‘Every night, I dream of the bomb shelter'
Three weeks ago, Varvara Shevtsova was living in a bomb shelter in a metro station close to her home in Kyiv.
"The bomb shelter was the best choice,” says Ms Shevtsova, an 18-year-old social work student.
“We slept on the floor and we didn't have enough food and water. and there were two-and a-half hour queue s forth et oil et.i almost fainted many, many times.”
This week Ms Shevtsova moved to Montrose in Angus, where she has just taken a walk with her host “mother”, retired teacher Catriona Smart, who with her husband Harry has become one of the first Scottish families to take in a refugee under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.
"I like Montrose,” she says. “I hadn't heard of it before when I started talking to my host family, so I just looked it up on the internet. today i went for a walk around it with my host and it has charm, it is very green and very cosy and has a lot of fresh air.”
After a week living underground after the invasion, Ms Shevtsova and her mother fled Kyiv to the western city of Lviv, then to Poland and Germany, where they stayed with relatives. However, the journey was not easy.
Ms Shevtsova describes outbreaks of illness in the bomb shelter, where hundreds of people were packed together. Some contracted a stomach bug, while others suffered an illness she believes to be Covid.
"Everyone was coughing, we don’t know it was Covid, but we think it was,” she says. “I got sick and felt terrible when we were on the train to Lviv, it was awful.”
The pair had to travel without Ms Shevtsova’s father, as men are not allowed to leave ukraine in case they are needed for the war effort. "My dad stayed in Kyiv, where he works for the emergency services to help people to get out if their buildings fall down, putting fires out and so on,” she says.
While in Germany, where they lived in cramped conditions in Ms Shevtsova’s grandparent’s house, along with a number of other relatives who had also fled ukraine, ms shevtsova’ s mother heard of a potential visa scheme for her daughter to live in the UK.
She speaks fluent English but barely any german and realised her opportunities in Germany were limited.
"I had no job opportunities there due to my low level of German language,” she says. "I was studying for my bachelor’s degree in social work at university in Ukraine and I love this job. I was first in my class atuniversity and i want to be qualified and work in social work.”
Her mother began to look at matching websites, where hosts from across the UK had posted details of what they could offer.
"I had already been thinking of doing my master’s degree in Scotland ,” ms shevtsov as ays. “i love british culture. when i was 16, my parents gifted meat rip to London, which was my dream, and we went there, but I had never been to Scotland before.”
Meanwhile the Smarts, both 66, had begun talking about hosting a refugee.
Mr Smart, a published poet, said: "We don’t have any pressing work requirements, we are both essentially retired and we have space in the house, so we thought ‘why not?’”
The couple signed up to the website and after receiving an initial message from Ms Shevtsova’s mother, they arranged a Whatsapp call where they all spoke for the first time.
"We just clicked and that was when we decided that we would move forward with this,” says Mr Smart.
Although details of the homes for Ukraine scheme had not been finalised, they decided to get organised.
Ms shevtsov ah ad documents translated into English and made copies of her passport. By the time the scheme was announced, they were ready to go and her visa was processed quickly – despite being “overwhelmed” by the bureaucracy.
"It was a nightmare when you actually went through the process,” says Mr Smart. “It took us two-and-a-half hours to fill out the initial form, then Valvara realised we had made a spelling mistake in her name, but there was no way to correct that, you had to do the whole thing again.
"There was 30 pages of stuff to go through and a lot of questions we would have never imagined like ‘have you ever worked for the intelligenceit was just kind of absurd, there was a slightly mad quality about it all.
"When we first met her at Edinburgh airport, it was quite an emotional moment. Obviously we were all a little bit nervous of meeting each other, but we just jumped on the first bus and got to Waverley Station, where we hung out in Pret and took the first selfie of us all together and sent it to her parents.”
Despite her new beginning, Ms shevts ova is still haunted by her time in Kyiv during the war.
“What was most difficult was not having any end point,” she says. “You don't know when the war will end and how long you will have to stay in that kind of shelter and live like that – how many weeks or years. that kind of condition is such a nightmare.
And every night, I still dream of the bomb shelter–and somehow the underground is the main figure in my dreams, and that is horrible. I don’t think I will ever want to go on the Metro again.”
However, she is hopeful for the future. Ms Shevtsova plans to find a job and apply for university in Scotland to continue her social work studies.
"My hosts have given me my own bedroom and bathroom, it is the first time I am living normally in a long time,” she says. “The idea that I am here in Scotland and that I have my personal space is insane. I still can’t believe I am here.”