Locations“My house saved us”: the story of a former teacher from Dmytrivka
December 19, 2024
Lidiia Ivanivna in the garden near the foundation of her destroyed house. Dmytrivka village, Bucha district, Kyiv region, June 2024.
Life was quiet and calm in the village of Dmytrivka in Bucha district, located 30 kilometres from Kyiv, before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. More than 2,000 people lived there, with residents tending their gardens, raising children, and peacefully going about their daily routines.
But at the end of February 2022, after the start of the full-scale war, Dmytrivka was on the front line. In just a few days, normal life had turned into a constant struggle to survive.
Meet Lidiia Ivanivna
Lidiia Ivanivna, a resident of Dmytrivka, recalls the time with horror:
“Everything imaginable was flying over our heads... It was impossible to get out of the basement. We stayed there for three weeks. The air temperature reached zero! Water, gas or electricity were out of the question. We had to cook porridge on firewood.”
As a result of the hostilities, Lidiia's house was completely destroyed. Only the foundations remain of the place where her family had once lived happily. Her only surviving personal belongings were a half-burnt fur coat and a saucepan with shrapnel holes in it.
House history
Lidiia had been living in her house in Dmytrivka for 45 years. In the late 1970s, she bought a plot of land and then started construction. It went ahead gradually, with barely enough money from her teacher's salary to pay for the work. Her parents and four brothers helped her.
“My whole family helped me build a huge house of 150 square metres and two floors! You should have seen how beautiful my house was!” she recalls with warmth and pain. “The living room was 33 square metres, and it was lit by two chandeliers, because one was not enough.”
“And what an atmosphere there was in the house... such happiness! I, my son and daughter lived there.”
“I do mathematics so that I don't cry or feel sad.”
Lidiia is a mathematician by profession who has devoted her entire life to teaching. It’s no surprise she chose this particular career, as she comes from a whole dynasty of teachers – she has relatives who are teachers in Europe, Canada and even Australia. And Lidiia's daughter is also a teacher.
Lidiia Ivanivna in her yard. June 2024. Photo: Andriy Kovsh / UNDP Ukraine
“I’m also working now, but online. I have students on all continents! There were even some who called from Utah and woke me up at night because they couldn't figure out how to divide 26 and 13,” she says, laughing.
At the age of 56, Lidiia decided to take a serious step – to adopt a child who was two years old at the time. The girl's biological parents had been deprived of parental rights, and they were distant relatives of Lidiia's. After much hesitation about taking in the child because of her advanced age at the time, Lidiia decided to become a mother again.
“That's how it turned out that I became a mother for the first time at the age of 19, and for the second time at the age of 56.”
“My big house saved us”
On 5 March 2022, Lidiia Ivanivna's house was hit. The whole family was inside on the ground floor when a shell smashed into the kitchen. The gas was switched off, but apparently there was some gas residue in the stove, which led to an explosion. Everything in the kitchen – from furniture to appliances – was torn to pieces by the blast.
On the first floor there was a family library, collected by Lidiia Ivanivna's mother and her ancestors. After Lidiia Ivanivna recovered from the explosion, she rushed upstairs to try to save at least something, but the flames had already spread and it was impossible.
“It was burning with terrible intensity... We ran out of the house in our flip-flops, in pyjamas, barefoot! But we got out of the house without a scratch. My big house saved us.”
However, the roof and the first floor of the house were completely destroyed in the fire.
“There could have been so many holes in me and my children – like in this pot. But we were miraculously saved,” says Lidiia, holding up a burnt and twisted saucepan riddled with holes.
Lidiia Ivanivna shows a pot that was left after the first shelling of her house. June 2024.
Happy to be alive, my son, daughter and me decided: “It's okay, we'll install windows and doors, put up a roof and we'll live. It will be a one-storey house. The main thing is that we are alive!”
But... in two weeks the house was shelled again.
“Then we decided to evacuate. My daughter went to Poland, and my son and I went to Bila Tserkva. We stayed there for a month-and-a-half and then returned,” says Lidiia.
She returned to a home that no longer existed.
The war had damaged more than 1,468 objects in Dmytrivka community, including 38 apartment blocks and 1,220 private houses.
“It was horrible what we saw when we came back... Scorched earth and ashes. No windows, no doors, not a single surviving wall - just ruins,” Lidiia recalls with pain.
The shattered remains of Lidiia's house. February 2024. Photo: UNDP in Ukraine.
Lucky find
Lidiia is very happy to tell us about a discovery she only later noticed in the far part of the yard. Before the evacuation, she hid the fur coat her late husband had given her in a bucket “so that no one would find it and take it away.” When she was tidying up the area, she saw the bucket, looked inside, and there was the fur coat! Half of the fur coat was burnt, but the other half remained intact.
“This fur coat is very precious to me. I made a half fur coat out of the intact part and gave it to my daughter as a wedding present. It is now a relic in our family,” she says.
On the way to recovery
“We did not even know where to start… Luckily, we were able to get some help,” Lidiia says.
To support the community, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ukraine organised the removal of debris from 60 private houses in Dmytrivka. Lidiia Ivanivna's house was one of them. This process consisted of several stages:
Conducting a non-technical survey of the site to ensure that the area is clear of explosive ordnance;
Three explosive items were found on Lidiia Ivanivna's plot: one of them, which was unexploded, was removed by the State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SESU).
The others, they said, were safe, so Lidiia gave one for scrap metal and kept one as a “souvenir.”
Next came the identification of asbestos-containing materials and their removal for safe storage prior to disposal. After that the remaining house structure was demolished and the demolition waste was removed.
At this stage, all construction materials that can be reused are stored for future construction. Currently, the woman lives in a modular house that has been installed in her yard.
The shell and the saucepan that remained in Lidiia Ivanivna's yard. June 2024. Photo: Andriy Kovsh / UNDP Ukraine
Intact bricks sorted during the debris removal are stacked for future reuse.
June 2024. Photo: Andriy Kovsh / UNDP Ukraine
Flowering again
“Look at the flowers on my plot! The land here was burnt, and now the seeds I planted have sprouted,” Lidiia says, very happily. “And I'm going to become a great-grandmother soon!”
Flowers in Lidiia Ivanivna's yard. June 2024. Photo: Andriy Kovsh / UNDP in Ukraine
“Caption how I ride the bike… but I ride very fast!”
Lidiia cycling outside her yard. June 2024.
Lidiia Ivanivna has three bicycles, and every day she rides more than 25 kilometres.
"Once, some Americans came to film a story, and they asked me to ride my bike," she says. "When I was riding, someone called me. I picked up the phone and started talking, and the Americans started shouting at me:
You can't do that! It's risky, there are safety rules!
They said I shouldn't hold the bike with one hand and a phone with the other. But I ride like that without any problems.”
They also told me:
“God help us to live to be your age!”
Lidiia Ivanivna in her yard. June 2024.
Disclaimer: As part of the project ‘Promotion of Human Security in Ukraine through Responding to the Multidimensional Crisis Caused by the War,’ funded by the Government of Japan, more than 1,000 irreparably damaged buildings were demolished and cleared in Kyiv Oblast. This effort involved the removal of 334,065 tonnes of debris, including the safe disposal of 1,896 cubic metres of asbestos-containing materials. In addition, UNDP supported the war-affected communities in Kyiv Oblast by providing 35 waste collection trucks, over 4,000 waste bins, and 41 units of heavy machinery to restore essential municipal services and strengthen debris and waste management systems.
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