Because Once You Know, You Can’t Do Nothing

Olena Never Waited for Permission
 
Olena never sat down to write a strategy plan. She never thought, I don’t have the budget, the education, or the right qualifications to help people. When the war came, she simply started helping.
 
When we meet her, the first thing she says, before talking about the soldiers or the children or the villages destroyed, is this:
 
“Oh no, I forgot all the family photos at home.”
 
She says it with a laugh, standing in the middle of her warehouse in a small village outside Kyiv, surrounded by boxes of medical supplies, food packages, children’s clothing, and things she will deliver to people who have become her responsibility.
 
From the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Olena has worked with Novi. She supports civilians and soldiers alike. She feeds units on the frontlines. She visits hospitals, sits on the edge of beds, and holds the hands of men as they try to understand their new bodies.
 
“There are so many wounded,” she tells us. “The government doesn’t cover many of their prosthetics. Only volunteer rehab centers do. So we help. We help with their mental needs, too. We bring homemade meals, give them hugs, and buy them new clothes. They need time to realize who they’ve become now.”
 
This is Olena’s way of explaining what should break a person, but somehow strengthens her resolve.
 
Her “Big Love”: The Children
 
If you want to see Olena soften, ask her about the children.
 
She helps handicapped children, many of them living in a government-run orphanage where the director essentially lives full-time. “All the children you will meet there today,” she says, “they are my big love.”
 
She tells us about a boy with Down syndrome, “so kind, so open—impossible not to love.” She visits a few times a month. She always brings something. She always brings herself.
 
And then there are the families with many children. “I found one family with ten kids,” she says, “and now I help ten families. They need everything.”
 
Across the street from her warehouse is one such family. Six children. Their mother hung herself. The children were living alone in a pile of trash when Olena found them.
 
“We cleaned them up, cared for them,” she says. “The next day, the father showed up with a new woman. He made the 12-year-old take the mother down from the loop.”
 
Olena shakes her head. “We are trying to figure out how to help.”
 
This is her method: show up, ask questions, act.
 
A War That Rewrote Her Life
 
“I didn’t do this before the war,” Olena admits.
 
She was a teacher for mentally disabled children. She ran a few small businesses. She had a normal life.
 
Then the bombs began to fall. People hid in basements. Stores closed. Children were hungry.
 
“I realized I had to do something,” she says.
 
So she went.
 
To an occupied village where a local farmer butchered a pig and asked her to help cut it up. Then they divided the meat between the villagers. “We had never done this before,” she says. “But they were hungry. So we fed them.” Then, she noticed a milk factory nearby. She marched over, rang the bell, and asked to speak to the boss.
 
“There are hungry children here. They need milk,” she told him. “They must have thought I was a crazy person.”
 
For a year, the factory gave her milk for the children.
 
She tells us how she carried crates of milk past soldiers. How she tripped and fell with all the bottles in front of armed troops once. How tanks were expected at any moment. How the northern villages near Kyiv were all occupied, and yet she kept going.
 
“One village,” she says quietly, “every household lost someone. At least 18 children were shot.”
 
She visited another village where Russians killed people simply for having diesel on their hands, accused of making Molotov cocktails. Twenty-two people were burned alive.
 
Then the story of the woman whose husband was shot in front of her. The woman and her 11-year-old daughter were raped for two weeks. Neither speaks now. “They are mentally broken,” Olena says. “This is what the Russians are doing to us.”
 
She tells the stories without drama. Without theatrics. Just truth.
 
What One Woman Can Do
 
Today Olena has five volunteers and an ambulance. She works with several NGOs now because, as she says, “Many small ones can do a lot. One NGO cannot do so much.”
 
Novi supports some of her trips, provides funds, cleaning supplies, and the encouragement that sometimes matters more than anything.
 
When we ask how she survives this work, why she still smiles despite everything she has seen, she shrugs.
 
“The war changed everything. Now this is my life. I can’t imagine another,” she says. Then she laughs, a bright, disarming sound in a country recovering from trauma.
 
“Why so happy?” she echoes ( I just asked her).
“I don’t know. Maybe because helping people makes me alive.”

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