"If you start helping others, at some point you can't stop doing it."

Roman Yefremenko is from the Poltava region, but moved to Kharkiv four years ago to study. He is a chef by profession and worked in a local restaurant until February 24. Then the war started. 

As the violence escalated, Roman was urged to leave the region, but he stayed in Kharkiv, which by then had become his home.

"When I heard the explosions and realized what was happening, I didn't even have a thought to pack up and leave,” the 21-year-old says. “There was a feeling that my country and my city needed me, and that, despite staying, I was not doing enough."

Although he quickly lost his job, he found a new vocation on the second day of the war. It was volunteering.

At first, Roman prepared food for the residents of Kharkiv who had stayed in the city. Later, he joined the Rescue Now team and began to take care of lonely elderly people, people with disabilities and people who could not care for themselves. He was also involved in the evacuation of the most vulnerable people from dangerous areas of Kharkiv.

For more than a month, he and his friends lived and worked in a basement. They plotted safe routes and assembled humanitarian kits, only returning home to wash.

"It is difficult to say that now, or in the first weeks of the war, there was any completely safe place or district in Kharkiv,” recalls Roman. “You never knew which place would be shelled. We experienced different things, we evacuated the elderly people literally under fire, we were constantly moving through basements and shelters."

Now, once a month, Roman buys and delivers food and medicine to elderly people. Most of the elderly people he cares for have serious health problems. Money and medicine are in short supply. They have high levels of anxiety and even trauma due to constant shelling. The help of volunteers is often the only thing that has got them through the war.

"When you hear words of sincere gratitude from people who are certainly going through hard times – when, without having much money, they offer you almost the last thing they have – it's hard to hold back,” says Roman. “Sometimes, they even thank me with poems, each time a new one – and I just sit and listen to them."

Together with Rescue Now, Roman takes care of more than 600 elderly people in Kharkiv. After losing his job, volunteering has become a real vocation for him. He now takes on new tasks without even thinking.

"If you start helping others, at some point you can't stop doing it,” he says.

As soon as Rescue Now received the support of UNICEF and the aid points ‘Together. Meeting points’ appeared in Kharkiv, Roman was among the first who joined to continue his mission to help vulnerable social groups.