The smoking area is not just the smoking area, it’s also the play area mostly when the adults aren’t around.
Tatiana’s daughter runs inside while Mila and Tatiana talk.
During the day when the adults are mostly at work or trying to find work, the younger children are left to their own devices. Mila and Tatiana are the ‘house mothers’. While Tatiana comes to the Foundation with her daughter M-F, Mila lives at the Foundation. They’re there to make sure everything runs smoothly and keep an eye on the kids. Valentyna had arrived fairly recently to the Foundation and she wasn’t sure yet about leaving her daughter alone. She was somewhat unique in that her family was Russian and she was born in Russia, but had lived with her father in Ukraine from a young age. Her father was no longer alive, and she had no family in Ukraine. Her daughter’s father was fighting in the war and they did not have a close relationship, so she left. She worked as a seamstress in Ukraine and could take her daughter with her, but was not able to find similar work in Poland. She experienced some issues crossing the border into Poland from Ukraine, where she was told to go back to Russia, to her family- but she does not consider Russia home. She said ‘ne moye vina’, meaning this war ‘it’s not my fault’, they’re not her people.
Here she sits with her daughter while the kids draw. She draws a dog from a kids tutorial on the phone.
People stop by with donations, clothing, some food. The biggest issue at the time was food- while they bring some baked goods, some canned items, what was needed was to be able to go to the grocery store. Here a woman had just come by with bags of kid’s clothes. The girls were excited.
Finding a bunch of things she liked, she pushes her goods down so she can fit some more in.
