Living the war from a distance | “It’s very hard to live two lives”

Every evening, between 5 p.m. and 1 a.m., Val Stanislavov is on call.

Catherine Handfield
The Press

When an airstrike threatens her parents’ town (Khmelnytskyi, western Ukraine), her phone sounds an alert. Val immediately calls her father and mother to wake them up. These leave their beds to settle between two walls, where they are a little less likely to be injured if their residential tower is hit by a shell.

“At the beginning, my parents stayed awake in turn during the night to monitor the alerts, explains Val, met in his duplex in the west of Montreal. I told them to go to bed, that I would take care of it. »

Val Stanislavov and his wife Olga Stanislavova left Ukraine in 2012, worried about the political context. As Australia did not accept cats (the couple had one at the time), Val and Olga set their sights on Quebec, where their professional profile was in demand. It was in Montreal that their 6-year-old son Nikita was born. They learned French.

If Val and Olga are living through the war some 7,000 km from their native country, you can tell when you meet them: their heads and their hearts are in Ukraine.

When Vladimir Putin announced in a televised speech his intention to launch a “special military operation” in Ukraine on the evening of February 24, Val called his parents to urge them to get cash and gas cans. .

Since then, Val and Olga continue to work, “no choice”, but they constantly keep an eye on their screens, sometimes to find out about the progress of the war, sometimes to help their loved ones. “Just now, says Olga, a friend who has just taken refuge in France called me. She asked me to act as her interpreter. »

During the interview, Val called his parents, as he does several times a day. Her mother was in tears. “Why doesn’t NATO give planes and shut down the skies? she asked him. Val listened to her. That, too, he can do.

Guilt and need to help

Psychologist Garine Papazian-Zohrabian knows the reality of people who experience war far from their own. This is a common reality among immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers, she notes.

Garine Papazian-Zohrabian accompanied Syrian and Afghan refugees who lived in extreme anguish. She met young people completely incapable of studying. She also remembers this Syrian mother who cried while eating, because she was thinking of her starving sister.

Hamza Karim left Yemen in 2011 to continue his studies in Toronto. Four years later, war broke out in his native country, a war that has now lasted for seven years. According to the United Nations, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen is “disastrous”, “desperate”. More than 20 million people need help to meet their basic needs. Nearly 400,000 children are at imminent risk of dying of malnutrition.

“As a Yemeni, I know exactly how Ukrainians outside Ukraine feel. It’s very, very difficult,” says Hamza, who prefers to keep his last name secret for fear that his relatives in Yemen will be victims of reprisals.

Hamza, 29, continues to live. He works, he has just become a father. But his life, he says, is no longer the one it used to be.

In 2017, the one who lives in Toronto decided to leave Facebook. On his newsfeed, there was only terrible news, horror images. “I felt disconnected. In Yemen, he says, everything has been bombed. Hospitals, bridges, communication towers, cemeteries. In 2018, a Saudi raid hit a school bus. Forty children died.

Hamza feels guilty when he thinks of his nephews, his friends, his people. Every 75 seconds, a child dies in Yemen. “I rarely go to good restaurants,” he says. I don’t shop like I used to. I no longer travel, knowing that the cost of the trip could allow a family in Yemen to live for two, three years. »

Feeling of injustice

When talking to his relatives, Hamza also feels embarrassed. Canada, he recalls, is helping to perpetuate the conflict in Yemen by selling weapons to the Saudi-led coalition. “What should I tell them?” That Canada values ​​its economy more than their lives? »

According to Hamza, Ukraine deserves all the international support and all the media attention it receives. But it should be so for other peoples. “It’s crazy, how much everyone swings from what is happening in Yemen,” he drops.

Psychologist Garine Papazian-Zohrabian points out that “the selective empathy of the government and the media” instills a sense of injustice in many immigrant families. “It can give the impression that there is a hierarchy of human suffering”, underlines the psychologist, whose country of origin, Armenia, was the scene of an “atrocious” war last year, of which little has been said.

Hamza, who is president of the Yemeni Canadian Community, intends to continue to educate Canadians about the war in Yemen.

As for Val and Olga, they promise each other one thing. “When the war ends, we will go to Ukraine to help rebuild it,” says Olga.