Natalia, the volunteer from Kyiv, who is happy that she can be helpful to others

Natalia Zolotoverha is from Kyiv, she arrived in Bulgaria a month after the beginning of the war together with her daughter. In Kyiv, she worked at her tailoring atelier. Now most people have left and there is no work for her in the city. As soon as she arrived in Bulgaria, Natalia started working as a volunteer.

“I still do this to this day – we meet with people who come by buses, we accommodate them in hotels, we help with whatever we can, we collect aid… I am very happy that I can be useful here, that I can help! I was very worried about what I would have to deal with. We didn’t plan to stay this long at all.

We thought, ‘Well, we’ll go there for a week or two, up to a month…’ But because the situation remains difficult, and I’ve started helping people here, now I understand that I’m needed here.

In this time that I have been here, many people have come and gone. During the summer there were different people from different regions of Ukraine, but now only the people from the hot spots who cannot return home are still staying. These are Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Odessa, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and Donetsk regions.

I have one dream – for the war to end. This is the dream of all Ukrainians – for our children to live in peace and security, this is the scariest… this is my biggest dream!”

See the full interview with Natalia here (the subtitles are in Bulgarian).

Read the other stories:

Nadia, with the never-ending dream of becoming an Olympic champion
Diana on how much the illusion of normality helps
Natalia from Herson who wants her country to be the best in the world
Nadezhda from Nikolaev who believes that when it comes to helping others, Ukrainians could learn a lot from Bulgarians
Ekaterina from Odessa, who wants everything to be as it was before
The cobbler who now helps in a kitchen and says that Bulgarians actually like Ukrainians
Natalia from Kramatorsk, whose home was destroyed but still dreams of returning back
Katya, who we brought to tears by asking one naive question