"Start living your lives right now!" The advice from IDPs of 2014 to people fleeing the war
Let go of those who turned their back on you in difficult times
Yulia Bozhko, an IDP from Donetsk
Don’t make the main mistake – don’t lose faith in yourself. It is hard, but you should accept the situation as it is. Probably you will be able to come back soon. But you should consider the actual reality. I know many success stories about the IDPs from Donbas who started up new businesses, changed their profession, and found something they loved doing. If you have a chance, learn something new. Let it be something different from what you have been doing before. Learn languages. Who said it is too late? Yes, it is a difficult period, but it is also a time for new possibilities. Think about what you would like to do next.
Copyright: The archive of Yulia Bozhko
To avoid any psychological burden, I would recommend having more walks, going in for sport, reading, painting - doing what you really enjoy. If you need the assistance of a psychologist, don’t hesitate to get it. There is nothing shameful about it. Never compare yourself to others.
Help others – good deeds and words of gratitude will help you go on. You will see more like-minded people around. Let go of those who turned their back on you in these difficult times. They have their own path. Make new acquaintances and friends. Live at this very moment. Don’t put your life on hold. Don’t hold on to your memories and things. I wish you the strength to survive these hard times.
Learn a foreign language to feel more comfortable abroad
Yevhenia Iordanova, an IDP from Donetsk
I believe that you shouldn’t wait. You should leave and start your new life immediately. When active combat starts in your city, it will not get better. Let me tell you from my experience – it will get even worse. Grab your kids and save yourselves; use all the possibilities to do it.
I am sharing my experience from 2014 with you, but the decision is up to each person individually. This is your life and responsibility. I would like to recommend people to start learning foreign languages. It will allow you to feel comfortable in any location of the world, wherever you happen to be. I started doing it after moving, and now I speak English and Italian.
Copyright: Courtesy of Yevhenia Iordanova
Rely on yourself. And on your friends and people around
Yulia Baieva, an IDP from Yasynuvata
I can’t give people a hint on where they should go. I guess there is no place in our country where you can be completely safe now. But I can tell you precisely whom you can rely on in your new life – on yourself, first and foremost! And count on your friends and people around you! Believe me, there are many more good people around than it seems.
You should definitely take your documents and medicines along. Take some pictures and some little things of importance. In 2014, we were leaving Donbas for two weeks. Like everyone… In our backpacks, we had soap and washing stuff, useless items and underwear. We didn’t start our new life from zero. We started it from a low minus.
The most important task was to be accepted into the local community, to become one of them. I hope we have achieved it. Now I am helping three IDP families, accommodated at my place, to adapt too. Two families are from Kharkiv, and one is from Donetsk-Sloviansk. I hope we don’t have to dig our roots out again and rush nowhere… I believe in Ukraine! I believe in the Armed Forces of Ukraine!
Turn to a psychologist for help or, better still, go to the psychotherapist
Olena Malenkova, an IDP from Donetsk
The first thing I would like to recommend to IDPs is to start their life and stop waiting. When you are in a new place, your adaptation may take a long time. All of you may have post-traumatic syndrome disorder. If you can’t cope with it on your own, go to a professional psychologist immediately or, better still, go to a psychotherapist.
When we talked to the UN mission in 2014, they told us that it would take at least two years to demine everything. You should realize that it means two years of demining only, and then the construction will start, and you will need a place to live all these years.
To live in waiting is a road nowhere. So, you should start living immediately. You should find work or start doing something you can do best, something you have been doing in your city in peaceful times. Whatever will help you psychologically, that’s what you should be doing. Try to look back as rarely as possible and think about what is happening today and what will happen tomorrow. Build your plans and start your life.
At first, I was also waiting. But then I realized – days pass one by one, and I should rejoice that I am alive, and so are my relatives. I should make plans and start moving towards their implementation step by step.
You have to move forward!
Iryna Hambarian, an IDP from Donetsk
You don’t make mistakes – you acquire new experience. Try to memorize (or better still, write down!) the things you didn’t manage to do on the first attempt. By the way, as for “write down” – get a notepad and a pen. Take notes of everything!
People’s contact data – only with names and notes! Later, you will definitely not remember who is that Lena (Sveta, Ivanna, Nadia, Liudmyla), where you met, and why you need each other. The contact data of organizations – again, take notes: a contact person, what exactly they are doing at the moment (right now, many NGOs and charities have transformed to face new challenges), where they work in terms of location.
