Interview 4. The Test on Adulthood. Victoria Pustovit
Odesa resident Victoriia Pustovit tells how during the war children proved to be more serious and responsible than some adults and why you shouldn’t relax at this difficult moment.
The war was a test for Ukrainians, particularly on humanity and courage. When some communities pull together and do their best to help the troops and each other, others go into the shadows and refuse to help. Viktoriia Pustovit, a computer science teacher at Odesa School No. 22, tells about this, giving her energy to volunteering but not having much support from her superiors. Victoriia urges us not to relax and to take at least small steps every day to help Ukraine win this war.
A cure for despair
Family is my resource. Unfortunately, for me, the current situation is lingering. In 2020, when the pandemic began, I already felt the lack of a resource. I lost my mom, one of the most important people to me. Then it was as if we recovered from the pandemic, there were fewer restrictions, and we started travelling again, going to theatres and movies.
War came, and again we had to look for a resource. I realized that I had to become such a resource to set my relatives up for life and keep their spirits up. Some of them are desperate, my daughter had panic attacks during every explosion, so it was necessary at least from a distance to calm her down. My teenage son does not show how he is experiencing the war, but he has begun to close in himself, so he also needs to be explained how this could happen in the twenty-first century.
Every day is for victory
I feel survivor’s guilt syndrome – I saw the shelling in Kharkiv, Mariupol, near us Mykolayiv is constantly suffering. I understood that I could not change it in any way and had to help people but it was very hard to find tasks. We applied to volunteer centers, went around the city to buy food and gave it to help, to be involved in some way.
Odesa is not shelled as often, although we have alarms every day. It is very frightening to have a conventional sense of calm when you go out and don’t read the news. Everyone is relaxed, people pretend nothing is going on – they go to the beach, sit in cafes, children play outside during the air-raid siren. We are not adapted to war, that is why the tragedy of that shelled house stirred up the whole Odesa. Maybe it’s a defensive reaction. The pain overwhelms me because there are people who are in much worse circumstances, and we don’t sympathize with them or only pretend to sympathize. It’s horrible. We’re too relaxed.
I don’t know if everyone feels what I do, how lucky we are and how unlucky others are – those who lost their home and left to save their lives. Each and everyone has to decide what they can and want to do now.
Every day I wake up with the thought that today I must do something to help us win. This is an issue that many of my friends are dealing with. If we have funds, we donate them to help those in need. If we can make nets, we go and make them. If we can make someone’s day better, we do it. With the help of parents, teachers and pupils we collected food packages for territorial defence groups and those in need, and we made Easter gifts for our defenders. Every day we do something to make someone feel better. My relatives helped produce protective structures in the city. Those relatives and acquaintances who live abroad are donating and bringing in help. Everyone is working as much as they can.
While we’re all thinking about global problems, russia is spending crazy amounts of money to destroy our entire country.
War of the worlds
When discussing where we would like to go to EdCamp, my colleagues and I said unanimously – Kharkiv. We were going to visit that city so many times! I had the tickets and I knew who I was going with. I had a big plan for the trip, a busy schedule for the whole March but everything I had planned and dreamed about got turned upside down and it depended not on me but on the fact that evil came to us, and I could not stop it.
For me, the invasion of the russians is like the invasion of aliens in the movie “War of the Worlds.” They had agents here and had been planning the invasion for a long time. We didn’t seem to notice all this, we were living in our own rosy world, planning our lives but there was a real threat. On the eve of the war, I talked to a colleague who saw a dream about war. I thought that in the twenty-first century this was impossible but it turned out that our realities with the fight for the environment and sorting of garbage do not correlate at all with the realities of another country. It was a shock for me to realize that while we are all thinking about global problems, russia is spending crazy amounts of money to destroy our entire country.
The main lesson
Finally, we all made up our minds about identity. For myself, I understood this clearly. I didn’t even know how much I love my country. At present, I feel pain and pride. We could not understand ourselves through reading, watching movies and history. Now we need to live through this personal pain, this war, to identify ourselves.
Educational front
Like other relatively peaceful regions of Ukraine, the Odesa region hosts internally displaced people whose children study at local educational institutions – children who stayed here and those who went abroad but continue to study remotely. According to the Odesa regional military administration, there are 55 000 internally displaced people registered in the region, including 20 000 children. More than 49 000 children went abroad and continue to study remotely. Therefore, the work of Odesa teachers has become even more intense.
To help teachers in Ukraine continue teaching children during the war, the EdCamp Ukraine community has launched a crowdfunding campaign – raising funds for computer equipment and Internet access for teachers who have lost teaching equipment because of the war. It also plans to use the funds raised to provide psychological support to teachers and organize conferences to share experiences of teaching during the war. Citizens from abroad can join the campaign on the GoFundMe platform as well as Ukrainians on the EdCamp Ukraine page by adding the comment “My War. Lessons” to the payment.
Unsupported
Unfortunately, our school community has had different perceptions of the war. Not everyone understands how important it is to readjust and adapt to new realities. My team of like-minded people at school and I banded together and support each other, doing something together. During the first two weeks on vacation, we were completely isolated and didn’t know what to do. The school authorities were not prepared for such a scenario either, they didn’t know how to support their subordinates, the psychologist resigned. We were looking for ways to help and visiting other schools – making nets and cooking food for the military.
