Hello everyone!
My name is Yuliia Kantaeva. At the age of 36, I have two sons, the eldest – 16, the youngest – 5 years, and extensive work experience in my favorite specialty. I'm a cooking technologist, and I've been working in this field all my life. A few years ago, we opened a small cafe in our city, in Kramatorsk. This is in Donetsk Oblast, in the long-suffering east of Ukraine.
I spent the last weeks before the large-scale war with my youngest son at home. We were preparing for the surgery scheduled for the end of February. But it didn't happen as expected. On February 24, the eldest son woke up for school, and he wakes up very early, and saw a message from the class teacher that the school was not working that day. And then the first explosion sounded. I thought that they were conducting training (this is a typical situation for us for the last 8 years). I went to the window and heard a whistle and another explosion. After that, my husband also woke up. I opened social networks and read that explosions occurred all over the country. What did we feel? It became very scary – we realized that the war had begun…
And for us, this is not the first experience of war. My family, like many other families, starts all over again for the second time and it is very difficult. The war came knocking on our door for the first time back in 2014. We didn't go anywhere then. A friend of mine from Vinnytsia once asked if it was just as scary in 2014. And then, perhaps for the first time, I thought about what was happening. In 2014, there were a lot of victims and destruction in our city. Then we were very scared, but we understood that we could go to any other city in our country and we would be safe. Now it's scary because you don't understand what to do, where to go and what will happen next. Perhaps that's why this time I didn't have the strength to endure it again.
In March, we were still at home, still hoping for something, apparently, although we had already moved to the corridor. At the end of the month, we decided to leave the city. In addition to psychological fatigue, the fact that the youngest child still needed surgery was superimposed – and this issue had to be resolved as quickly as possible, and in Kramatorsk there was no way to operate on the child.
We were going nowhere. It was very scary to take this step, because in your apartment, in your city, you are like under a dome. As people say, at home even walls help you. And what awaits you outside of it is unknown. But, unfortunately, a few days later, some kind of apocalypse began in our city – there was no gasoline, pharmacies and hospitals did not work, shops were closing. The stories of friends who told how they left under shelling were horrifying. In fact, I now understand that all these stories are not very useful, they frighten already frightened people even more.
We decided to go to the Transcarpathian region. And before leaving, we prepared for the worst. I will never forget and never forgive my enemy for what I had to do then. I showed my eldest son where the documents and money were, and instructed him to grab the alarm bag and the younger brother in case of anything and run, run as fast as possible to our people, not paying attention to us, no matter what would not happen to us, and let the dog and cat go – they would follow.
When we left the boundaries of our Oblast, it seems to me that even the sun began to shine brighter – everything works, everything is enough. So, on the second day of our trip, we felt much better. For the first night we were sheltered by a completely unfamiliar family. For the second time, we stayed overnight at a school in Ternopil. There were very friendly people – they warmed and fed not only us, but also our pets – a dog and a cat.
Unfortunately, we didn't manage to stay at our final destination – we didn't find a place to live that we could afford. We spent a little time, collected our thoughts and decided to return in the direction of our home. When we were already in Dnipro, I found the website "Shelter" and through it we met a man who happily offered us to live at his place.
Over time, my husband and I were able to return home for a short time. But we left it with completely different thoughts – the feeling that we need to live and move on. We packed up the necessary things, took my friend and her son and went back to Dnipro. There, our new friend gave us keys from his summer house on the river bank. All he could offer was a hut without any conditions – there were neither beds, nor normal windows. To be honest, at that stage, the nerves could no longer withstand all the tension. But again, we were lucky, the neighbors sheltered us and found us a hut in the village overnight. A small hut, without amenities, but in a very picturesque and more or less safe place.
After some time, we still managed to get surgery for the child. And I am eternally grateful to these doctors for their golden hands. Then my husband was offered a job in Uzhhorod, and my family and I moved again. It's a beautiful city, but I really want to go home, where we have everything, we need, and I'm not just talking about things.
Here in Uzhhorod, at the humanitarian center, I saw an ad from the VILNI project and decided to join. In general, in my free time I like to read, sew, and of course knit. My mother was very good at knitting and taught me a little. But I started doing this thing seriously when I gave birth to my second child. It's actually a bit of a funny story. One morning I decided that I was a very cool knitter. I went, perhaps, to the most expensive store in the city and bought 4 skeins of yarn and knitting needles for all the money in the world. I came home and realized that I would have to knit at least some sweater, or my husband would kick me out of the house))) So I knitted, dissolved, cried, knitted it over and over several times, but I liked the result. Then I took cutting and sewing courses and now I knit sweaters, cardigans, and pants – in a word, a lot of things. Here you can look at my products https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn-rDlahlYM/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Now, in parallel with my participation in the VILNI project, I work as an accountant in a restaurant, as well as volunteer in the Red Cross. But I really like knitting. I love the whole process from start to finish – I come up with models, draw them on paper, think about all the details for a long time, make patterns and necessary calculations... At this time, I don't think about anything but knitting, I rest my mind, body and soul.