What does ‘normal’ mean during the war?
It has been more than 670 days since the Russia-Ukraine war started. On a wintry day, Russia invaded its neighbour on February 24, 2022.
Since then, what transpired has been covered by media across the globe.
It is not a new story anymore.
A powerful country tries to correct the course of a smaller nation. The banality of evil is not lost on me when I write this. As a journalist, I report almost daily on the developments happening on the battlefield or the war of words between the respective leaders. It makes one wonder about the thousands of lives that have changed due to the ongoing war, which is now proving to be the bloodiest since the Vietnam War.
Nataly says it has become a matter of choice.
Nataly, a 29-year-old living in the capital city of Ukraine says it has become a matter of choice. She recalls that it was after a few days of uncertainty that one day, she woke up to a call from a friend saying the worst has finally happened. Russia had invaded Ukraine. She says, that although there were talks of invasion happening around, she always thought of it as a far-fetched idea, never really believing that it would happen.
Life after the war started
Nataly says, that in the first few weeks after the invasion, her life along with many others came to a standstill. Nobody worked, nobody knew what to do.
For days, she couldn’t sleep. The future seemed so clouded that she says planning life for even more than two hours did not seem feasible.
Some of her friends immediately shifted to the western parts of Ukraine. According to the United Nations, over 5.1 million have been displaced internally in Ukraine while more than 6.2 million have been forced to seek refuge outside.
But Nataly made a choice to not run away from the place she calls home.
In the initial days of the war, she shared a flat with two of her friends. A month after the war, normalcy started setting in her life or rather she tried to bring some into her life.
What’s normal now?
Her normal routine includes doing daily chores against the backdrop of war raid sirens and continuous shelling.
Sometimes to avoid the nightly ordeal that Russian shelling brings along, some people choose to sleep at underground shelters instead of their homes, she says. It’s dangerous living in the city, she says, adding that there is a price to pay to stay in her own home now.
Other changes that have creeped up in her life include taking up medical courses to learn how to give first aid because you never know when you would need to save someone else or yourself.
A lot of her friends have become volunteers who collect money and provide equipment to the frontier soldiers. She along with her family raised money to provide drones to the army as well.
Living in the city or even travelling around is not safe. For people in other parts of the world, while a vacation might bring some respite, for Nataly, it wasn’t the same.
She went to Lviv for a few days where she was welcomed by drone strikes. Now as a part of their pre-departure ritual, people in Ukraine just don’t check for cash or keys, but also look if the place they are travelling to has a bomb shelter or not.
Crowd funding campaigns and making donations to army and charity foundations have become an integral part of people’s lives in the war-torn country.
Nataly says, if you’re travelling to a village where shelters are not available, you just accept your fate and make a choice.
Humans are adaptive, she says.
It makes one think but where do we draw the line. Here is a person talking about getting used to paraphernalia that a war in her country has brought along with itself. Overwhelming is how she describes her days since the war clouds engulfed her skies, while mentioning in the same breath that she has been among the lucky ones.
War has brought people closer home
Nataly further says as days pass, life is becoming more uncertain, but she is glad to be around those she loves.
She says, among the people she knows, most have shifted to speaking Ukrainian only. People even avoid using Russian casually like they used to, in the pre-war period.
War has brought people closer home. It is being reflected in the art they create. Nataly says a lot of them are turning towards Ukrainian culture and their roots.
Nataly says she is grateful to the world for the support Ukraine has received so far. She hopes it does not end as the country continues to remain at war. She would also want people to know more about the Ukrainian culture.
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