Nowhere to go home to
Conversation with Ukrainian activists
The following are excerpts from a two-hour conversation with activists from eastern Ukraine, who have been working on women’s rights and armed conflict for a decade. They are displaced from their hometown, which was occupied in 2022.
You know what worries me about this war, now that it’s almost three years since it started? That we are becoming numb to all the horror and tragedy. Death no longer upsets us, the way it used to at first. The overall level of humanity in society is being lost. It makes me scared. We got used to it. It is awful.
The war will end, but from where do we get our humanity back?
One of our colleagues in Zaporizhzhia, which is being bombed all the time, told us that being under bombing, night after night, it’s like all the city’s residents being put against a wall. The soldiers in the firing line aim and shoot, and some of the people fall down dead. The rest can walk away. Until the next time.
In Odesa, when the air raid alarm goes off, it’s very short notice before impact. A few minutes, maybe. You have to drop everything and run.
The way the Russians are behaving in the territory they have occupied, it’s clear they don’t know or care about these places. “Novorossiya”? Come one, they don’t believe in that themselves. These places mean nothing to them.
Their attitude reminds me of something I used to observe when I worked as a real estate agent many years ago. Imagine an old couple has lived in their apartment for a very long time, until their death. During those many years, they have filled their rooms with books, books they thoughtfully collected, read and cherished. They have planted perennials and shrubs in the courtyard and tended to them. They have put so much labor, time and thought, never mind the cost, into acquiring these things, into making their home.
And then the old couple dies, their books are thrown into boxes to be taken out, maybe to be sold for pennies, maybe straight to the garbage, the plants in the courtyard wither and are pulled up. The apartment is put on the market, and when I show it to clients, all they are interested in is how many square meters there are, and whether you can hook up a washing machine. The love and value that have been invested in this home are invisible to them.
Talking about home, we must start thinking about getting settled once again, putting down roots, and where and how. These three years as internally displaced people have been a blur of moving around, of being unsettled. The international humanitarian aid agencies are curiously obsessed with putting up “modular housing” for refugees. Settlements quickly raised in the worst parts of town or beyond the edge of town, rows of huts from experimental materials like paper maché. No infrastructure around, at a safe distance from the original inhabitants of the city. At one such settlement, they told refugees they couldn’t move in with their cats.
It will be even worse when demobilization finally happens, as it probably will soon enough. You know there are soldiers at the front who have been fighting since the beginning of the war. Many of them are from the territories that are now occupied. They became homeless while they were at the front. They have nowhere to go home to. They will be demobilized into homelessness.
There are subsidized mortgage programs for veterans, at a very good interest rate, 4% if I remember correctly. That’s lower than inflation, so veterans can borrow money for free, technically. What kind of jobs they will have after demobilization is another question, of course.