Hello, dear reader! Today, I want to talk about the war in Ukraine a bit and answer some questions people ask me.

Are you still in Ukraine or have you evacuated? If not, why?

Yes, I am still in Ukraine. Unfortunately, I am unable to leave Ukraine. My family and I have no support or connections in other countries.

What do you think about the war overall?

It is disgusting, any war for any reason. I hate wars, weapons, and militarism.

How is living in a country at war?

Obviously, there is nothing good about it. Of course, there are problems that we have/had, and I will tell you about them.

Currently, one of the biggest problems is power outages. They happen very often, sometimes disabling power for a few hours at a time, or even longer. For example, one time we only had electricity from 4 AM to 8 AM for two days. When the power outages first began, I would try to find places with power and internet, like a hypermarket. But now, internet is not as important to me and I just stay at home during outages. If my laptop runs out of power, I use an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) to charge it a bit. If the UPS also runs out of power, I just relax or do something else.

On holidays, we did not have any power outages. I assume the government did this for the holidays. Recently, a few days ago, the outages have started again, but I am used to it now.

Also, for those wondering, we have no problems with food and water supply, all is fine there.

When the war started

It was evening (or night, I don’t remember), I was lying with my laptop,
I don’t remember what I was doing exactly.
My parent called me and told me about the war.

What was my reaction to that?

To be honest, my reaction was strange, and I was a very bad person at that time. Please don’t hate me for my reaction,
I didn’t know what I was saying, I was stupid. I said: “Ok, and?”, and thought something like “Oh, finally something interesting, not just nothing,”
I don’t know why I thought that, to be honest, and also I didn’t realize at that time how bad the war could be, and how much worse it would get.

When the war started, I was reading the news all the time and telling my parents and other people I was talking to about them.

What happened after?

Medicines. Many pharmacies closed completely, and it was very hard to buy medicines.
Also, there were very long lines. Did that do anything bad to me? Directly to me – no, but..
We couldn’t buy morphine for my parent (to reduce pain), she wanted to get a prescription so much,
and when we finally got one, we couldn’t buy any.. She had really strong pain..
She died a few days later.. April 2. Fuck cancer. I cried while writing that :(

Everyone, please, appreciate your parents while you have them,
if you’re in bad relationships with your parents, try to fix that, if you did something bad to your parents,
please, apologize to them, while it’s not too late, you will never forgive yourself later.
I was a very bad person at that time, and I will never forgive myself. Don’t repeat my mistakes, please.

Okay, let’s continue..

Food. There were big problems, especially with bread, first time, it wasn’t possible to buy bread at all,
also many stores were almost empty, and there was no bottled water, but we don’t use bottled water (and you shouldn’t!), so that wasn’t a problem.

Thankfully, we had food supply at home (like, potatoes, onions, and other stuff).
Then, after some time we found where to buy bread, it was hard, very long queues, and not much bread for selling (people buy all quickly),
parent was purchasing a few loaves of bread, and we were putting them in the freezer, you can put bread in the freezer and then defrost it,
and this bread will be fine, that’s good if it’s hard to buy bread and you need to save for later.

Additionally, later on, there were places where you could get some food, etc, for free.
Of course, with long queues but I am not complaining, of course.
My parent obtained so much oil (for cooking) there, that we still use this oil and don’t need to purchase more.

A little history related to that:
Someone decided to help people and bought lots of chicken eggs and was giving them away for free,
like, “take as much as you need”, a good person.
But some people took lots of eggs from him, and then later were selling them, seriously..
Our society can be that bad sometimes, yeah.
He stopped helping after that.

Milk and how we walked 10 kilometers to get milk.
We couldn’t find milk at all for some time, and then we decided to go to a market that was far away from us (5 kilometers),
obviously, there was no transport. So, we walked to this market, bought food, bread, and of course milk.
We found great milk from Poland, and honestly, it was the best milk I ever tried.

Another history:
Some bad people were selling food that should be for the military.
Which is illegal, of course.

…

Most of the time, we heard explosions, shots, etc.
There was really so much when the war started.
By the way, that time, we had only one power outage, unlike now.

 And what now?

And now, after more than a year,
there aren’t many explosions around.
There are no tanks, and few soldiers around.
There are no food or water problems at all, all is fine.

We have food, water, and heating, but as you can read above, we have problems with power.
Also, now, every market, coffee shop, etc has their own generator,
and people can buy what they need, or in some places, charge their devices and use the internet.

Recently, the government opened hundreds of points with heating, electricity (using generators), internet (fiber, Starlink), and free tea and cookies!
I’m glad they did. I’ve heard that people come to such places to work or just to charge their devices.
Personally, I’ve never visited such points, and all that is written above is what I’ve heard from the news and from people.
I’ve only seen one point and it was closed, but it was around 9 PM so maybe that’s why.
I just hope these points work and help people. If you’re from Ukraine and know something more, I would be glad to receive an email from you.

If you want to know anything else, feel free to email me.
Maybe I’ll write a second part of this post later.

Thank you for reading.

Stay safe.

Written by Alexa Hattori on January 14th, 2023.

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