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Change

S&U interviews

War & peace

30 March 2023

5 min read

After the anniversary

Ukrainian musician Lyuba Reznichenko reflects on the war’s anniversary and on the aid given in so many ways. Interview by Peter Robertson.

Peter Robertson

Peter Robertson is Christian Aid's senior humanitarian journalist.

A woman sits on a chair in a field holding a large stringed musical instrument.

Lyuba Reznichenko playing her bandura.

Christian Aid.

Christian Aid first met Lyuba Reznichenko in July 2022 after the then-25-year-old had fled her home, and her studies at the music academy in Dnipro, for a remote village in western Ukraine. She was sharing a bungalow with three families, including a friend from her church in Dnipro.

Her parents, brother and three sisters were still in Kherson, under Russian occupation - they were safe but Lyuba could not get to them. She spoke about her worries and said she missed playing music but was enjoying the nature around her.

I caught up with Lyuba, in Lviv, via a Zoom interview. She updated us on the liberation of Kherson but explained her parents were under constant shelling from the Russians.

Lyuba plays the bandura – the national instrument of Ukraine. Her father advised her to take her bandura with her when she escaped, so if she ended up with nothing, she could still busk. She has since staged performances in Lviv city centre to raise people’s spirits and talked about how emotional people get: “They all want peace and victory,” she said.

She also spoke about her faith, the work she has been doing helping refugees and the support she received from Christian Aid’s partner, Hungarian Interchurch Aid.

Lyuba said when she looks back at the past year, she gets frustrated:

“It sometimes feels like I am ready to succumb to all that. But I understand that we cannot do that. We must hope, we must pray. I do believe that God will help us and victory will be ours.”

What was your life like before the war?

I was studying at the Music Academy in Dnipro. Before that, I went to see my parents in Kherson during the New Year holidays… I was planning to go visit them again in March, but 24 Feb changed everything. I was in Dnipro and my entire family was in Kherson.

What did you feel when you learnt about the Russian invasion on 24 Feb?

Like the majority of Ukrainians, I started getting phone calls at 4am from my friends who were saying: “get up, the war has started.” It was horrible, I was very scared as we heard the first air raids and explosions. Horror is the only thing I remember about that day.

What happened next?

I stayed in Dnipro until mid-March. To avoid plunging into panic and depression and as a believer, I will be honest with you, I prayed a lot. I do believe that God supports, protects and helps. The church I used to go to opened a centre for the first wave of refugees from Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhya regions. As my own family was in the area under occupation and I could not do anything to help them, I decided to start helping those refugees.

Then I learnt of an opportunity to evacuate to western Ukraine in March, I grabbed it. This is how I ended up in Transcarpathian Region.

What’s your experience of interaction with Christian Aid?

I stayed with a very kind and hospitable family in a village there. They have many children and helped other refugees and I helped them every time I could. Then, in May I learnt of the Hungarian charity HIA, Christian Aid partner, and registered with them…

They supported me financially. As a student, I did not have any means. I could not ask my parents for helps as they were living under occupation and banks did not work there…

How did you stay in touch with your family?

It was a very difficult situation. There have been protracted periods, like a week, two weeks and a half, when I could not get in touch with them as there was no phone connection, no internet in Kherson. I was horrified by the news I read: a strike here, an explosion there. I was thinking about my family all the time.

But there were moments when I could reach them on a chat app. The connection was bad, but still, and when you hear the voice of your nearest and dearest, that’s a great relief…

How is your family now?

Kherson was liberated on 11 November… But then the situation only deteriorated because the Russians were shelling it from the right bank almost non-stop. My parents tell me that it is going on almost without interruptions.

When did you move to Lviv and return to Dnipro?

At the end of August, I moved to Lviv where I met other believers who were actively involved in charity work. I worked with them, too. We staged performances in the city centre. I played bandura and sang patriotic songs to raise people’s morale.

Then I returned to Dnipro to complete my studies… I continued cooperation with this organisation there… We were quite active there, too. We toured the region with performances, I played bandura a lot.

What is people’s reaction to your performances?

