Ukrainian Lidia toiled in an asparagus field for four days to earn money for a trip to Zaporizhia in Ukraine. She wants to return to embrace her children and grandchildren again. They were separated four years ago after her house was destroyed by a rocket and it was no longer safe for her to stay there.
Her sons went into the army, sometimes Lidia didn’t hear from them for weeks. One of them was injured and has suffered from memory loss ever since. He constantly asks about his mother.
“I miss them very much, I want to talk to them, I want to hug them. I am already old and I am afraid that I may never see them again,” says Lidia.
When volunteers from the Assen Bloeit community center heard of Lidia’s wish to see her sons again, they started a fundraising campaign. “It touched us enormously that Lidia, at the age of 82, still had to plant asparagus to earn money for the trip,” says Hendrik Hospes, volunteer at Assen Bloeit. “We finally raised the amount within fourteen days.”
Lidia has been coming to the community center in Assen-Oost for more than two years, where she helps in the flower workshop. She finds support from the other volunteers. “It really feels like a second family here,” Lidia tells Hendrik.
Lidia shows videos from Ukrainian news channels reporting on the situation in Zaporizhia. The images show burning houses. “It’s very scary there now,” Lidia says with a tremor in her voice.
Due to recent drone and missile attacks, she does not dare to travel to Zaporizhia. “There the air raid sirens sometimes go off for 20 hours in a row and then you have to take shelter in the basement.” Meeting her sons in another, safer city is also not an option now. “They can then just be picked up from the street and then sent back to the front.”
Lidia has not yet let her sons know that she wants to visit them. “I want to work first, because I don’t really want to use the money from the fundraiser, I feel guilty if I accept that.”
Lidia has created a profile on an online platform for small jobs. There she offers help with small tasks, such as walking dogs. “No one has responded yet,” she says. She also signed up for work at the TT Circuit, where she wanted to sell merchandise. She was not accepted there because of her age.
Hendrik urges Lidia that she does not have to feel guilty about using the money raised for a future trip: “It is not at our expense, we would really like to contribute to making the misery a little less.”