Voice of Ukraine

From Lyuda (Day 232): Dear brothers and sisters, Our day yesterday seemed so relaxing after massive attacks before and the night with only one alarm was good. Praise the Lord! Sergey and I could go out for lunch that we had postponed and it was so nice to have no alarms during the day.

Yesterday I talked to Dr. Anya about her brother Ilya. She says that gradually the improvements come. He began to control his bladder and his sensations are restoring. He is still in bed, he doesn’t get up, but he is improving. Please, continue to pray for his body and for his heart to respond to God’s love.

Our counselor Vika works a lot with teenagers now. Many young people seek help in crisis chat, they have different problems but there is one thing they have in common – they need care and love. Here are some stories:

“ My name is Lena, I’m 14 years old. I am a refugee from Kharkiv. On February 24, I woke up because I heard explosions and on the same day we left, leaving the parrot in the apartment. Our neighbors are taking care of the parrot. Now I am in Sweden. My friends in Kharkiv stopped communicating with me because I fled from the city. Now I can’t find fellowship and I feel lonely. I really want to go home, but unfortunately we cannot return. The area where our apartment is located, is heavily shelled every day. I began to go to school and everything seems to be fine. But my heart is empty. The kind of communication I have now is not the same….”

Polina 15
“I have lost the desire to do anything, even what I used to like very much before. There is no desire to do anything, I just want to lie on the couch and sleep. Also, lately it seems to me that I have almost stopped feeling emotions. For example, what used to put a smile on my face is no longer an object of joy. I had to leave my hometown and when we were leaving we got under shelling. I am now in Poltava. I don’t hear explosions here, so I’m less nervous. I stay with my cousin, but we hardly communicate with her I wake up at 8:30, do online classes, study for up to 4 p.m., then do homework. After that I can do only two things – go to the yard for a walk or go to bed to sleep. I used to have friends, but now I lost touch with them…”

Jane 16
“I’ve been feeling really bad for a few weeks now. My dog made me happy only 2-3 times and that was it. I have problems in relationships due to the fact that I constantly feel upset. I do not want to live, and every day I think about suicide. My parents don’t know about it, and I’m very scared to talk about it, because basically I don’t have any trauma or incident that makes me feel so bad. I’m trying to communicate with my friend, but it doesn’t help and I feel worse and worse. I don’t know what to do, everyone is tired of me having bad mood, I am tired of this feeling, too. I want to live normally, enjoy life and find something positive, but I do not see the sense of my existence at all. I hope that the conversation with you will at least put me on the right path…”

Dasha 16
“ I feel scared and I need to talk to somebody. My mother died when I was 18 months old. I lived with my father and my grandmother. My father couldn’t stand grief and began to use drugs. He got married soon and left me, I stayed with my grandmother. My father came from time to time asking for money. When my grandmother didn’t give him money he was abusive. I called police several times when my father was beating my grandmother but when police came my grandmother began protecting my father from them. Few years ago my father died of overdosing. I was very angry at him and began to have conflicts with my grandmother. She was ready to forgive him everything and I thought it was not right. Once we had a conflict and I left. I didn’t come home for several days. When I came home my grandmother was ill, I called the ambulance, she was taken to hospital and at night she died there of stroke. I miss my grandmother and feel guilty for her death, I want to feel the smell her soup when I come home. Her soup was the best food I’ve ever had. I want to see her, to talk about her day. Now I stay with my friend and when her mother invites me to eat with them I think about my grandmother’s soup. ”

Please, pray for our clients and for us a s we work with them, especially for the clients in crisis chat. They can disappear from the chat and we never know what happened to them.

In Christ,
Lyuda

P.S. Our counselor, Vika, is a keen theatre-goer, it helps her recover and be in good professional form. We can’t share the photos of our clients, so there are photos of teenagers from the internet and there are some photos of the colors we see around.