The reaction is abundant. People do react to my songs. They cry, too. They become very emotional. They all want peace and victory.

What do you feel about the first anniversary of the war?

It is all very difficult. When it all started, there was hope that it would end in a week or two. And then a month passed, another… Still there was hope that it will just come to an end.

When I look back at the year, I just become frustrated. It sometimes feels like I am ready to succumb to all that. But I understand that we cannot do that. We must hope, we must pray. I do believe that God will help us and victory will be ours.

What do you think about the UK charity organisations helping Ukrainians?

First, I want to thank you from the bottom of heart for supporting us all this time. This is an awful situation and many Ukrainians need help. Especially those living in eastern Ukraine, in hot spots, which have seen fierce fighting, the newly liberated territories where people have no place to live, where they lost loved one… Those people need more support.

I would like to say that more aid is directed there. Still, it is impossible to live there. It is not safe at all because of the non-stop raids and explosions. Those people who evacuated to the west of Ukraine need help. But they sometimes cannot get it because all the attention is focused on the east.

So if you can it would be good to distribute all the assistance among those staying in the east and those who moved here, to the west.

Article

Change

Identity

12 April 2024

1 min read

How to be (un)successful

Could busyness really be the counterfeit of significance?

Pete Portal

Pete lives Cape Town, and works with men coming out of gangs and drug addiction. He is the author of How to be (Un)Successful.

A man sits cross legged in a park with a laptop on the grass in front of him. He looks to one side.

Malte Helmhold on Unsplash.

You probably want to be a success.

That’s OK – it’s a very reasonable thing to desire.

The questions ‘Am I successful?’ or ‘What is success?’ are deeply significant and to ask such questions is a normal part of the human experience. The yearning for a life of purpose, as elusive as it can seem, is felt acutely by the majority of those who have ever lived – certainly by more than might admit it. (Those feelings of inadequacy you experience may be more common than you think.) And now more than ever it is understandable that you may feel you are not particularly successful, or not successful enough. We are assaulted by a combination of capitalism and consumerism, social media and cancel culture, polarised ideologies and virtue signalling, topped off by the wounds of our parents passed down – all of which can amalgamate into producing some pretty angsty, pressure-driven people.

It’s not just you; I’m pretty sure we all have a bit of a problem with success (the word itself is so subjective), and our idea of it can often be fuelled by wounds rather than vision, romanticised projections rather than reality. Because we are all somewhat flawed, any worldly contribution we try to make can get precariously entangled with a me-fixated narcissism on a fairly regular basis.

Most of us know that being successful is not simply about money, looks, large numbers or power. That’s just a caricature to which very few reasonable people actually subscribe, right?

Well, sure – at least on the surface.

My social-media feeds are rammed full of early-to-mid-thirties enjoying a kind of spandex-clad transcendence.

The thing is, despite seeing through it and being repelled by it in others (we see it’s all vanity, inch-deep), something in us longs for success on these terms. But much more interesting than skimming along the surface of ‘success’ is excavating deeper into some of the core motivating beliefs we humans have about ourselves, such as mistaken pride in thinking we each control our destiny, or paranoia that tells us there’s an inherent scarcity of everything in the world. These are the swell that carry along the undercurrent of comparison – where we see the lives of others and long for a different reality for ourselves. And comparison – so often eliciting either pride or despondency – rarely ends well.

A cursory glance through the wisdom of online articles on the matter tells us millennials typically understand that material wealth isn’t the marker of success – there are enough old, sad, rich people to show that. Instead, success has now become synonymous with living a life that others want. Chase an experience. Go adventure. Wanderlust. #yolo. To succeed in life is to publicly consume as many unique experiences as you can during your short time on earth.

I don’t know about you, but my social-media feeds are rammed full of early-to-mid-thirties enjoying a kind of spandex-clad transcendence. Success for today’s generation would seem to look a lot less like the overweight suit-clad city trader selling their soul to the system, making shedloads of cash to buy a slice of suburban real estate with a Porsche in the drive, and more like the lithe and mindful global citizen doing ‘life on my terms’. Think coastal living, yoga on a stand-up paddleboard in the morning, slaying the emails in your industrial co-working space, eating a superfood lunch, nailing a couple of zoom calls early evening before smashing some gua bao and margaritas with ‘your peeps’ at the latest pop-up restaurant before taking an Uber home. #squadgoals

There’s no escaping the fact that technology has shrunk the world and as James Mumford notes, ‘global capitalism has brought so many different ways of life closer to us than ever before. We can see vividly a greater number of people who we want to be.’ This can bring up hidden feelings we thought we’d buried long ago.