Write down your heroic deeds for the day that has passed. Yes, everything you will be doing on that day (all the subsequent ones!) is a heroic deed. Even the things, deemed as trifles in ordinary life, demand titanic efforts and strength now. So it is a heroic deed. Just accept it, encourage yourself, and live on.
Write down your plans for the nearest future! You have to move on. And here is why.
Charity has its “shelf life”. Very soon, you will be asked to free the place for the next batch of the survivors – that’s if you haven’t been asked yet. It is normal. Just accept it and plan your nearest steps: where you are going, what you need for it, where to take it, and who will support you in it.
There is nothing more permanent than temporary. So, if you have decided that you are going to stay in this place, look for your nest, your den, immediately and start settling for a long time. Make yourself comfortable. Think how you will feel in winter here. Write it down.
People are different. Though there are more good people, there are enough bad ones as well. Write down local curses into your notepad – the more and more various, the better. Learn them. Don’t be ashamed to use them! And make sure to find out and learn the local “passwords–responses”. Really, when you hear, “Glory to Jesus Christ!” you should answer, “Glory forever!” instead of what came to your mind first. You should smile and thank, thank and smile. A smile and gratitude are your shield and sword for now.
You have survived. You have endured. You live on. And people have helped you do it.
Don’t get used to apartments and cities
Olena Povaliaeva, an IDP from Donetsk
How are the IDPs to start a new life? I can share my conclusions; just remember that this is our algorithm. It suits our family while you may need something absolutely different.
Rely neither on the state nor on your employer. You may rely only on yourself and your family. When the war started, unfortunately Ukraine didn’t keep hold of Donetsk, didn’t defend it. Did it hurt me? It did. Did I stop being Ukrainian? No, I didn’t. It is a mere objective reality of wartime, and it should be accepted because the forces are not even, unfortunately.
Photo: Courtesy of Olena Povaliaeva
It was my husband who protected me at that time. He got me and our two-month-old son out. Since then, there has been no second in our lives when we would feel completely safe. We have been escaping all the time. Escaping the war, escaping the aggression.
This is why we didn’t stay in Odesa but went to live in Bulgaria in September 2021, half a year ago. That was when they started telling everyone about a large Putin’s war. Yet, nobody listened to it because our people want to believe in better things. On the contrary, we didn’t believe that and, unfortunately, we were right. So, you should rely on yourself and listen to yourself. If your self-protection instinct and your maternal instinct tell you to run – you should run far away. Don’t stop. Living against your instincts is unnatural and harmful to your health, and mental health, first of all.
Don’t make a home out of your new city artificially; it will not happen in an instant. One day, you will still get a tender feeling like, “Oh, I seem to have forgotten my Donetsk bus stop at my house.” That’s because another one is more relevant and dear to me now. And my saleswoman with fresh tomatoes in the market is completely different. The one on my Donetsk market on Bakiny had dyed eyebrows and blond hair. Or was her hair red? Actually, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter either which garden is around your house now, or which wallpaper and TV-set are there. Your family is all that really matters. And your friends, who are scattered around the globe now. I have friends who have been in the Czech Republic, Germany, Turkey, and other countries for eight years. Still, it doesn’t mean that we are not united or that we don’t support each other.
So, stay in touch, and then go and visit each other. At least sometimes because it is necessary. After the age of 30, it is hard for us to find new friends, and we don’t even try, maybe we don’t really want it. Current technologies allow us to talk to our dear and near and fly to visit them.
If you feel that you can’t stand emotional pressure, that you are depressed, that you are on the edge, there is no strength to do anything – visit a psychologist to get professional assistance. There is nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone has his or her own limit. The main thing is to listen to yourself again. And to go to the place where you feel better.
Does it feel better to go back to the horizon of planning for one-five years? Settle abroad, probably even in another hemisphere, and do your planning. Does it feel better to hope for your return? Then don’t plan anything in perspective, find some temporary income and wait. But don’t believe in any analytics with any predictions and dates. In reality, nobody knows what will happen. A futile hope kills the desire to live.
When we lived in Odesa, about three years after our abandoning home forever, the feeling that I would never visit Donetsk again caught up with me. I will never see my grandmother alive. I will never show my son the park where I used to have walks in my childhood. Yes, we took this decision because we had a son at the time. Now we have two sons. Even if all the problems of the region are solved completely, even if it is controlled by Ukraine again and the “DNR” gunmen are killed, and there is no threat of dungeons and tortures to me and my husband (as we are on the “to-execute” lists), I understand that this is a territory of perennial war. And I am not ready to expose my children to the danger of mines, shells that have not exploded, and so on. Once you make a final decision, realizing that there is no way back, it gets easier. You start building a new life.
