Anatoly and Rania are a young couple, with three young children aged 15, 8, and 6, who lived in the quiet village of Toshinvka, in the Lugansk region of eastern Ukraine. "We had plans for the future, we were cultivating the land and peacefully raising our children. Then, on February 24, everything changed," Anatoly recalls.
The family woke up to the sound of explosions; the whole city was in fear and looking for flour, sugar, salt, and oil to stock up for a few days... But after a week, there was nothing but spices in the stores. "We didn't have much food, but we were still able to cook something with our neighbors for the children while we heard the bombs falling," Rania said.
March 19 was an even worse day because it was their own home that was bombed. "Everything was shaking, we threw ourselves on the ground and were surrounded by stones, glass... the children were screaming in fear... We tried to calm them down as we thought we were going to die there. It was terrible," the couple explains.
From that moment on, having their lives saved and dreaming of peace became everyone's recurring thoughts. "We ran to school praying that no more bombs would fall on us. We all lived in the basement of a school, cold and without windows, which served as a shelter," they continue.
With other families from the nearby village of Lower, they formed a close-knit group because of the common front in adversity, while outside the shelter everything continued to be terrifying amid explosions and the sounds of planes and helicopters. One day, however, Salesian missionary Oleh Ladnyuk arrived in a white van and distributed food and candles. "The children's faces changed thanks to simple cookies, and we parents were also filled with hope in receiving some food," Anatoly recalls.
But since a bomb fell in the vicinity of the school the next day, everyone just wanted to get to a safer place. "But we had no money, no means," they explain. However, the school's principal managed to get a bus with which to flee all the families, a total of 40 people. They traveled 40 km, to Zolotarívka, seeing around them only smoke, death and destruction. Arriving at the station, they took a train to Sloviansk, and from there, after several days of traveling west, they finally arrived in Lviv.
"We arrived early in the morning at the Lviv train station, and they took us to the second floor, where everything was organized to welcome us and give us what we needed: blankets, mattresses, pillows... The children fell asleep, but we had so many doubts: 'Where will we go now? No work, no home...," says Rania.
They all stayed together as a family, and the next morning, the Salesians came back again to give some hope in their lives. "This time it was Father Mykhaylo Chaban who brought us to the Salesian house and settled us in a comfortable room. Their warm welcome gave us peace, and we are very grateful to all those who helped us all this time," Anatoly concludes.
Lviv, in fact, in the west of Ukraine, is a relatively "safe" place so far, and many people who have to leave the most dangerous areas of the country but don't want to go abroad, move there. There are so many of them now, that the government is setting up container houses for ten thousand families. Some of these will be in our complex. In this container city, each family will have a small "home" in a specially equipped container, with a shared bathroom and mobile kitchens.
These families will now be our new "parishioners" and "students" of the Salesians.
