Books from the bombed school

There is only one road leading to Avdiivka, a city surrounded on three sides. You have to drive it as fast as possible, because you can come under Russian fire at any moment

There is only one road leading to Avdiivka, a city which is surrounded on three sides. You have to drive it as fast as possible, because you can come under Russian fire at any moment. About two thousand civilians still live in the town. And from time to time, volunteers from several organizations deliver humanitarian aid to them – food, water, medicines.

When we first went to this area – even before the React Foundation was established – one of our guides was Sasha, a soldier driving an old white bus. Before the rally to Avdiivka, he and his friend loaded the car with food completely and ran down this dangerous road. We split up. Sasza returned an hour later in a still heavily loaded car. With what? We couldn’t believe what we saw on the bus. There were hundreds of books inside. Ukrainian school textbooks. It turned out that Sasha and his friend went to the school in Avdiivka, which was destroyed by Russian shelling, and extracted anything they could as fast as possible.

– We’ll take it to the kids in some other school, it’ll all be useful! – Sasha was happy.

This is the front line and you can easily lose your life here. Everyone is afraid to go to this spooky town, and rightly so. And these two guys decided to save primary school books…

This is just one of the stories that showed us the strength of motivation and determination of Ukrainians to defend their country and their identity. We will tell you about some others soon.

*In photos: we are helping our friend Sasha to carry books from the destroyed school during another trip to Avdiivka.