“We’re having a great time here,” Alina says in English to her Greek friend Angeliki. “Every night we have fun. We feel safe. Music makes us forget the scary sounds we used to hear in our country.”
Dozens of children from the war-torn Ukraine are hosted in the children’s camps of the Municipality of Athens, following the initiative of Kostas Bakoyannis, in cooperation with the Ukrainian authorities. A breath of calm, security and a drop of joy, amid the extremely difficult and unfair days they are experiencing, the refugee children of Ukraine found again in the renovated facilities of St. Andreas, along with hours of creative work, care and warm hospitality, as Greece has proven to be able to offer.
During this time, there are two missions from Ukraine in the camps of the Municipality of Athens: a group of 47 children and their companions from Mariupol, at the request of the president of the Union of Ukrainian Cities and mayor of Kyiv, Mr. Vitaliy Klitschko, and a group of 26 children and the their companions in cooperation with the Greek-Ukrainian Chamber. In the previous camping season of July, at the facilities of Ag. Andreas experienced a break from the agony, 60 children and their companions, at the request of the Greek-Ukrainian Chamber, as well as another 35 children with their companions, after communication with the Consul General of Greece in Odessa, Mr. Dimitris Dochtsis.
“Music makes us forget scary sounds”
The young children from Ukraine, in perfect harmony with the children of the same age from the Municipality of Athens who are also in the children’s camps, enjoy the creative workshops, educational games and sports activities organized by the managers of the structure and, for the first time after a long time time, they look at the sky without fear.
“We’re having a great time here,” Alina says in English to her Greek friend Angeliki. “Every night we have fun. We feel safe. Music makes us forget the scary sounds we used to hear in our country.” But Katerina, Danil, Alina, Viktor, Karina, Roman, Maria, Ivan, Daria and Olena on the benches under the dining room many times share with their new friends the experiences of the horrors of a war , where he turned Mariupoli into “stone and soil”.
As their narrative unfolds, both groups of children, Ukrainian and Greek, live the moments with deep emotion.
“For the first five days we thought it would end quickly. That it won’t last long and nothing will happen to any of us, nor our city. We couldn’t go out so as not to die,” the children from Ukraine testified in English, adding that “drinking water and food ran out very quickly for the people who sat in the basements and we went out and tried from the rain to collect for to have something to drink We had to cross many kilometers to find water, for example in a river.’ Another child explains that he thought they would be gone “for three days and six months went by.”
Their sentences are stormy and revealing of the unjustified and brutal violence of war: “The most frightening thing for me was that when I was woken up that day instead of hearing “good morning” I was told that a war had broken out. I opened my eyes and it seemed to me from the window that it was raining heavily.” “Around 5.30 in the morning we heard some strange sounds. They were bombs.” “I will never forget that they were shelling and my brother was almost injured or even killed, and then we got out and ran to save ourselves,” the children say with emotion.
Uprooted from their homeland and trying to preserve some of their childhood, born in Mariupol and now displaced to other Ukrainian cities in an endless struggle for life. They traveled for 2.5 days by coach to arrive on July 31st in the children’s countryside of the Municipality of Athens, a haven of carelessness, if only for a while.
They remember their life before the war and describe it to their friends in Greece, with words of nostalgia: “We lived very well. We went to our favorite school. We were with our friends. It was perfect and when this started, it fell apart into little pieces. Our life was full and happy. We were very happy. There was certainty, security. We went to our activities, to our schools, to the daycare centers. We had a wonderful life and could give ourselves everything. From then on, we all learned to appreciate what we had much more than we did then.”
And yet, despite the difficulties that no child should ever have to face, they express optimism for the future through their innocent souls: “We hope that the war will end at some point. The city will be ours again. It will be rebuilt from scratch and become even more beautiful than before. We will try to forget the past and look forward.”
Gifts and celebration for the welcome
The goal from the beginning was to make the children from Ukraine feel at home, so the Directorate of Children’s Fields organized a small welcome party, where souvenir gifts were distributed to all the children of the mission. On behalf of the mayor of Athens, Kostas Bakoyannis, who could not be there due to the coronavirus, Deputy Mayor Nikos Vafiadis noted that “the camp is an excellent educational and recreational experience for everyone, but when it becomes an antidote to the horrors of war, then the hospitality takes on a completely different meaning,” adding “we welcome the children from Ukraine with love and affection to the third camp season and assure them that we will do everything to have a carefree and carefree vacation.”
The event was attended by the Secretary B’ of the Ukrainian Embassy, ​​responsible for Culture and Humanitarian Aid Serhii Kravets who warmly thanked Mr. Bakoyannis and the Municipality of Athens for the initiative, while the event closed with the National Anthem of Ukraine, as the children they waved their country’s flags proudly.
A few hours later, during the theme night “Camp you have talent”, where all the teams present their participation, the children from Ukraine applauded as the teenager Anastasia sang “Good morning Ukraine, the fire in our hearts we must forget , to forget the word terror while holding freedom in our hands.” The message of freedom unites every person fighting for their homeland and the children of Ukraine closed with a wish to their Greek friends: “Never go through what we are going through.”
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