Until a few months ago they never believed it was possible to lose everything in a few days, abandon home, work, friends, and start over at sixty. But they, Olena and Olha, two sisters who lived in Mariupol in Ukraine, today live the time of waiting at Caritas-Spes. Goodbye, but with the desire to return.
Amhed, in Syria, holds his thirteen-year-old boy’s last report card in his hands. This year, at school, he was the best in his class and it is a great satisfaction for him because he achieved this goal after a long educational journey at the after-school program supported by AMU in Homs with the program Seeds of Hope.
Olha had given birth to her baby girl just three weeks before the war broke out, in a small village on the border with Crimea. Two months after the Russian occupation, she arrived at the Caritas-Spes center in western Ukraine.
The children of the Seeds of Hope Project after-school programs in Syria have achieved excellent academic results despite the difficulties around them.
The activities of Caritas-Spes in Ukraine supported by the fundraising of the MdF Emergency Committee were concentrated in the centers of Yablonitsa and Bryukhovychi-Lviv.
There are many adolescents hosted at the Caritas Spes center for internally displaced persons in the Carpathians. They are young people who want life and a future.
Mrs. Victoria is now safe in a Caritas-Spes shelter in western Ukraine, but her only plans for the future are to return.
It seemed impossible to find a corner of peace in Ukraine, yet Olena and many displaced people like her were welcomed in a Caritas-Spes center located in the Carpathian Mountains. Here “the human soul heals”.
Farah’s mother talks about the little girl’s newfound serenity in Syria, after starting a language rehabilitation program, thanks to the Seeds of Hope program.
Daad lives in Syria, she suffers from cancer and because of the war she had to change accommodation several times, until she settled in Homs where she now fights against the disease accompanied by the Seeds of Hope programme.
A family with five children found shelter at the Caritas-Spes Ukraine center, where they can finally breathe a little peace: the children play, draw, and distract themselves from everything they have experienced since the beginning of the war.
“I kept thinking, ‘We left hell to blow ourselves up here on a mine.’ But God saved us again. When we entered the territory under the control of the Ukrainian army, we kissed and hugged everyone who was there.”