This morning in the street, I witnessed a scene that really moved me: a young woman dressed in black was on her knees begging with a small sign that read: help a young widow with two children. Leaning over her was an old grandmother who said: “Come to my village, take your children and come to my house. I live with my three grandchildren, we have a cow, there will be milk for all.” I couldn’t help but embrace this wonderful grandma, a real saint. Oksanna and I could not help weeping witnessing such kindness.

She is, in the words of Solzhenitsyn’s Matriona’s House “the righteous one without whom there is no village. Nor city. Nor our whole land.”