Unfortunately, the school management decided not to take the initiative and to wait. It was traumatic for me because there was no support from the administration. No one rallied us, nor reassured us. While in other schools the teachers worked to help the Armed Forces of Ukraine, our institution stood on the sidelines. Then the school made a volunteer headquarters but our teachers, pupils, or parents weren’t involved. We had to volunteer elsewhere. This is a lesson – school principals need to understand how important it is to support their subordinates, the teachers, in times like these. We are all in the same situation and often confused, but the administration should set people up, even if they don’t know what to do. After all, you can just say that everything will be fine because we must have the resource to work with children! However, no one gave us a charge of cheerfulness and confidence. No one supports the teachers and children psychologically. At times like this, you get very lost and don’t know what to do but thanks to our group of like-minded people and the initiatives of EdCamp Ukraine, we were able to find the right words of support for parents, teachers and pupilsof the school.
After two weeks of vacation, we continued the learning process. We had less time to volunteer and help but even that didn’t stop the teachers. I see principals from other schools in our EdCamp community rallying their teams, they take it for granted and can’t appreciate how important it is to their subordinates. I want others to understand how important the role of the principal is. Unfortunately, not everyone has that kind of support.
School principals need to understand how important it is to support their subordinates, the teachers, in these difficult times.
Overcoming confusion
The hardest day for me since the war began was February 25. That’s when we all finally realized what had happened. Children instantly started going abroad. We had 25% of the total 1 300 students of the school who left, which is a significant number. Some of the kids don’t have a connection.
On February 25th, I had six computer science lessons on my schedule. I did not understand whether to hold lessons, or whether children needed me but for all the lessons the pupils came out to me. In the first days, I reminded them about the lessons on media literacy and how to distinguish fakes. Also, many times I stopped our teachers so they too wouldn’t be influenced by disinformation and fakes. I had to restrain the flow of fake information in the work chat and the children’s behaviour turned out to be mature and adequate, unlike the parents’. When we suggested to calm down and move a bit, the children said: “With me everything is fine, but calm down my parents, because they are running around the apartment like mad”. Therefore, we had to calm them down too, because their parents were very confused.
I realized that children and parents needed us (teachers) more than ever. In the early days of the war, our work was to assess the emotional state of pupils and to calm them so that they could see and feel the teacher and know that everything is ok. According to the children, they are more relaxed when they see that I am home.
IT army
A lot of things have changed in studying. For example, we got instructions on what we should do when we hear the air-raid siren. We never had that before. We used to tell them about it in civil defence classes, but they didn’t feel the need to do it before. Now when they hear the sirens, they realize that it’s very important.They’re very loud in our city. Now the children don’t have levity but there is much more seriousness and responsibility. They’ve probably realized how important is what I told them before. They have experienced the lessons of survival in combat conditions.
The children love computer science; it’s a modern, actual subject so the only thing that has changed in my teaching is that I offer them video lessons for individual work. More pupils can only learn in the asynchronous mode because many children are abroad and cannot always join the zoom meeting. Everything else hasn’t changed because I’ve always tried to link the lesson to practice and make an analogy of where it might be needed in life.
It’s very important now that kids can not just memorize the material but have adaptation skills. I’ve seen how it works with those who already have those skills. My kids in 6th grade know how to support each other, even when they are in different countries. Honestly, thanks to quarantine, we don’t have that much trouble adjusting to life via zoom but kids abroad often say they really want to go back because they miss the communication, hugs, and other things of normal childhood life.
Creeds
My pride is first of all the people of Ukraine. Our people are courageous, giving themselves completely for the state. I have changed my mind about the leadership of the country that supports us. If our head of state went into hiding, we would not be able to stand. What he is doing is helping people not to be confused in a difficult situation, but to find the strength to fight and win.
I have great faith in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, our people and volunteer movements. I am confident that victory will surely come. Everyone must work in their place and do what they can do best. I’m not sure I could hold a gun, my place is to be a teacher, to support my IT army because we teach kids how to recognize fakes and perform DDOS attacks. This is very relevant and important right now. It is important to clearly understand where the truth is and where it is not.
A place on the map
I want people abroad to understand and tell their children that there is a great European country – Ukraine. Since 2005 I have been travelling to different countries, and when people asked me where I am from, they always asked if this is russia. It offended me. I tried to tell people about Ukraine and orient them, at least geographically but they still associated us with russia.
I want the Europeans to understand that we are an independent country with a great history. I don’t want us to be pitied. I want people to know about our great history, about Kyivska Rus, I want people abroad to remember that we are a European country. It pains me that before the country was not noticed, people did not know that we exist.
I want Ukrainians abroad to talk about the state so that everyone would understand where Ukraine is and what we are doing for the world. We are full participants in the global world, we must be reckoned with and know that we are a distinctive state.
Text – Halyna Kovalchuk.
The interview series My War. The Lessons was prepared with financial support from the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation – a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of EdCamp Ukraine and the Foundation.
