Olena Vincent was born on 16th June 1987 in Simferopol, Crimea. She is a social and human rights activist. She has a psychosocial disability. Until 24th February 2022, Olena Vincent lived in Kherson. At that time, she was in the 10th intensive care unit for women of the Kherson Regional Psychiatric Hospital.
On 24th February, our day started as usual. We had breakfast. After breakfast, the girls who brought lunch said that the cooks told them in confidence that the war had started. That is, the staff did not tell us anything. The girls who accidentally found out did it…. And then the doctors came. They also did not tell us anything. And only somewhere around ten o’clock in the afternoon, we were informed that the war had begun. The doctor said that we would be given phones for ten minutes, and we had to urgently tell our relatives to pick us up. But no one could pick me up. So I stayed there. I just talked to my mother for ten minutes, and that was it”.
THE BEGINNING
OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR
The Russian-Ukrainian war for Olena began in the spring of 2014 after the occupation of Crimea by the Russian Federation. Olena Vincent became an internally displaced person. Then she became a social and human rights activist focused on internally displaced women. For more than five years Olena lived in Lviv, and later in Kherson.
It was there, in the Kherson Regional Psychiatric Hospital, that Olena woke up on 24th February 2022.
The hospital patients had no access to information. They could learn some news about military events from the hospital support staff.
No one ever tried to calm us down or give us any information. We were simply forbidden to watch the news and talk about the news, about it at all. I mean, we didn’t know anything. We could only ask a doctor during rounds where they spend about a minute and a half on a patient whether the Ukrainian flag is still over Kherson or not. That’s all we actually knew”.
The hospital is located 5 km away from Chornobaivka which was under constant shelling.
Since the hospital is located five kilometres from Chornobayivka, everything that flew from Chornobayivka flew past us. One missile landed in our canteen. Our electricity was constantly cut off, and the water supply depended on electricity too, so we had neither electricity, nor water, nor hot food. When the shelling would start, they would take us to the corridor. We had to sit in the corridor. And only in the morning they would bring us to the wards. Because the hospital has no shelter. The hospital has a basement for potatoes which they did not consider as a shelter at all at first. But on the tenth day, when it continued, they said we would go there. Still, we never did it”.
Olena Vincent recalls these almost three weeks in the hospital as monotonous and hungry.
All the days were very similar to each other. We had very, very poor nutrition. We were always hungry because there was no one to leave something for us, because we couldn’t get to the hospital, the shops didn’t work… Earlier they at least more or less adhered to the norms, but from the beginning of the war… I mean, there were no vegetables, fruits, or meat. Only porridge and pasta. That’s all that they served us. And also, — that’s, like, a personal moment, — the day before the 8th March, I remember just crying from hunger because I just wanted to eat, and we had nothing to eat”.
