In Ukraine, the ongoing conflict brings its share of misfortunes. Exactions and bombardments have torn countless families apart and pushed many of them onto the roads to flee the fighting. In Dnipro, we have been welcoming those from the Donbass for weeks. There, a volunteer psychologist Anna Gorodnichenko listens to their traumas.
From our special correspondents in Dnipro,
It is in a place just inaugurated and empty because of the Easter celebration that Anna Gorodnichenko welcomes us… Toys are strewn on the floor, on the wall, drawings by children… but also by adults. Because if the parents bring their offspring in priority in this center, entrusts us the psychotherapist, the adults also crack when one asks them a question: where do you come from?
“ Even if they arrive here, where there is no fighting, where life is so to speak normal, they are still at home in their minds. In a group session, they can pause to look at their phone because they received an alert for their region. Look my house was taken by the Chechens. You have to try to get them to focus on their present, their current environment, where they can act, build a normal life here, for their children. And focus on what they can do now », Explains Anna Gorodnichenko.
Post-traumatic stress, panic attacks, the well-known disorders of war victims hit these new arrivals hard.
But the inhabitants of Dnipro who hear the war approaching are not spared either, explains Anna Gorodnichenko: “ The people of Dnipro are there, in relative peace. But they watch everything that happens at their doors and they are afraid of what will happen to them tomorrow, afraid that all this will happen to them too. They do not envisage the future any more than the displaced. And their stress is permanent because of what could happen. War is near. »
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