“This plastic bottle is more valuable than all my things!”

“This plastic bottle is more valuable than all my things!”

From Avdiivka to Pokrovsk by car, from Pokrovsk further by evacuation train. It goes to Lviv every day, with a long stop in Dnipro. People who are waiting in the capital, in other cities, or those who no one is waiting for, or those who need medical assistance come out here.

One of the cars is special, it is used by people with limited mobility or people with disabilities. Anhelina Oleksandrivna was left alone in the carriage when a Vostok SOS volunteer saw her. There was no woman with such data in the list. The elderly woman did not know who was taking her out of the dangerous area. In Dnipro, as elsewhere, no one was waiting for her. “You won’t leave me, will you?” asked the woman in glasses. No person is left alone on the platform, so the evacuation coordinators decided to place Anhelina Oleksandrivna in the Temporary Stay Center for People with Reduced Mobility and People with Disabilities.

On the way to the center, Ms. Anhelina asked several times: “Where is my water? Hasn’t it disappeared?”. It was about a five-liter plastic bottle: the volunteer had to show it every time to calm the grandmother. On the spot, the woman first of all grabbed the bottle, as if it was a valuable thing.

Children, this bottle is more valuable than all my things! Let everything disappear, and save it for me! Do you know what? It’s not just water. This is holy water from Avdiivka!

Three days later, we met Ms. Anhelina again at the central station of Dnipro. She cheerfully pinched the platform, of course, with the same plastic bottle. There was about a third less water. The Avdiivka grandmother fell into the arms of Italian journalists: the correspondents recognized the pretty woman they saw during the evacuation. She then caught the eye of the photographer and became the heroine of the report.

That day, grandmother “Holy Water”, as Vostok SOS volunteers nicknamed her, took the train to Khmelnytskyi, to a sanatorium-type facility. And the main thing in her luggage was a bottle of water.