Shulik Viktoriia Volodymyrivna

“My name is Shulik Viktoriia Volodymyrivna. I was born in 1962.

In the late 90s, life was hard, so my daughter and I sold an apartment in Kyiv and moved to Zhytomyr region, we bought a house, made repairs there. It was fully entitled in my daughter’s name. I thought then: who knows how long I have left? And this way, my daughter would immediately get the house without bureaucratic red tape.

Once an old friend from Kyiv, at whose company I once worked, called me and said: please come for a couple of weeks, help me – I have a little child, and there is so much vegetable preservation to do, and a lot of work around the house – I can hardly cope…

So I asked my daughter: what am I to do? She said: go, mom, I can manage here myself.

There was no work in the village, I could earn at least some penny in Kyiv…

So I went. I worked there even longer. I lived at my friend’s, helped her with the housework and got a job as a janitor at school. I kept sending money for my daughter.

At that time, she met some man, began to live with him and he persuaded her to sell the house. She sold it. Without my permission, even without my knowledge.

She promised: “Mom, we’ll be fine, we can live together. And when I returned to the village, her partner said: you won’t live with us…”

I was still a healthy woman then, but I had nowhere to go…

I met a man in Kyiv, had lived with him for four and a half years. He scoffed at me wherever he felt like… That I don’t see now is the result of his ‘work’. He plucked my right eye with his toe.

Then I lost my left eye because he kept beating me. He drank heavily. I did not drink. I am an ordinary, common person, I understand that there are certain days for this – different holidays, dates. All the more so that I have a medical education, I understand how harmful alcohol is. But he drank, and his friends constantly came to him.

When I became completely blind, he brought me to Teremki and put me on a bench. I sat there for seven months. People got used to me, they carried me food, but I lived on a bench, I could not take two steps from it. So seven months passed.

Then, one day, some madman, maybe a drug addict, grabbed my hair and shouted: “What are you sitting here for?” He pushed me on a concrete parapet, and I kicked hard. Shortly after that, my leg began to rot.

An ambulance took me, they operated on me, and when the time of my discharge came, the doctors agreed that I would be temporarily placed in another hospital, because I was a former health worker.

Now I have been discharged from that another hospital. I have no documents. I am completely blind. I do not know what to do…”