I often feel unfulfilled. Sometimes completely lost. For years I haven’t been able to admit that. Until fairly recently I would find myself looking at others and thinking: ‘Don’t they ever struggle with life’s big questions? Don’t they ever want to give up? Surely, I can’t be the only one sinking under the weight of comparison?’ Far from freeing me from my broken sense of self, the version of faith I was trying to live by was exacerbating the core wound I recognised in myself. That wound was a sense of feeling a failure, unsuccessful. And like an unwelcome parasite, it fed on comparison to others.

Read any random couple of articles on ‘successful’ people talking about how ‘successful’ they are, and a lot of what’s conveyed is a profoundly angsty relationship with time: ‘You only have one shot at life’; ‘I don’t want to waste my time on earth’; ‘You can never get it back.’

It’s as though we have an inherent recognition – and for some, dread – of the physical limits placed on us by virtue of being mortal and human. But what if unencumbered productivity, unceasing activity and unrelenting progress – however that is defined – are signs less of success than of self-centred insecurity? Could busyness really be the counterfeit of significance?

It’s as if we have, left unchecked, an insatiable appetite for accomplishment. It’s not hard to see where this comes from. Paul Kingsnorth comments that: “Modern economies thrive by encouraging ever-increasing consumption of harmful junk, and our hyper-liberal culture encourages us to satiate any and all of our appetites in our pursuit of happiness. If that pursuit turns out to make us unhappy instead – well, that’s probably just because some limits remain un-busted.” He goes on to suggest that this is a fundamentally spiritual problem, because ‘a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit.’

So far so depressing?

It needn’t be.

Fullness of life – true success, if you like - is found in living to serve others above ourselves.

Despite my continued struggle with all of the above, (neatly summarised by the inner critic’s voice asking me ‘what have you got to show for your life?’), I am beginning to learn that ‘life in its fullness’ (as Jesus once described what he came to offer) is found elsewhere. So, what does this look like and how do we successfully access this fullness of life? This quote can come across – and I’ve heard it used as such – like a marketing slogan, dangling a golden carrot in front of sad or vulnerable people to recruit them into church. Presumably that wasn’t what Jesus had in mind.

Now there’s no denying the fact that Jesus was one of the most influential people who ever lived. Arguably THE most influential. Generally, even those who don’t follow him recognize that what he taught was pretty timeless. (Also evidenced by the 2.6 billion people today who are happy to be called Christian.) All of this suggests he had some fairly wise takes on how to live life well, and that his perspectives have stood the test of time. So, when he is recorded as teaching about how to discover what he described as ‘life in its fullness’, the chances are there is something valuable and insightful for those of us searching for success.

The thing is, in this particular speech, Jesus conceptualized ‘life in its fullness’ as a shepherd who ‘lays down his life for the sheep’. Sure, he was talking about himself, but he was also talking more broadly about the human experience. Jesus’ point is that fullness of life – true success, if you like - is found in living to serve others above ourselves. This flies in the face of much conventional ‘self-help’ wisdom, but it would seem you cannot find true abundance any other way.

We might well think: ‘Well hang on a minute, Jesus claimed to die for the sins of humanity – we can’t all do that!’ Absolutely right, and please don’t try. But in dying and raising to life again, Jesus foreshadowed the journey of surrender and rebirth that each person who chooses true success must go through. As C. S. Lewis said: ‘Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead.’ This new life of serving others above ourselves – where we seek to align our desires, loves and motivations, our use of time and energy, words and actions with those of Jesus – comes to resemble the promise of life in its fullness. Discovering that would seem fairly successful wouldn’t it?

How to be (UnSuccessful) is published by SPCK.