There are rules and there are realities. How children still live and study in Hlukhiv despite forced evacuation

From the beginning of Russia's invasion until July 2024, there were several "arrivals" in Hlukhiv, so the locals considered the city to be calm. Residents of the border communities that suffered from shelling were also evacuated here.

However, already in 2024, the Russians began to attack Hlukhiv. At first, local children were sent to online education, and in August, an evacuation was announced with the mandatory evacuation of children.

Mayor Nadiia Vailo said that they are still trying to get the children who did not leave. Some of them left without calculating their own strength, so they soon returned home, having spent money and fallen into debt. Others did not leave, despite the warnings and persuasion of the police, authorities and social services. There are many of them. They live. And they study.

I would have taken the children, but for what money?

Halyna (names have been changed at the request of the protagonist) has three children. Her eldest son Yurii is 20, her younger son Serhii is in the seventh grade, and her daughter Masha is in the third grade.

Halia is raising her children alone. She is unemployed. "I used to work as a barmaid, but when I went on maternity leave with my middle son, I didn't go back to work. And when I gave birth to my third child, when can I work there if I have so much trouble with the children? We live on 'children's' money, which is barely enough to get by," she says.

Halia didn't even have her own smartphone. She used an old push-button phone. The first smartphone in the family came when the children were switched to online learning due to covid. Halyna took out a loan to buy one mobile phone so that her sons could take turns using it for lessons. However, there was no way to repay the loan.

Since the mandatory evacuation of children was announced in Hlukhiv, Halia and her children have not left.

"Poverty does not allow us to get to safety," she says, "We really want to leave, because we don't have the nerve to live jumping up and down because of banging day and night! Social services and police insist on immediate evacuation. They came to us twice. I tell them that I would love to take my children out, but I don't have the opportunity."

Halia says that the city council offers places for IDPs within the Sumy region. For example, in Shostka community or Konotop community. But Halia does not want to go there because she sees on the news that there is also shelling there.

"Now it is calm only in the deep rear in Bukovyna. But I don't even dream about it, because I know how much money is needed to live there. I communicate with people. Six months later, I returned. I didn't find a job, took my children to school, slept in peace, and that's it. If I had at least 10,000 hryvnias, I would evacuate for at least a month somewhere nearby, rent a hut in the village, just to sleep. We receive social payments, but they all go to food."

How does the family live in the city? "They shoot from artillery and mortars or other weapons somewhere near the border, and our house jumps," says Halia. - "When they were dropping guided aerial bombs on Hlukhiv, it was terrible. During the day, the children hide under the table. This is their shelter. Although we know that if it hits the house, no table will save us. If the attacks happen at night, we all lie in bed together and try to calm each other down. It's scarier at night than during the day."

The woman adds that, although it is calmer now, drones are flying all the time. They circle over the house: "We are very scared. We hear a drone approaching us, our hearts clench in fear, and our breathing seems to stop. When it flies over and the sound fades away, we exhale. But not for long, because another one is approaching. And so it goes on until the morning."

Do children have any leisure time to distract themselves? In fact, no: "Playing outside is out of the question. Before the Russians clung to Hlukhiv, Serhii's duties included going to the shops," says Halia. - "It's half a kilometre from our house to the nearest outlet. How could I let my child go there? What if there is shelling in the middle of the road? For six months, my children hardly went outside the yard."

What about education in such conditions? This was also a difficult question for the family. At home, there was one smartphone for two schoolchildren - Masha has grown up and Yurii has graduated. To study, Serhii had to go to his neighbour's house and sit at the screen with his classmate.

Eventually, Halia asked the school for help. They were given a second-hand tablet, which Masha got. Serhii tried to study from his phone.

But it broke right during an online lesson. Halia carried her smartphone three kilometres away to get it repaired, accompanied by the sound of explosions. They asked for 400 hryvnias for the diagnosis.

"When I heard that, I turned around and walked away," says Halia. She could not afford it. So she told her son's teacher that there was nothing left for him to learn.

The family was lucky - the teacher told them that the school had a laptop they could borrow. The laptops for the school came as an aid from the Lithuanian government. The country has joined the "Device Coalition". The initiative brings together partners from different countries to provide children and educators with computer equipment and give students access to education. The Lithuanians have sent 334 laptops to the Hlukhiv Department of Education. According to the Ministry of Education and Science, more than 300,000 Ukrainian children do not have access to education due to a lack of gadgets. This is especially true in the border regions.

Nowadays, Halyna's children are with gadgets. They join a lesson according to the standard scheme: wake up, turn on. The cameras are not always switched on. In case of air raid alert, if there is no direct threat to the city, lessons are not stopped. But loud explosions are often heard.

