Lights back on...

When we woke up the power was back on in Rivne, which meant that work must have gone on throughout the night after the heavy shelling of key energy infrastructure on Saturday. On the way back to Lviv we took a 1 kilometre detour down a dirt road to walk beside a river lagoon/mud flat, where men were fishing and there were wading birds galore, e.g. great egrets and herons. It seemed like a different reality from that of blackouts and sirens, and other day to day realities of a country at war. We spent some time watching a man wading about half a kilometre into the middle of the lagoon (the speck in the distance in the third photo); he then turned around and started wading back! Why??

We had some interesting feedback to Bob's comment in last night's blog, about aid recipients having had enough of soft toys. It came from the coordinator of the families' charity in Kyiv, who took some of the soft toys we brought to a refugee family with 4 children. She said,  "They sent a huge thank you." So we can never make assumptions about the value of aid.