The thick blanket of snow and ice covering the Korotych road where the family home of the Sisters of Don Orione for single mothers stands creates a muffled, rarefied atmosphere. The temperature, in the morning, reaches 13 degrees below zero. A woman with her son, 3 or 4 years old, guests of the family home, bundled up in hoods and scarves up to their eyes, ask for a lift to get to the bus station: walking with a child, with the cold on the street, it is too dangerous.
Inside the house, the silence is broken only by the cries of children playing and running along the corridor and from one room to another. In the bedroom used only for her, a girl – whom we call Kateryna – tenderly cradles her baby girl born a month ago in her arms. Kateryna is 28 years old and has three other children, but none of them live with her. “This girl arrived here with us a month before giving birth,” she says Sister Kamila FrydryszewskaPolish nun, superior of the shelter founded by the Little Missionary Sisters of Charity (Sisters of Don Orione) in this suburb of the city of Kharkiv, in north-eastern Ukraine.
«Kateryna is trying to get out of a very difficult situation: the little girl’s father is addicted to alcohol and she is addicted to him, trapped in a toxic relationship and in a living condition marked by degradation. But she didn’t want her newborn baby to be taken away from her by social services, so she decided to break away from her partner and come here to us. Even if her condition is very fragile: we don’t know if, once she leaves here, she will return with him again.”
For many years the Korotych family home has opened its doors to welcome single mothers in serious difficulty, women with social, psychological and economic hardship, often with a history of addictions, family abandonment, histories of mistreatment and abuse. Today the house hosts seven mothers with their boys and girls. «Here they receive their first welcome, in the emergency phase so to speak. They receive assistance and psychological support. They stop for some time, then they are moved to the other two larger family homes, not far from here, which depend on Caritas Spes (the Caritas of the Roman Catholic Church) but are managed by us.”
Sister Kamila arrived here from Poland thirteen years ago. Together with her there are three sisters, all Polish, Sister Renata Jurczak, Sister Sabina Pekala And sister Lidia Drozniewska. Thirty years ago Sister Renata was the first to arrive in Ukraine, in Kharkiv. In the country that had just emerged from Soviet domination, the Orionine nun welcomed homeless people and street children. Then the mission aimed at single mothers began. Sister Sabina, who also lived in Italy in the past, resided in Kharkiv, but sI moved to Korotych after the Russian invasion and the start of the full-scale war, which began on February 24, 2022, because the suburb was considered relatively safer, less exposed to the dangers of bombing than the city.
Just about forty kilometers away from the Russian border, Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine after Kyiv and in the past the country’s capital, was immediately one of the main targets of Moscow’s massive offensive, which in the first months tried to conquer it by tightening it in the grip of siege and heavy bombing. But Kharkiv staunchly resisted the Russian advance.
In these four years of war, the city has never had a respite and continues to suffer constant attacks with missiles and waves of drones. Not even Korotych was spared. In the corridor of the house, on the second floor, Sister Sabina shows a gash on the ceiling caused by the entry of a large bullet, which then bounced forcefully on the floor, breaking part of it. The pieces of the projectile are kept behind the altar in the chapel of the house, in memory of a danger that was escaped. “Fortunately at that moment there was no one in the corridor otherwise he would have been hit and probably killed,” says the nun.
Every day, except Saturday and Sunday, Sister Sabina takes the bus and returns to Kharkiv where she continues to take care of the Caritas Spes canteen. «Many of those who come to us to receive meals are homeless, but for the most part they are displaced people who arrived from the occupied territories, from the front areas, people who have lost everything. And then many elderly people, those who barely survive on very low pensions.”
In this very harsh winter, marked by severity and temperatures unprecedented in recent years in Ukraine, even Korotych must live with continuous electricity blackouts – provoked by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure across the country – and look for ways to better manage daily life.
Meanwhile, on the first floor of the family home, the cheerful laughter and hugs of the little guests warm the heart. In this land close to the front, the house of the Sisters of Don Orione is a bastion of charity that did not allow itself to be overwhelmed by the war.
