Living Like a Displaced Person
in a War Zone
Ukraine, March & April 2022: I just returned from 5 weeks in Ukraine, Poland (and a tiny jaunt into Hungary and Slovakia.)
(Because of the vicarious trauma I believe that I am still sorting through, I am going to share this trip, my impressions and some of the things that I saw and experienced in multiple blogs. I have to piece it all together like a patchwork quilt and then lay those thoughts out on paper. This is part I am simply attempting to step into a displaced Ukrainian's footsteps.)
Is it possible to know what another human being is feeling, experiencing and grieving? I don't know. Even if you walk right behind them, putting your feet directly into the mark that they have pushed into the dirt with their shoes, that human is living his or her own story. But I believe empathy and Christian love demands that we come close to the surface of their reality to get a better understanding, to know what it means to be "them." And so it has been here in Ukraine for me. I have had the privilege and opportunity, to not only hear another's pain drenched account but to trudge behind thousands wearily waiting at the border, for too many hours to count-in hopes of being safe.
I too have been hungry; thinking that there would be food soon only to watch it evaporate. As darkness happens and another curfew falls, I had to wait again for the sun to rise in order to eat. To figure out where I could get food.
I have been awakened by air raid sirens at 4 am and have had to wait in the hallway with others, wrapped in blankets, trembling but not from the cold. Uncertainty in every breath. Tense and quiet, sharing a surreal experience together in a crumbling, concrete apartment block. All anticipating what might come next.
It could be an "all clear" signal or the crashing sound of a bomb, decimating and changing the histories of many-including myself.
I didn't have to be here, I chose to be. And yet, I have praised the Lord each morning for surviving the night. I too have walked homeless, not knowing where I would lay my head that evening. At times it with others who were just grateful to have a couple of square feet to stretch out and block out reality for a few hours.
Refugee shelters in churches and in basements of buildings. I slept in both of these for three nights.
I have been unwashed for days, wearing the same clothes over and over until they smell like the fires that soldiers make in oil cans at night. So many young men in army fatigues waiting by Molotov cocktails in used wine and vodka bottles at the checkpoints. Tons of sandbags and concertina wire and cumbersome steel hedgehogs that wait to stop the invader's tanks. I am not displaced and I am not a refugee, but I have tasted a morsel of the bitterness of this role that has been thrust upon so many people, who just want to live their lives as before. I understand a little better because I took this road.
These people are brave. 
And still, even in all that, I am still just an observer in another's pain. Perhaps, I can touch upon their existence-just a little closer emotionally than someone who is at home transfixed to the televised news. Still I am separated. Set apart by more than language and nationality. Unity comes from shared desperation. Each individual Ukrainian has a story to tell and much like the year that Chernobyl gave them bigger water to drink, this tale is again of uprootedness and uncertainty. I hope each one gets to share their trauma and that there will be a compassionate ear that will listen without judgement!
-Launa Stan (written in Lviv, Ukraine after sleeping in a shelter for refugees for the first time.)
