“My name is Tetyana Bilyaeva, I come from the Kherson region in the Goloprystansky district, village Novaya Zburjivka. I worked as a methodologist in a kindergarten. I worked as a director of a community centre, which means I always had to deal with people, with children. That’s what I always liked. And when the war started, on 24 February, of course, life changed.
Often everyone talks about life before the war and after… so these would be the first feelings of what we felt when the war started – when we didn’t understand what was happening – we couldn’t even believe that something like that could happen. Despite the fact that we were under occupation from the first days.
When the understanding came that there was a war and that we were under occupation, that we didn’t have the right to speak, we didn’t even have the right to say that we were Ukrainians, we had to forget our culture, we had to forget everything ours, even our language, we left for Poland.
We got together in two hours and after we were released from captivity, me and my daughter. When we got home and I wanted to pack, I couldn’t even find my things because everything was in the house. The house was scattered, broken, destroyed.
And then the phone calls, I was looking for volunteers and I found the Caritas Centre which helped me a lot with products and with basic needs. And the most fortunate thing is that we were given accommodation for a month.
In a month we acclimatised a bit in Warsaw, in a big city. I haven’t found a [full-time] job, not because there aren’t any. It’s hard to find a job. But I’m afraid that I might let people down, for example, God forbid something happens to my leg again, then I won’t go to work and it won’t be right. I found a casual job “for bread” so to speak. And now I think I can look for a permanent job.
Life goes on, you just start to understand that no matter how difficult it is. You’ve got children, you’ve got yourself and you’ve got to go on living, rebuilding yourself first of all and then everything around you.
Thankfully, the Caritas centre employs psychologists to help people recover from such problems. Of course everyone has a story. There are no identical stories. Someone may have it worse than we do. God willing, someone has not experienced this.