Hanna Shevchyk from Mariupol
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I’m from Mariupol, and for us the war came at 4 am. We woke up to a loud explosion, then we started looking on the Internet to find out what had happened and realized that war had broken out. I woke up my eldest son and told him that the war had started, I was collecting water because I knew I had to get it and was waiting for my husband to come home from work. Then he suddenly returned from work and said that a shell had hit his store. I am a neonatologist by profession, I worked in a maternity hospital in Mariupol. So on February 25, I had to go to work. We were already under fire, shells were flying in, our soldiers were trying to defend us, but the planes were already throwing these shells out. So we took all the women and all the employees down to the basement and stayed there for a day. We set up delivery rooms and makeshift wards wherever possible, and people from other buildings started to come to our shelter. The next day, when I was leaving work, I went to the pharmacy and bought some basic medicines and bought a pregnancy test. That day I found out that I was pregnant with my second child. Starting from February 28, I could no longer go to work because it was impossible to leave the house.
On March 6, the military came to our house and took us to a shelter in the city center, and we stayed there until March 30. Since I was the only doctor there, I provided care to more than 400 people. Mostly people were suffering from intestinal infections, but due to the lack of medicines, we had to improvise. We had very few syringes, so I sterilized them with vodka and washed them with rainwater. It was very difficult to leave the city.
I would like the whole world to know what is happening to Ukraine, what kind of aggression Russia has unleashed on us, and what horrors our children are going through. We want to return home so that our Mariupol can be rebuilt, but we are very afraid that we will not be able to return home and the whole of Ukraine will be under occupation. We believe in our Armed Forces and want everything to be fine.
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