I live with my 88-year-old grandmother and my son. My grandmother has not been able to walk for six years. She cannot see, so I take care of her. My mother died when I was in Grade 10. Dad lives separately with [his] family. He often comes by and helps. Our families are friends.
We were all at home when the first attack occured. At 12:00 a.m., a shell hit our home. We were all asleep, my grandmother and I. I woke up to the sound of glass cracking. But I was afraid to get up. Then grandma shouted, "Yulya, don't get up, do it in the morning!" When I went out in the morning, oh my, not a single window was whole. And when the [shell] fell] in the garden, its fragments flew not at us but in the other direction. They hit somewhere else and, luckily, no one got hurt. Praise be to God no one else got hit.
2015–2016 were the most terrible years. We had no electricity for months. We cooked food like homeless people, over a campfire. I would set alight, spread out the wood and make dinner. We had potatoes. We had eaten almost all meat, but I managed to save a little. I also had onions, melons, and watermelons in my garden. Once a shell hit our verandah. All windows were blown out in the old house.
The next day, [shells] fell into the garden twice.
It was dreadful. The child was terrified. When a shell is fired off, you can hear a whistling sound, and we hide in the house. The child is afraid. He crawls under the blanket. We have nowhere to hide, our basement is weak. If it collapses, we will remain there.
We survive on our grandmother's pension. I used to work at school, and now it is a main military office. So I am unemployed because of the war... My grandmother receives humanitarian aid, a grocery set: flour, sugar, butter. We really like pate.
I wish the war would stop, and I would have a job again. The main thing is to have peace, to stop fighting. If someone had told me, I would never have believed that there would be a war in our village.
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