A fruit and vegetable entrepreneur from Fuente Álamo gives a house to three refugee families

Aliona, Leonid, Svetlana and Vika are celebrating. Although they are from different families, anyone would say: they have known each other for a long time and have come together on the occasion of Nikita’s 16th birthday. The music mixes with the shouts of enthusiasm from the children, whose only concern is opening presents and hugging their parents.

Suddenly, explosions are heard. Explosions as strong as the grab that one of them makes on his mother’s shirt. Little ones instinctively lower their heads. That noise is not that of a balloon bursting, but that of a war. There is no more music.

The three families of Ukrainians reside in Chernigov, a historic city located in the north of Ukraine. They all desperately go to one of the bunkers enabled to protect themselves from the bombardment to which the surface is being subjected. This is how a day goes by, and two, and three… Up to nine. The situation outside does not promise any improvement, but the future of the fifteen members is not much more promising in that dark cellar.

Armed with courage in one hand and desperation in the other, they go outside to face the rain of projectiles that continually fly over them. They travel in three cars and with improvised luggage: each family barely fills a suitcase. They cling to the chink of a better future. Like so many others who went on to swell the death toll. However, against all odds, luck was allied with these three families. Or rather: with twelve of its fifteen members. The three men of fighting age – in Ukraine all men between the ages of 18 and 60 are obliged to remain on national territory – had to stay.

Finally, fate led them to Fuente Álamo. It was in this town in Campo de Cartagena where the generosity of José Atanasio, owner of the El Monarca fruit and vegetable company, gave them the warmest of welcomes. Athanasius had made a huge country house available to the City Council to be used by Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.

Housing with all luxury

It is a house with all kinds of luxury and comforts. Those who have been able to contemplate it assure that the Venetian stucco decorates its walls, it has air conditioning and an automatic door for the garage, among other details. A house, according to these sources, that the businessman “was perfectly prepared to live in” and that, in no case, responds to the neglected aspect of a second residence. In addition, the “giant” refrigerator was overflowing with food.

It is a new life with many facilities, but with an intangible and impossible difficulty to overcome: the three families are incomplete, since they lack the children’s parents. Anyone who looks at a photo of the moment of the birthday celebration and one of the present realizes that, if there were a unit of measurement for terror, her faces would have surpassed any record.

Now they are trying to adjust to their new life, away from the bombs, but also from their loved ones. They are in the process of regularizing their situation and are willing to find a job with which to return the gesture they have had with them and, why not, also occupy their heads. The wives and children of the three men who had to remain in Ukraine “are looking forward to meeting them again.” Wishing to celebrate a birthday. Celebrate life.