“They are not your average women, they are such patriots that they are ready to go to the front lines even now to dig trenches to save our boys,” says Vira Adamovych, a 74 -year old lady with piercing eyes bursting with energy.
She is the leader of a group of 15 retired women who do this selfless work. They have hung around together since the EuroMaidan revolution, and now they meet every day to coordinate their volunteering activities.
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Last winter, these fearless babushkas built barricades on EuroMaidan, bought food and warm clothes for the protesters. Adamovych sheltered 11 protesters for four months in her one-bedroom apartment.
The protesters have now been replaced by refugees from eastern Ukraine. “I don’t understand how one can quietly live if now is the time when everybody should share things with others,” Adamovych says.
She felt restless when the fighting began in Donbas region and decided to start regular dispatches of food parcels to the army through other volunteers.
Her first parcel cost her Hr 400 – a massive chunk of her Hr 1,000 monthly pension, or less than $100. At first, it was a struggle to even get discounts. “When I approached vendors at the market and asked for discounts on food for soldiers, nobody actually trusted me. Most people thought I am a crook,” she said.
On the first day, only one of the vendors, Akel Niyazova, a native of Tajikistan, donated a full plastic bag of walnuts, raisins and dried apricots for the Ukrainian army at no charge at all. “My heart is breaking every time I see TV reports about our soldiers,” Niyazova explains. She recalls the horrors of a civil war in Tajikistan in the early 1990s, which eventually forced her to flee and settle in Ukraine 17 years ago. “I ask Allah every day to keep our Ukrainian soldiers safe and alive,” she said.
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Over time Adamovych mobilized her female friends to also help the army. Tetyana Udovychenko was among the first to join. “I remember how we grieved for the lives of those who died in World War II, and I don’t want it to ever happen again. I think that now everybody should support those who defend our land,” she says.
By now, every stall owner at this market in Obolon knows Adamovych and her food battalion, and chip in weekly to assemble a package of 10 kilograms of salo (pork fat), vegetables and even clothes for soldiers.
“The women working here (at the market) are our angels,” Adamovych says. “It was their idea to place three-liter glass jars signed ‘For the Soldiers’ at the market to collect money.” This fundraising effort brings the elderly volunteers an additional sum of Hr 100-200 daily.
As the months went by, Adamovych and her team have become famous and people from the neighborhood started coming to the market to donate food and money for the army. But there is also a dark side to that popularity. Last week Adamovych received a phone call from a man who threatened her.
“He told me ‘you will stop or I will stop you’,” she says. But, of course, she is defiant. “I am a lifelong fighter. I fought with cancer for more than 17 years and I won. I am not afraid of any separatists,” Adamovych says.
Besides supplying soldiers at the front lines, the women also try to cheer up the wounded soldiers who have to stay in Kyiv’s hospitals. They roast meat and potatoes, make pancakes and cakes for them. “There are many soldiers (in the hospitals) who have no visitors at all. They are always very happy when we come to see them,” Adamovych says.
The women plan to expand their operation to other markets in their native Obolon district in Kyiv. “We try to help as much as we can to speed up the coming of peace,” the woman says.
Kyiv Post staff writer Nataliya Trach can be reached at trach@kyivpost.com.
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