. It was some 10 meters away from them. After that they stopped going outside on their own. They are afraid to go alone. They always go in a pair. They walk together even to the toilet or the kitchen together. They are very scared. I somehow got used to that bombing, as long as it does not affect me directly.
It is better at home, for sure. Home is a better place. At home, everything is yours, and, as they say, home is your castle. And here, you know, I just feel like a vagabond. I feel out of place here.
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