Olha Vovk-Sobina was born on 22th June 1988 in Enerhodar, Zaporizhzhia region. Olha is a social pedagogue and human rights activist. She has been living in Zaporizhzhia for over twelve years. Olha works in a charitable foundation where she takes care of people with cystic fibrosis. She has a disability due to visual impairment.
THE BEGINNING
OF THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR
On the eve of the full-scale invasion, Olha and her colleagues discussed the existing danger and distributed responsibilities in the charity foundation among themselves in case of active hostilities.
But the woman did not fully consider this scenario as realistic. On 24th February 2022, at 5 a.m., a colleague called Olha and told her about the beginning of a full-scale Russian invasion.
“Olia, the war has started [crying — editor’s note]. Pack your daughter’s things. Now I’m driving to my family to take them out. On the way back, I’ll stop by you”.
However, she did not believe it and denied the reality until the last moment. That day, Olha decided not to evacuate her daughter yet, given the unclear situation throughout Ukraine. The girl stayed in Zaporizhzhia for another three weeks.
SAVING OTHERS
When the initial shock wore off, Olha panicked.
There was a lot of confusion and panic. We all started to panic because it was impossible to plan your next steps. You realise that you couldn’t even imagine that something like that was possible, and on such a scale. It was clear that there was no safe place, that rashists can reach you anywhere in Ukraine”.
She and her colleagues had to decide how to deal with the wards who needed daily medical treatment: to evacuate them or not? It was decided to evacuate them upon their or their families’ request.
In addition, Olha Vovk-Sobina has been managing the program of assistance to orphan patients with cystic fibrosis. Those patients were children and adults who had to take a huge amount of medicines every day because without the necessary therapy, irreversible body reactions would quickly occur. Therefore, the woman had to urgently review the stocks of medicines available in the foundation, call the wards and make lists of necessary medicines.
As military doctors say in war, there are three colours: green, red and yellow. These are the colours I used to mark my wards with: there were some for whom our drug supply was enough to survive for a week; some for whom we had drugs for two weeks, and some for whom we simply had nothing for tomorrow, and the situation was critical. I realised that almost all of them were glowing red”.
In order to provide medicines to the wards, Olha established contacts with European associations and NGOs dealing with people with cystic fibrosis, as well as with volunteer communities across Ukraine to organise the logistics of humanitarian aid delivery.
APATHY
Both physically and mentally, Olha Vovk-Sobina had a hard time.
I stopped eating completely. I never was hungry. My husband would come to me and ask: ‘Have you eaten anything today?’ — ‘I don’t know, I don’t remember!’ He would bring food to my bed, ask me to eat, and then come to me half an hour later: ‘So you didn’t eat?’ — ‘I guess.’ — ‘Please! Either I feed you now, or you start eating!”.
And I didn’t want to sleep at all. I couldn’t get enough of it because, for example, I had been working for twenty hours, twenty-one hours straight… I was communicating around the clock with international organisations and European associations”.
However, with the support of her husband, she slowly got her schedule back on track after a while.
At the end of the second or third week, I got used to the idea that we are at war, that I as a person can’t influence it or change anything now. But I knew I had a goal — to save lives”.
She also expanded the geography of her work by arranging the delivery of humanitarian aid to the occupied Kherson and evacuating her wards from Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
