Two friends called Volodymyr & Volodymyr. 

Volodymyr doesn’t have a leg, and two strokes left him constantly drooling. He is nonverbal and struggled to communicate with the people around him until he was gifted a tablet to begin writing with. Now he can converse via the tablet with the people around him, including his friend Volodymyr who is always with him and helps him.

 “Volodymyr is from the Donetsk region, and I am from the Luhansk region but come from Kharkiv. Later I moved to Debaltseve. Before retirement, I worked as a machinist’s assistant. My younger daughter and granddaughter died during the hostilities. It was hard to go through. My daughter was 20, and my granddaughter was 6. How can I make a life out of these pieces of pain? How? Who needs me now? I still have an older daughter, but I’ve lost contact with her. I still have two brothers, but I don’t know anything about them. So I drag my life, like an old dog drags an old chain. I can’t cast it off, but I also don’t have the strength to carry it anymore. Instead, I take care of him, my friend Volodymyr. He and I ended up in the same shelter. Volunteers took us out of the shelling. We go together wherever they take us because we have nothing left. Everything is gone, everything except our desire to live. To have housing, food, hygiene items, and access to information. Help from charitable organizations like Mir Ministries is our salvation. Our deepest desire, though, is to return home,” said Volodymyr.

Both Volodymyr’s evacuated to the village of Zabolottsi in the Lviv region, and our volunteer Oleksii brought them to a shelter. Besides Volodymyr and Volodymyr, Oleksii also has 23 widows under his care.