Halyna says that above all, she wants her children to grow up to be good people. She is proud to have raised them to be patriots. She recounts how Serhii and Masha once set up an improvised checkpoint on the outskirts of Hlukhiv. It was a wooden and cardboard structure with a barrier. They stopped cars, motorbikes, bicycles and raised money for the needs of the Armed Forces: "Everyone stopped and gave something. Some gave money, some gave sweets. The children gave the money to me, and I transferred it to bank accounts as donations for the military. The children ate the sweets themselves."

The family should be together

The Chaiok family does not leave Hlukhiv either. The parents of 12-year-old Mykyta are both doctors at the local hospital. Mother Maria is a paediatrician. His father, Oleksandr, is a forensic scientist.

Maria says that the couple decided to stay here even if the evacuation was mandatory. They say, if not them, then who? "Doctors of their profile are needed here.

Despite coming from a relatively peaceful region, Maria did not take her son there. She believes that a family should be together. And the child is best with his mother under any circumstances.

So while his parents are at work, Mykyta stays at home. During an alarm, he knows where to hide in the safest place in the house. In the autumn, the situation became more complicated: a guided aerial bomb severely damaged their house. The family temporarily left the city. But soon returned home, having restored the house to a habitable condition. Maria felt so depressed that she turned to a psychologist. At the same time, she noticed that her son's tablet, on which he was studying, was starting to fail. It was glitchy and did not hold a charge well.

"School programmes require uninterrupted operation, and in our case it was difficult to organise. Power cuts make it impossible to charge the battery in time. My son's eyesight began to deteriorate. As a doctor, I understand the consequences of distance learning. Especially when you spend hours on the screen." Mykyta was annoyed that he could not study properly because of the equipment.

Recently, Mykyta was given a laptop from the same batch of gadgets that came from Lithuania. Now the device is not glitchy and the charge lasts for all his lessons.

The problem with access to online education

In the border city of Hlukhiv, there were problems with children's access to online learning before the full-scale war. Ever since the days of Covid. Tetiana Hovorukha, the principal of Hlukhiv's largest school, No. 6, recalls that before the invasion, her school had more than 900 children, and most of them had no technical means of learning, except for mobile phones. So they studied with them. This continued during the full-scale war, when the children were transferred back online (they were only briefly returned to classrooms before the heavy shelling of Hlukhiv).

This is how 8th-grader Victoria Shevchenko tried to study from her phone. The girl's father was a border guard. Her mother, Hanna, says that the family lived very well, and her husband took care of the children. But after the invasion began, he went to defend the country and went missing. He has been missing for two years and four months. Hanna says that after her husband's disappearance, everything in their life went wrong: "Our family is in a state of complete exhaustion, not only emotionally, because we are constantly thinking about our husband and father, but also financially, because I have to support two children myself."

The woman adds that gadgets for studying were out of the question in her family: there was and still is a catastrophic lack of funds for them. Viktoria studied from her phone. If the situation allowed, she sometimes used her mother's work laptop.

"She had been studying like this for four years, and it took its toll on her health," says Hanna, "Her eyes and head started to hurt. We had to immediately address the issue of providing the child with a laptop or tablet. I wanted to take them on credit."

The family was also allocated a laptop under the Devices Coalition programme, as well as two other families: "The turn has come to us."

How many children stay in the city? The exact number is not said. According to Oksana Yudina, head of the Hlukhiv community's education department, more than 2,000 pupils study in Hlukhiv's schools, and about half of them have been evacuated: "The number of children is constantly changing, because people are migrating back and forth," Yudina adds. Teachers work remotely. Some left, some stayed, some resigned. Access to gadgets for online learning is a problem that parents are actively discussing at various levels here. In particular, they complained to local journalists.

The need for devices remains

Head of the Education Department Oksana Yudina says that since 2022, Hlukhiv has received 701 gadgets for distance learning from philanthropists. They were distributed to children from privileged categories and those living in the five-kilometre border zone, as well as to teachers: "The provision of pupils cannot be 100%. We are voicing the need to the department."

"We are trying to provide children with devices," says Alla Matosova, headmistress of School No. 1. Out of more than 400 students in her school, only about 70 left because of the evacuation. "We recently distributed 112 more laptops we had received from Lithuania. Before that, we studied the needs of the children, analysing their living conditions and circumstances." 

Gadgets make it easier for children to learn, but in the context of war and constant shelling, the process remains difficult and unpredictable. That's why students, parents and teachers all hope that one day they will be able to return to offline classes.

"Offline learning is to see the eyes of children, because it is very important to see whether a child understands you," says Hovorukha. "We dream of having children running through our empty corridors. Let them scratch the walls, let them be naughty, but let them run! But now our happiness is in our safety. So for now, we have only memories and dreams."

Oksana Kovaliova