On the kitchen table lies a package of sandwich bread with Cyrillic inscriptions, a sign of a recent trip to Ukraine. Lessya, a speech therapist in her forties, and Eva, her 14-year-old eldest daughter, went during the February school holidays to Boïarka, their town, south-west of Kiev. « Amelia [la cadette, 10 ans] cried a lot not to be part of the trip, but I didn’t want her to experience the anti-aircraft alerts, the power cuts that deprived us of heating or hot tea… If all goes well, we will go back this summer”, explains the mother, slender silhouette and long black hair. Eva, with hair as long as that of her mother and sister, still has eyes that sparkle from seeing her friends. Despite the chaos and the cold, “meeting in the cafe, laughing, talking about everything and nothing, it was so good”. The three of them have been living in France for almost a year, where more than 100,000 refugees have been received since the start of the war, but Ukraine remains their country.
They laugh, smile, bicker, kiss…in what is now their home. Since November 2022, Lessya and her daughters have been living in a staff apartment at Les Lentillères college, in Dijon, where Eva is educated and where Amelia should return to school in 6e. From March 2022, upon their arrival in France, the college was ready to receive them. The circuit for allocating the vacant apartment has took time; the lease was signed in early November for one year renewable. “That everyone has their own room has changed our life here. We are no longer on top of each other, and I am no longer constantly on the alert. We live at our own pace and are finally relaxed! », explains Lessya. Household linen, dishwasher or washing machine, beds, mattresses, chairs and tables… Almost everything in the apartment has been given to them.
“This generosity touched me”
For these February holidays, Amelia joined her father, Oleg, Lessya’s ex-husband – they divorced three years ago -, and her aunt Ira, Lessya’s sister, in Semur-en-Auxois (Côte-d ‘Gold), a town of 4,000 inhabitants 80 kilometers from Dijon. They live there in a hostel, each in their studio, whose lease is renewed every six months and the rent is between 30 and 50 euros. For Ira, former quality controller at the Marzeïev Institute of Public Health of the Ukrainian Academy of Medical Sciences, arriving in France at the end of March, after the others, was complicated: “Without money, with just a plaid and my blood pressure treatment for three months”… But the reception was incredible, she says: “All this generosity touched me. »
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