Greetings! I am happy to share my story. My name is Liudmyla, my last name is Bystrova. I am from Dnipro, which is a large regional center of Ukraine. My age is already respectable - 65 years old. I am a mother of two adorable girls. Alina is 44 years old. And Polina is 10 years younger - she is 34. Polina has two children, my grandsons are Pashka and Dashka. They lived in Kharkiv before the start of a large-scale war, and I took them from there.
I have two higher educations. My first specialty is a gastroenterologist. At first, I worked in this field, but then I graduated from Kharkiv State University at the Department of Psychology and after that I became a psychologist. Despite my age, I worked until the end. But recently, literally on the eve of the invasion, I got seriously ill with covid. For a while I was even in intensive care. Thanks to God and the doctors, I was saved. But the disease caused complications in my legs, so now I can't walk well.
How did the war start for me? For some reason, on the night of February 24, I did not sleep well. In the morning, around 3:40, I heard the first explosions. This began the bombing of our airfield. Then I became so scared, as, probably, never in my life.
I never left my city, because then I couldn't walk at all. What was I hoping for? That the war will end soon. Well, after a week at the most, then after a month, then I waited for the end of the summer... It seemed that this nightmare was about to end. And it will definitely end, but now I am sure that it will happen only in the fall of this year or even in the winter of 2023.
Since the beginning of the war, of course, I panicked, I didn't know what to do - I'm not healthy, I lost my job, the state pension is very small... How to live on?
Before the war I liked to play the piano and sing. Also, when I was 7 years old, my grandmother taught me to knit. She herself knitted very well - socks, gloves - and she showed me how to pick up loops, how to knit them. That's how I learned. Therefore, when I saw an ad on Facebook that the VILNI project needed female knitters, I thought, why not, and wrote a letter.
And today, knitting is basically all I have. For me, this is my whole life. I really like to knit, create beautiful things, and now it's the only thing I can physically do. So I sit down with threads and knitting needles, knit loop after loop and think, think - I remember the peaceful times and how it was good then, and we didn't even understand it.