Civilian casualties are still common: in July this year, three local youths aged 3, 14, and 19 were injured by shrapnel. Yelena lives in one of them with her 29-year-old pregnant daughter Viktoria and granddaughter Veronika.įighters on the two warring sides, entrenched in positions about 500 feet apart, fire at each other nightly and sometimes daily. Many of the roadside houses, their windows regularly patched up and then broken again by explosions and gunfire, are still inhabited by locals who are unable or unwilling to move away. The frontline runs northeast of Mariinka’s center, cutting across residential roads that lead to Donetsk. Donetsk, the urban center six miles away which locals once relied on for work, higher education, shopping, and entertainment, is capital of the unrecognized ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ (DNR). Most of the town is back under government control. More than three years after the July 2014 battle to take back Mariinka from armed Russian-backed separatists, the war between Ukraine’s government forces and its Russian-supported breakaway eastern region continues, and the frontline runs right through Mariinka. Despite the war, the bakers try to make something tasty and fancy-looking from whatever ingredients they get. “If it ends one day-and God willing, every war has to end-well, then we’ll have to live further.” “We’re trying to make something tasty for people, because you see how we live here,” says Yelena. Yelena and fellow baker Olya work together with the speed and ease of long practice, making pizzas and buns that the bakery sells for just under market price in Mariinka and surrounding towns, or distributes for free to citizens deprived of work and income, gas and water, homes and family, by the war. The biscuit mixture is resting the first batch of bread loaves is in the ovens. It’s too dangerous to go home before morning. Because of the shooting, workers stay all night at the bakery. It’s late evening in the spring of 2017, although with no windows lining the bright, orange-painted walls it’s hard to tell the time, or hear the boom and rattle of artillery and machine-gun fire that starts up outside at 5 p.m., prompt as a curfew siren emptying the streets. It’s Ukraine’s first frontline workplace-generating enterprise, and a haven from the politics, propaganda, and violence that have torn Mariinka apart. Reborn from staff and equipment of the destroyed factory, the non-profit bakery was opened in March 2016 by the Dobra Vest (Good News) evangelical church. Yelena’s new workshop is in a former supermarket in Mariinka town center, a ‘gray zone’ in a conflict that’s claimed 10,000 lives since 2014. We had a table in the workshop, like now, and it was above the table all the time.” And my little stool was still there… The icon too, our icon. “We went back after it was bombed,” Yelena tells me, “and I saw my cup there. Now, the cup sits on a table beside an Orthodox icon in Mariinka’s small, local bakery a survivor of the on-going war in east Ukraine. It’s a reminder of almost thirty years’ labor, and of the day they ended in summer 2014, when an artillery shell landed on the bread factory where she’d worked all her life in Mariinka, east Ukraine. But for Yelena, it holds a lot of history. It’s a very small cup: blue dotted with yellow, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. For the people of war-torn Mariinka, bread is a reminder of better days.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |