A group of 120 prisoners from the Donbas Regional Psychiatric Center arrived in Lviv, the capital of western Ukraine, on Sunday afternoon. She and the volunteers waiting in wheelchairs and wheelchairs to help them cross were about 200 people on the platform. Despite the crowd, the scene unfolded in a silence that irritated the soul of the audience. The sudden cry of one of the patients disrupted this slow movement of pain in the station. A member of the German fire brigade started to cry again; The police officer secretly wiped his tears. Patients were evacuated from Severodonetsk two days earlier after a Russian attack destroyed part of the hospital where they stayed.
The midday sun faded from the sky of Lviv as volunteers led men and women who could barely move without assistance. Traveling by train a thousand kilometers from Kramatorsk took all day. There were the elderly and the handicapped, men without arms or legs. First, there were drug addicts and war veterans, two specialized high-risk groups in the evacuated facility, the Severodonetsk Mental Health Center. Tatiana Shapovalova, an employee of the organization and responsible for the program, gave orders from one place to another. His lieutenants were two women desperate for doctors to supply them with specific drugs that one of their patients had lost on the train.
Those who could walk walked through the corridor accompanied by a volunteer. The appearance of people who did not know where they were, of people in fragile health who were driven from their safe space, was lost. Despite their disorientation, many of them clung tightly to the small luggage they were carrying so that the station workers could not pick them up. They went down the stairs connecting the rails to the entrances of the station and waited there, in several school buses, for the train of the whole delegation to leave. The buses took them overnight to the Psychiatric Center in Chernivtsi, a six-hour drive not far from the Romanian border.
Russian artillery shells at the medical facilities in Severodonetsk were no exception. The most famous precedent was the bombing of the Mariupol maternity ward. There were also attacks on other psychiatric centers, one in the city of Izium, in the Kharkiv region, and another in Borodyanka, Kiev.
Transfer to Chernivtsi
Prisoners waited for seats on the bus, except for those who couldn’t control themselves. He lay on stretchers, lined up on the floor, waiting for the medical team to move to their modified vehicles. NGO workers handed out packed lunches on the buses and swallowed food within minutes. Dozens of people left their seats on the buses to watch a volunteer hand out cigarettes while another lit them. “Smoking, in the case of drug addicts, is very comforting. At times like these, it’s a blessing,” explains Carlota Boyer, a psychologist from Alicante who is currently volunteering at the Lviv train station with the Associação Cultural Causas Comuns.
Boyer has experience helping in prisons, as well as humanitarian crises. For people with psychiatric disorders, he said, “the situation can be four times more stressful than for others.” “They need their routine, to know where the bathroom is, when to eat. Strangers, no matter how much I laugh, cause shame.” Boyer remembers the arrival of patients from Severodonetsk and how persistently he asked the same question: where did they go?
Kirill Dovzhik is 22 years old and has been working for four days at Lviv train station as a volunteer for the Territorial Defense Service of the Ukrainian Division of Reservists and Volunteers. She is from Zaporozhye, where she worked as a Latina dance teacher. Clashes between the Ukrainian army and the invader take place in this city and its district. So he decided to move west with his mother to a safer place. Thousands of civilians from Mariupol, the city hardest hit by the war, have fled to Zaporozhye in recent days. Dovzik explains that the testimonies of displaced persons from Mariupol to Lvov are reassuring; He cites the case of a family who told him how they were trying to save their house, which had been set on fire by a bomb attack. But Dovzhik confirms that he has never seen such an entourage of the Severodonetsk Psychiatric Center before: “See me as a professional dancer, teaching chacha or tango before the war; It’s hard to prepare for something like that.”
The nurses’ families also travel with the interns. Two teenagers waited for buses and waited in a cage where their pets, two mice, were kept. Some patients asked to color the animals and they were taken out of the cage. Shapovalova was waiting for her granddaughter and her parents in Lvov. They left Donbass when war broke out between pro-Russian separatists and the Ukrainian government in 2014. The girl was then 10, now 18. Accompanied by grandma calls or translates from Ukrainian to English. Her name, she says, is Dasha, but her mother corrects her: her name is Darina, “Dasha is over”. Dasha is a Russian diminutive of her name. They come from the Donbass region, where Russian is the main language of the local population. “Now they don’t want to know anything about Russia or Russia,” says Darina, formerly of Dasha.
Source: La Neta Neta
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