Olga remembers that March 10 as if it were today: she was
finally able to leave Bucha with a humanitarian corridor
.
For days she had stayed with her three children in the shelter of the building where her apartment is on the third floor and she could not imagine what she would see.
"From the bus we saw the corpses on the ground, there were so many, I immediately tried to cover the eyes of the boys with my hands, especially the youngest. I didn't want them to see so much horror", he says, saying that just as they were leaving with the " green corridor ", as the humanitarian corridors call here," the Russians shot a man who was riding a bicycle. They wanted to show us what they could do ".
Olga is one of 170 guests in the parish of St. John Paul II on the outskirts of Lviv.
With her trendy pigtails and teenage pants she looks much younger than her 33 years.
She is the mother of three boys: Samandar of 16, Iscandar of 15, Ibrahim of 9 and she raises them alone because she has been separated from her husband for years.
In the parish building there are in all about forty children with their mothers or grandmothers.
They come from Kiev, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Irpin, Bucha and also from Mariupol.
Everyone is waiting to go home but "they are waiting to see what Putin will announce on May 9," the parish priest, Fr Gregorio Graus, told ANSA.
Olga Stroieva with her three children would also like to return to her Bucha.
Indeed "once in these days I went, I left the children here and I went home".
It is damaged, with scratched walls and all the windows broken, but it is still standing.
"But we still can't live there: in my house there is no electricity, gas, water. The bridges have been destroyed and then everywhere there are signs indicating the danger of mines.
For now, I can't bring the boys back there ", she says. In Bucha - she says in the meeting with the pontifical foundation Aid to the Church in Need which is currently on a humanitarian mission in Ukraine - she was a hairdresser," I am waiting to find work here in Lviv , in our part of Italy it is now difficult to work ", he says while holding the smallest of the three children by the hand.
In the Catholic parish that has dedicated all the rooms to refugees, which no longer has classrooms for catechism or other activities, Olga she is not the only Muslim. There are also Orthodox "but most of these people are non-believers", explains the parish priest, adding that among the refugees, however, "there is no Catholic.
But we don't ask for anything.
Neither where they come from nor what religion they are from.
Let's just open the door. "
Missiles yesterday in Lviv, today an apparent normalcy
Now, two months after the outbreak of the war, there is a 'desk' that organizes rooms and meals;
they help volunteers from Poland, Denmark and even a French doctor.
Vitaliy Dmetricin, the young seminarian who helps the parish priest in this 'enterprise', for what was a small parish of 500 souls, remembers the first day, at the end of February, when people began to arrive asking for help.
"We opened the doors, the first days we came to accommodate over two hundred people and we had nothing. Don Gregorio opened his wallet and gave me everything he had to do the shopping: three thousand hryvnia, not even a hundred euros. shopping to be able to cook only that day. But then God gave us much more ".