Find the stars in your family whose light will give you orientation. Rely on them in your hour of need. Build the map of your life by navigating by them. Inweave them in your present and future. Visualize something you dream about – travels, children, relatives. Just not things, not something material and immovable. Because, as we know, you can’t take an apartment or city along. If you think about death, it becomes clear that the walls we live within are valuable for providing us shelter from bad weather and danger. When we die, we will not take these walls along with us. So, the walls, the things, all this is relevant only as much as they fulfill their functions. If your walls don’t protect you anymore, you should leave them, because the main thing is to have your dear and near with you. Alive and unharmed.
Beware of fraudsters
Valeria Shypulia, an IDP from Snizhne
In some public chats, I have already seen the names “first-wave IDPs” and “second-wave IDPs” referring to the IDPs of 2014 and 2022, respectively. By the way, this February, some of us were deprived of everything for the second time because we managed to buy apartments in Mariupol, Irpin, Bucha, Vyshhorod, and other cities of our free Ukraine. It is time for us, the first-wave refugees, to give our advice to the refugees of the second wave. Let me tell you which mistakes you shouldn’t make, in my opinion.
A desire to “sit it out” and quickly return to your normal life. This is a harsh truth from me. In 2014, we were naïve to hope that it would not last long, and we could sit it out somewhere and then go home. We took our savings with us, found places to rent (by the way, at that time, the IDPs were also given enormous bills for accommodation), and lived with strangers, dreaming about coming back. As you see, it has been eight years, and nothing has changed. Those, who hoped to sit it out, spent their money and had to return to the occupied area.
Relying on someone besides yourself. An awful mistake. I am pleased to see the entire country helping our IDPs and people under occupation. Even the state gives considerable finances to those who have suffered from the invaders (which it didn’t do in 2014 and later). But it won’t last long. You have to rely only on yourself, so don’t be afraid, look for inner resources, say “thank you” for help but look for your own way.
Trusting absolutely everyone. I am warning you that many fraudsters have started their active misdoing. These are people without any heart or morals; they know how to exploit grief to earn money. For example, if you have seen an extremely cheap accommodation, don’t even think about paying anything in advance or enriching the fraudster in any other way. I know the state of despair when you want to believe a fairy tale. Yet, once again – remember about fraudsters and always check the people before giving them any money.
Panicking, diving into the news, trusting the words of some strangers in strange public chats and social networks. To give this piece of advice, I have to enter my painful memories. I remember it vividly – we watched the news 24/7 and took seriously the messages that an acquaintance of the third cousin of someone’s sister knew precisely that “they will definitely start bombing and mopping-up today.” This is a destructive strategy. It is very hard now, but panic is not your best friend. Try to find some time for movies, music, and conversations with friends.
Getting angry at the lucky ones. Finally, my last but not the least piece of advice. We have to stand united for the enemy not to break us apart. I see that those left with nothing are angry at those who left or live in a relatively safe part of the country. I understand why it is happening, but I know that it breaks the relations between Ukrainians. We will rebuild and return everything, but only if we are together, so we should calm down and trust our neighbor, our country, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Contrary to 2014, 2022 should become the year of reunion and victory. It cannot be any other way.
Don’t deny yourself little pleasures
Olena Melnychuk, an IDP from Donetsk
The faster you accept the reality, the better. You won’t return home tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, or in a week, or in a month.
Make your plans, judging by the current situation, without any options like “I am here for now, and then I am coming back”. Do everything well and thoroughly. It is your personal decision whether you will stay here or go abroad. There are no right or wrong decisions during the war.
Photo: Courtesy of Olena Melnychuk
Get your documents together. Restore everything you need to be restored, confirm it, and execute. Make copies of your documents, scan, and save them on your Google drive.
Send your kids to the kindergarten or school at the place of residence. Don’t keep them with you; let them be among their friends and kids of the same age. Don’t deprive them of communication and childhood.
Get registered as an IDP, don’t be ashamed of the words “IDP” or “refugee”. This is not a stigma. It will help the local community build their plans considering an updated number of people.
Don’t refuse assistance and ask for it, if needed. “They have given something to my neighbor three times, and never to me,” – then, tell about yourself, describe your needs, they will help you any way they can.
If any courses, trainings or seminars are organized, choose something of interest to you, and attend them. That’s where you will meet like-minded people and find support, new information, and useful ideas.
