Natalya’s kiosk is called “L’Amore”. It sells Italian-style Panini sandwiches in a small park of Mariupol’s Vostochniy neighbourhood. The spot where today one can buy a snack was in the epicentre of the shelling of Mariupol on January 24, 2015, one of the deadliest attacks in Eastern Ukraine’s ongoing war. Nataliya and her family moved to Vostochniy only three weeks after this incident to escape a place affected even worse; the Mariupol suburb of Shirokino. There, she used to run a grocery store and her husband a car repair shop. In late summer 2014 the sounds of exploding shells began to close in on Shirokino, located on the main road between the seaport of Mariupol and the border with Russia. At the beginning of September, the first shells fell in the centre of the settlement. Village life was completely disrupted.
After Mariupol was shelled from its eastern vicinities in January 2015, units of Battalion Azov, the National Guard and the Ukrainian Army started a campaign to drive “DPR” forces further east from Shirokino, so their shells could no longer reach Mariupol. The fighting that ensued in the course of this operation made living in Shirokino impossible. Nataliya first let go the employees of her shop, then sent her younger son to live with friends in the city. She and her husband stayed, until, on February 12, 2015, the village was shelled so badly that the family home and business were totally destroyed. They sheltered from the grenades in their basement and left for Mariupol as soon as it was safe enough. There is still no consensus whether the Ukrainian campaign to drive out separatist forces from Shirokino can be considered a tactical success or whether it was more of symbolic value. Anyhow, Mariupol has remained safe ever since, but the inhabitants of Shirokino paid a high price. Many homes were destroyed beyond repair and all civilians have been evacuated.
For Nataliya and her family, their flight from Shirokino marked the beginning of a long journey full of anxiety. They had moved only 15 kilometres away from their home but lost all the security it provided. In order to get back on their feet, Nataliya and her husband decided to go for a much longer trip to Austria, where they intended to earn money as farm hands. The decision landed them in an exploitative scheme. After months of hard physical labour on the fields of Upper Austria, they were left with more debts than earnings. They returned to Mariupol exhausted and broke.
“My time in Austria really broke me. I was broken emotionally and physically. My health and the health of my husband had gotten a lot worse. This was already the second tough lesson for us, not comparable with our experience in the war, but a direct consequence of it. When I came back, the first two or three months, I didn’t even leave the house to buy bread. I was so depressed, so ashamed.”
The term chelovecheskiy faktor (the human factor) was a reoccurring theme in our interview with Nataliya. For her it means something that applies in the war just as much as in the petty sins of everyday life. In the back of Nataliya’s sandwich kiosk is a somewhat unkempt parcel of land. It is unclear to whom the plot belongs and according to Nataliya, no one feels responsible to clean it up. The back wall of her kiosk, painted in bright orange, carries a reminder that a lot depends on a person’s attitude. “If you want to live a better life ‑ become a better person!” reads the heading of the text that tells passers-by to be attentive to their fellow human beings and not to litter in the small park. “Think again, you are a human being after all!” reads the concluding line.
The words written on the wall stem from one of the many poems Nataliya wrote in the phase that followed her experience of war and exploitation. They helped her to eventually get back on her feet. That she now is an entrepreneur in what she proudly calls a family business is also thanks to a program ran by the International Migration Organization (IMO) that grants funds for beginning entrepreneurs among internally displaced people to provide income opportunities and to strengthen cohesion between displaced people and the society that hosts them.
Natalya’s panini business and the message written on its wall, provide an example of how the war has changed many people’s attitudes towards their own society and their role in it. Having lost everything forced Nataliya to go back to school. In one of the IOM’s courses for grant applicants she initially understood nothing. Only with time she accepted that she had to start from scratch. After Nataliya achieved first successes with her paninis, she started to encourage others. Soon her business will move into a bigger kiosk and recently another displaced woman from Shirokino became her first employee.
“It’s an experience that led to a result, a result that I already have now. I am not saying it is some super-great result or something. But for what I have lost in Shirokino, I found so many contacts, such a great circle of people who charge each other with positive energy, we help each other and if it is only with a pack of diapers.”
Nataliya’s odyssey in Austria shows that war makes people not only vulnerable to direct violence. It also unhinges their lives and throws them into an unfamiliar world full of dangers. Her story also shows that getting back on one’s feet is possible with a lot of grit and with the support of family and civil society. Because currently so many of Eastern Ukraine’s inhabitants are in need of such support, local networks became more close-knit and the development of entrepreneurship and civil society was hastened.
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