Ukraine: A lesson in hope

It wasn’t the typical check-list for a press trip. Faraday bags for my laptop and phone; tick. Hotspot travel insurance; tick. Sort out a will; tick.

But travelling to Ukraine with the British charity HopeFull was undoubtedly the most memorable press trip of many memorable press trips.

I’ll admit, having been hardened by countless pitches for snake-oil and quackery, I was sceptical when I opened the email invitation talking about pizza and smiles.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there were times leading up to the trip that I wondered what on earth I was thinking.

I set out with a mix of excitement, fear and a veneer of bravado — after all, isn’t reporting from a war zone on every journalists’ bucket list?

No-man’s-land

We flew into Krakow and were driven to the border, where we walked across no-man’s-land and into Ukraine. As our vehicles pulled up there was a battalion of Ukraine troops, unloading rucksacks and bags of equipment.

One of our local guides explained that these were men who had already seen service, and survived the frontline — and they had been undergoing further training in a Nato country. Probably Poland, possibly England.

It suddenly became very real. These young men, some the same age as my son, had already seen friends die or suffer life-changing injuries. (Putin’s landmines and butterfly mines now have smaller payloads of explosive to maximise injuries but reduce deaths, as this puts extra pressure on Ukraine’s health system.)

These men knew what they were returning to, and we all knew that many of them would be dead by Christmas; their photographs and mementoes decorating yet another grave.

Cemeteries

In every city, town and village, you see cemeteries and memorials with flags that ripple in the breeze like the Ukraine wheatfields that once fed the world — the blue and yellow national flag, the black and red which represent the coal and blood of Ukraine, battalion flags, and the flags of football teams.

Death has become a feature of everyday life, and it’s the normalcy which is unsettling. At our hotel, a bunker once used by Churchill, had been turned into a cocktail bar before the invasion — and now it’s back to being an, admittedly, very cosy bunker.

As health journalists, we often write about life and death, and the importance of hope.

But to witness, and experience, it so viscerally was extraordinary.

Lifeless eyes

Children with lifeless eyes that had seen far too much came alive as the HopeFull pizza ovens fired up and the charity’s founder David Fox-Pitt launched into a flour-fuelled ‘pizza masterclass’.

The faces of babushkas who had lost husbands and sons softened to the sounds of laughter, and the sight of  Scotsmen in yellow and blue kilts of Ukraine Forever tartan.

I will forever be grateful for the experience, and for the privilege of meeting some of the extraordinary people of Ukraine, and the extraordinary team at HopeFull.

You can read my piece on the power of pizza, and hope, online, or in the Sunday Express and Sunday Mirror this weekend

And if you are able, please support the work of HopeFull, a small charity with a huge heart who are now working to set up rehabilitation centres for the many men, women, and children who have suffered life-changing injuries in the conflict.

Jane Symons