by Hayley Smith, LHI Founder and Director
The LHI team holds a meeting by candlelight at a cafe in Odessa.
LHI founder and director Hayley Smith visited Ukraine in December to visit our operating centers and assess the needs of everyday Ukrainians. Here, she shares some of the conversations she had when she was on the ground.
Odessa, southwestern Ukraine
Me: “I can’t hear you!”
Colleague: “What?”
Me: “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”
Colleague: “IT’S BECAUSE OF THE GENERATORS”
Me: “I KNOW!”
This is how conversations in Odessa, Ukraine go these days. With regular power outages, people have resorted to power generators. Loud power generators! Every business and every apartment complex is running a generator. Street lights aren’t hooked up to a generator, which is why we pass a few minor car crashes along on our way to a meeting in a local cafe.During that meeting, the city power came back on. The cafe staff turned off the generator as I was mid-sentence. I realized I’d been yelling over the generator. But about ten minutes later, everything went dark again and the ‘ol generator roared to life once again.
A dedicated but exhausted surgical nurse in Kryvyi Rih.
Kryvyi Rih, eastern Ukraine
Doctor: “May I please ask you something?”
Me: “Of course!”
Doctor: “Please do not post any of the pictures of the hospital from the outside.”
Me: “Oh okay, no problem.”
Doctor: “It is because the hospital is a target, you see.”
Two of the maxillofacial surgeons at the hospital.
We had just toured the facial reconstruction surgical department at a hospital near the frontlines. We met and talked to two patients who’d recently had surgery. The first was a lady who’d been caught in crossfire and shot in the face from a distance. Because she lived in an occupied part of Ukraine, she couldn’t get proper help until her town was liberated 5 months later. Another man’s jaw was severely damaged by shrapnel. The surgeons did their best considering the frontlines were a couple miles away and casualties were flowing in every day. There was a time where all of the hospital staff just slept at the hospital.
The kind man who shared his story with us.
Irpin, Ukraine (near Kyiv)
Me: “It was so nice to meet you.”
Local man: “My child, I survived the occupation, but will I survive the winter?”
Me: “Of course you will.”
Local man: “Are you sure?”
The team of two friends on the right survived the occupation. They showed us pictures of the damage to an apartment block that they are now repairing.
Occupying forces killed about 300 people in Irpin, most of whom were men. Not fighting men. Just civilians like the man whose hand I was grasping. He had the clearest blue eyes and, at the age of 65, somehow survived when so many others didn’t. After the liberation of Irpin in late March 2022, he and a close friend had taken on a pretty ambitious project of rebuilding a central apartment block that had sustained major damage. It helped him focus on the future rather than remembering the horrific things he witnessed. So, there we stood looking up at the building and all of the repairs, never letting go of each others' hands until I had to move on to the next stop on our humanitarian visit to Ukraine.