From June 28 to June 30, the Eastern Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives conducted another training on essay writing: "Tell the world about your experience of life under occupation." This is the second time we have gathered people who have lived under occupation, to help them to write about their experiences in their own words.

The Center selected twelve participants from Kherson, Mariupol, Bucha, Vasylivka, Dniprorudne, Berdiansk, Kadiivka, Svatovo and Luhansk to participate in the training.

Their essays cover many aspects of the life under occupation and during the war, for example: the evacuation of children, animals’ suffering, and captivity. The participants told how they tried to keep warm in the basement, waited for the birth of a child on the eve of the occupation of Mariupol, covered their relatives with their bodies during shelling, dreamed of scrambled eggs as a gastronomic masterpiece – how the Russian occupation changed their lives.

“Blonda is terribly afraid of explosions. Her ears hurt from that noise. She tries to hide under the water elder, while the cats climb on my head. They don't understand anything and are just trying to save themselves in my jacket. They don't walk on straight legs anymore, but creep around, their bellies almost touching the ground,” – this is an excerpt from one of the works written during the training.

"He stood in our office as if at home. It's like we came to see him, not the other way around. I never had a particularly close conversation with him, but I knew that this person was working out a familiar scenario. Only now it wasn’t on the news or in Donbas. It was happening in my region, my city, in our city council. Here and now. In our office. He expected a Russian-language script from us by May 9."

The training was conducted by Slava Svitova, a writer, certified expert in creativity and trainer in verbal skills and creativity.

"I understand how important the voices of these people are. And how much of it they have inside. Therefore, my task is to create such an environment for them, where it will be safe for them to talk about these experiences and put them on paper," she said.

The participants appreciated the trainer’s efforts and the atmosphere in the group, which contributed to the essay writing.

"I understood how to present a text here. That one can show the entire period of life of people in the occupied territories through the prism of one character. I left the occupation, and three months later I realized that no one writes about these historical things. About what happened. What we’ve been through. Many acquaintances, friends, various people experienced all this, but it’s not mentioned anywhere."

Volodymyr Shcherbachenko, Head of the Eastern Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives, said that, upon the completion of the training, the organizers wanted to receive interesting essays which would explain to foreigners why Ukrainians don’t want to live under occupation.

Selected stories will be translated and distributed to Western audiences soon.

About the training: This training was conducted within the framework of the project "Empowering civil society for a transformation of commemorative culture - non-violent contributions to deal with Russia's war against Ukraine", which is being implemented by the German NGO Kurve Wustrow and the Eastern Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives  together with other partners. The project is funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development within the “Civil Peace Service”..

The Eastern Ukrainian Center for Civic Initiatives (EUCCI) is a non-government human rights organization. Since the beginning of the war in Donbas, the Center has been working to restore justice and peace in Ukraine. The organization documents violations of human rights, provides legal assistance to the victims and stimulates public dialogue on issues important for the restoration of peace and justice (https://totalaction.org.ua/).