Learn to live with whatever you have – two pans instead of ten, different plates instead of a nice set, whatever there is. If you don’t have a hammer or a drill, that’s ok, ask your neighbor to lend you one for some time.
Don’t cry and don’t feel sorry for your former life, for how wonderful it was. Yes, you have lost everything; you can’t get it back. Yes, you will not have luxurious furniture like you used to have at home or a modern refrigerator. You will have the things that you can rent and that were provided by kind people. Live with it and find something positive in each situation.
Don’t deny yourself little (and big if possible) pleasures. Buy expensive ice-cream, if that’s what your heart desires, or take your entire family to the movies, even if it seems wasteful under current circumstances.
Pay attention to your kids, and don’t save on them. They will grow fast, so let them have not only the memories of being deprived of home but also joyful memories about the new place.
Don’t try to take the future under control
Iryna Lishchynska, an IDP from Donetsk
When Russia started the war against Ukraine in 2014, one day, we had 30 minutes to abandon our home and the city of Donetsk due to the personal threat to the life of our family. The hardest thing is making a decision. But, when it is about life or death, the decision is made in a second. The self-preservation instinct switches on at once. We realized that the life and health of our family/children was the most valuable and important thing.
We had just built our new private house and settled in, but when we had to set our priorities at a difficult moment, nothing of material value mattered anymore. You can’t take a house along or cover it with your body, so your former life fits one small suitcase. You have to leave your home in the clothes you are wearing at the moment. The most important and valuable thing is your family/relatives/friends, fosterlings, and documents. That’s what you take along.
Photo: Courtesy of Iryna Lishchynska
From my experience – it is better to get women, children, and disabled people to a safe place. A war, explosions, and alerting signals cause a significant trauma for the adults and even a more significant one – for children. A child needs a psychologically stable adult to rely on and to content emotions and feelings. They depend on us, and it is our duty to take care of them. On the other hand, our first and foremost task is to be responsible for ourselves and our conditions. Don’t try to take the future under control. It is better to govern your focus and concentrate on the little tasks of today.
The biggest mistake was our thinking that it would end soon. Yet, there is nothing more permanent than temporary. Unfortunately, the war will not end soon. It is very hard to realize and accept this fact. Usually, the first reaction to a severe stress is to freeze and wait. But it is important not to waste time waiting, and try to continue living here and now instead, as much as possible.
Don’t cross the bridges till you come to them. Just make small steps every day to continue doing routine things. Every day. It will maintain and form a feeling of control over your life. Staying with a child, cooking, and taking care of things is a very important and complicated work on the home front. Everyone has his or her own frontline, and everyone can be useful, doing his or her job that will help Ukraine win sooner.
It gets very complicated when you realize that the war will last a long time, and your mind and heart are still clinging to the past. In our hearts, we all expect that all this will end soon, we will go back to our former lives, and everything will be just like before. But it will never be just like before. We will live in a different way, in our new reality. We are different; we have already changed. We can lose a house, a car, things, but the most horrible thing is losing a life. And we have to look for new senses, new answers to vital questions. It is difficult to let the past go, but it is hard to move on without this step. First of all, you should focus on meeting the basic needs of those who depend on you. And, if you have enough resources, – help others as well.
Another thing I would like to highlight is preserving your mental health. We face shocking situations and try to be strong all the time, not revealing our emotions. But we have to survive in a new reality and follow the curve of acceptance: shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, ACCEPTANCE, analysis, planning, experience, actions. Our fears, anxiety, helplessness, and confusion are an absolutely normal response of our mind to what is happening. Don’t blame yourself, don’t degrade yourself, let yourself get angry, and hug the people you love more often. It is very reasonable and important for each of us to use the psychological support services to help ourselves cope and deal with ourselves, not to get stuck in negative emotions.
When life flips around, you can lose a house, a job, and many other things, then your intellect, skills, and knowledge become even more valuable. This is what is always with you and what you can develop. You can learn new things, acquire a new profession, new knowledge, and skills, and probably even achieve success doing what you love but have never tried to pursue as your main job. Life has no guarantees, and sometimes you have to start from a minus, not from a zero. Yet, I know that you will all cope and find a way out of any situation. Please, know that you are not alone. There are many people who will support and be close to you. And you can also be a person who will listen, encourage, and help. Our future is in collaboration, interaction, and communication. We will definitely defeat our external enemy, Russia, and cope with our internal patterns.
