Our second day in Novohrodivka began with less fanfare than the day before. While we had a few people waiting for us, the chaos was much more controlled today. We quickly settled in to our routine, seeing patients and getting their eyes checked. One of my first patients was a lady who was alone with no one to care for her since her family had left. With a little prodding, she began to tear up, explaining that her children had left to go to “the other side”. They were separatists, siding with the Russian cause, and had moved across the border and she had not seen them in months. Her life now consisted of tending her small garden, walking to the store daily (after walking down two flights of stairs), and mostly living in isolation in the midst of a populated complex. I could not understand if the isolation was political due to her family actions, or just societal due to everyone’s busy struggle to survive. But her struggle was both internal and external.

After lunch, I was asked if I would be interested in making a home visit. Having never seen the inside of a home in Ukraine, I agreed to go to a nearby home to visit a man who had been seen by a previous missions team, but was too ill to move from his home to the community center. Without going into the details of the visit, I was amazed at the lifestyle of many of the people we were seeing. It is hard to convey the setting of this small village, built on flat plains where you can see for miles in all directions. The only obstructions to view are one large hill (man-made by coal mine extraction) and numerous four-six story apartment buildings, clustered around courtyards. Had they been more modern in appearance, I would have thought there was a large university nearby and these were the dormotories. The population of this village is over 15,000 and most of them live in these buildings.

As I walked up to the back of one of these buildings, I thought we were walking into an inner city tenement. The dark, concrete stairs were much narrower than those at home. The plumbing and wiring resembled that of many homes built in the era of my grandparents, complete with exposed wiring, cast iron plumbing, and heavy coats of dark paint on everything. However, while I expected to see a trash-littered floor, the stairways was spotless. There was no dirt or dust, no odor, no excessive heat. In fact, the concrete stairways were quite cool with a breeze rushing through them. We took the stairs up a flight to the second floor and entered a very modern, locked door into the apartment of an elderly lady and her invalid son. The photo above shows their living room. It was approximately eight feet wide and sixteen feet in length. Off of that main room were two 8×10′ bedrooms with a tiny kitchen and bath making up the remainder of the living space. In total, there was less than 500 square feet. From conversations with others in the village, this seems to be the standard of living for those brought up during Soviet times. While there were again many stories of the day, one of my favorites was from an encounter with a feisty grandmother, full of energy, wanting to tell me everything about her life and family. With a long line of patients waiting in the hallway, after several minutes of listening to her loudly talk about her family and friends, we began to move her towards our pharmacy and eye exam station. As she began to walk away, she turned back to me and said, “When you see my son, tell him I said ‘Hello’.” I asked where her son was and she said “San Francisco.” She thinks that all Americans know each other and that I might run in to him some day. Tomorrow, we are scheduled to travel an hour and a half closer to the front to a another village with a different feel. This one has seen destruction from bombings and fighting. We will go through checkpoints and military zones. It is currently a safe area, but also considered a “grey” zone. I expect the stories from their to be mostly the same…but much different, also.