Voice of Ukraine

From Ira Kapitonova in Kyiv (Day 476):

Vindicate me, O Lord,
for I have walked in my integrity,
and I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.
Psalm 26:1

Today, I came across someone’s post on Facebook (https://cutt.ly/Zwrb3EvW), which made me stop and think. It contains so much truth and very deep attention to detail, helping to understand what the flooding in the Kherson region means to Ukrainians. I was crying, reading it, as it helped me get an outside perspective on the things and experiences that make us who we are today.

I will share some excerpts here, but you are welcome to read the whole post at the link:

• Many of the victims live in little houses that they would have built and decorated over several years, often with their own hands. Much of the furniture would have been handed down from parents and grandparents. Ukrainians don’t buy home insurance. There will be no money to help start again. What is lost is gone forever.
• Ukrainians don’t trust banks either. They keep their savings in foreign currency, and when they have enough, they buy property or land.[…]Ukrainians pride themselves on using their land to grow food. […] They grow potatoes, onions, carrots, courgettes, eggplants, and beetroot. Their gardens also contain all kinds of berry bushes and fruit trees. Many keep chickens, rabbits, cows, and pigs. There’ll be whole communities of babushkas [older ladies] whose lives revolve around their gardens, pets, and livestock. Gardening for them is not a hobby but a way of life. Downstream of the dam, all this is gone.
• Growing up in the Soviet Union taught them to be reserved with strangers and suspicious of foreigners. The easiest way to break the ice is simply to ask about their garden back in “the village.” Ukrainians generally aren’t given to bragging, with one exception: their gardens. You’ll be treated to a comprehensive, virtual guided tour. They’ll tell you who planted what, where, and when.
• A lot of Ukrainians were raised on stories from their grandparents of the famine in the thirties [Holodomor] when the Soviets stole their harvest to feed Russia and sell to the West. […] Many of the houses now underwater will have contained storerooms or cellars with enough jars of pickles and jam to feed a small army “just in case.” But all that sweat and toil has been for nothing.
• The Soviets systematically mocked village life, but it’s central to Ukrainians’ sense of identity. Younger Ukrainians often live in cities where they move from flat to flat. The village homes of their parents and grandparents are like an anchor for their entire extended families. They return for holidays, to help out with the garden and leave their kids there for the summer. There, children eat fresh fruit, breathe fresh air, hang out all day in the sunshine, and go swimming in the river.
• Growing your own food connects you to the land in a way that most Westerners don’t understand. The Soviets tried to break this bond by confiscating everything, starving them, and forcing them to work on collective farms. Millions died, but they never broke Ukraine.
• This attack has been so shocking because it is an attack on the land itself, the very fabric of Ukraine. You hear the ugly word “ecocide” used, as previously, there was no word to describe deliberate, calculated, indiscriminate, environmental destruction on the scale of a natural disaster.
• For the victims of these floods, next winter will be sad, lonely, and hungry. Their loss is incalculable.

The text above resonated with my heart because we moved to the village when the full-scale war began. We live in my grandma’s house, which my grandpa built with his own hands. We work hard to plant our vegetable garden, and I warn you not to ask me about it unless you are prepared to hear a long, detailed story about what is planted and how it is growing. Our grandma’s cellar was packed full last summer, and when the massive missile attacks began in the fall, we were joking that food would be the least of our worries even if we had to spend a couple of days in the cellar. Our grandma’s house in the village is a traditional place for our family reunions, and even the war hasn’t changed that.

Last year, when the Russian army was approaching Kyiv, my friend (who also moved with her kid to stay with her parents in a village) shared her reflections on the situation, and I remember her resolve when she said, “When I imagined a boot of a Russian soldier stepping on the flowers my mom planted in front of her house, I knew I was ready to fight with my bare arms.”

That’s why we are fighting so fiercely. We are fighting not just for our nation. And we are not fighting for territory. We are fighting for our Land, which deserves to be treated with care and respect.