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Elena Sankova - heroine of the LPR home front
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Last summer. Lugansk is surrounded. Ukrainian troops are methodically shelling the city. Elena Sankova, a teacher with enormous experience, decides to stay. Several mines land directly in the yard of her house. The walls are still painted with deep wounds from shrapnel rain.
After the defenders of Lugansk drove off the enemy, Elena took up the tragic statistics: more than two hundred education workers suffered from air raids and artillery shelling, five of them died; The houses and apartments of 130 people were completely or partially destroyed; Seven schools are closed and cannot be restored.
Behind each number are tens, hundreds of people: students, parents of students, members of teachers’ families. In addition, wage debts were growing; in general, teachers worked for free for more than six months and, perhaps, were the first to face such a manifestation of the war as hopelessness.
In December, Sankova announces the start of the first campaign - “Chain of Good”. The result was ten New Year's matinees for more than half a thousand children of Lugansk who survived the terrible war summer. These were holidays with a real Christmas tree, games, competitions and sweet gifts. About a hundred working teachers and their retired colleagues received food packages.
In February, the tireless Elena Yurievna begins the second campaign - “Solidarity: help the teacher survive!” With the help of specialized trade unions, lists of education workers in the most desperate situations have been compiled. The lists dryly and briefly indicate the reasons for financial assistance: a single mother, a lonely widow, five minor children, her home was destroyed, and she herself is disabled, buried two family members, a cancer patient, three dependent disabled people...
“Every day I listened to the stories of our teachers and every day I aged several lives,” Lena admits. “And every day I never ceased to be amazed at their courage: for months, long weeks, they invariably went to work, often walking, walking several kilometers to stand at the blackboard, write the topic of the lesson, teach and educate their students.
With a diagnosis of “cataracts of both eyes,” teacher of secondary school No. 44 L.P. Panfilova was doomed to become completely blind. After Elena talked about this on her Facebook page, 14 thousand rubles needed for the operation were donated by kind people from Kyiv and Norway. But the teacher refused the money, explaining that the doctors were encouraging about the delay, so the money should be donated to others. A few days later they found the teacher of school No. 54 N.A. Tertichnaya. with the same diagnosis and recommendation for urgent surgical intervention.
- With what a doomed look Ninel Andreevna took 800 rubles, which we give to everyone on the list: “Thank you, but how little it is, the operation requires almost ten times more, but where can I get the rest, I have no one to help, I absolutely There’s nowhere to get that kind of money, what should we do?” – says Elena Sankova. “A couple of minutes later, the dripping tears flowed in a stormy, non-stop stream in response to my words: “Sign up for the operation, you now have the money, next week they will be withdrawn from our card, delivered to Lugansk and immediately in your hands. There are still Good People in the world!”
An elderly, honored teacher has her own story: “My husband is in the hospital, the fourth stage of cancer, there is no medicine, no painkillers, he screams, cries, but he lives. I’ll at least bring him something to eat today...”
A delegation from the teaching staff of one of the city schools came: “We need to help the son of our deceased colleague, he is in the 11th grade, and literally within a month he was left an orphan: his father died at the front, his mother was torn apart by a shell during the last bombing, the boy has no one.” , and there is no money."
Teacher Olga Nosko and her husband raised sons aged 5 and 13, dreamed of a daughter, and a miracle happened. Only in the eighth month of pregnancy, Olya received a shrapnel wound, but the little girl did not rush into the world and was born on time. They named the baby Miroslava.
“Our teachers come with children, I listen and hear the little one: “Mom, can you buy me at least one piece of candy, didn’t your aunt give you money?” “I heard this question, asked in a quiet, quiet whisper, more than once during the issuance of money,” recalls Elena Sankova. “Now we can buy medicine for grandma, and she won’t be in pain!” - phrase of a 7-year-old child. “I dream about war every night, but you don’t tell my mother, I don’t tell her, don’t let her get upset, she already cries every day” - this is in my ear.
800 rubles – to each teacher and educator. Is this a lot or a little in a city where they know the value of every penny, where people of the noblest profession lived for months on the brink of poverty?!
From her own teaching experience, Elena Sankova knows: “Happy children mean happy parents,” so on June 1 she announced the third campaign - “Summer of Child Protection.” International Children's Day was declared a day of joy - 400 children had fun, sang, danced, played, enjoyed gifts and sweets on the first day of summer. A holiday of the same scope and degree of joy took place on July 18 - 110 July birthday people celebrated their birthday. During the summer, master classes were held almost every week, and not only for children, but also for their parents - together they played, studied, and created.
Visits to kindergartens harmoniously fit into the outline of vacation leisure. Kindergarten No. 42 is the only one in the LPR where children with Down syndrome, autism, hydrocephalus, and cerebral palsy are educated. Students and teachers from secondary school No. 40 came to visit them.
– How I love promotions when they are “two in one”! – Elena admits. – After the Day of Joy, I had a financial reserve left, and with great pleasure I spent it on cleaning products, plasticine and colored crayons, felt-tip pens and watercolors, colored paper and sketchbooks. And chocolate and candy gifts for all children and employees are a must!
Through the efforts of Elena, Luhansk kindergarten No. 74 became friends with a sister-city with the same serial number from the Arctic (Talnakh district of Norilsk). Thousands of kilometers were covered by handmade gifts for Lugansk peers, financial assistance from northern parents to children from Lugansk, kindergarten teachers and nannies.
These days, the director of the Perspektiva children's center, Elena Sankova, is visiting Russia. Restless and easy-going, a great inventor and dreamer, she announced the start of the fourth campaign in the last eight months, and its name is “Support.”
– Sixty children of Lugansk education workers will sit at the desks of our schools for the first time on September 1. At the moment I am in St. Petersburg, next week - in Moscow, in a few days - in Lugansk. There is a real opportunity to bring pens, plasticine, pencils, colored paper and cardboard, pencil cases and markers, gouache and watercolors, notebooks and sketchbooks to the besieged city in order to solemnly and joyfully congratulate the children of educators on their first day of school, and to support parents in difficult financial times. life,” says Elena. – I turned to St. Petersburg and Muscovites: if you have the desire and opportunity to purchase and transfer stationery for children to Lugansk, write to me in a personal message on my FB account.
Personally, I have no doubt that Sankova will return home with huge bags and trunks - those that she can drag on herself, and others that she will find the opportunity to deliver later, but she will be in time for the Day of Knowledge in any case. Because Elena is a person who is demanding, first of all, of herself, and if she sets her mind to something, she will definitely do it.
Amazing, magnificent Elena Sankova - author, organizer, director, performer of truly large-scale good deeds. Of course, she has assistants - colleagues who are equally passionate about the noble cause of raising children. But it was Elena’s unbridled energy that, like a fountain and a volcano, awakened the most touching and pure feelings in the souls of hundreds of people around the world who continue to help Sankova’s projects financially - crowns, rubles, hryvnias, American and Canadian dollars are sent to Lugansk by Donbass-sympathizing inhabitants of the planet. And for every penny she holds the answer - it is in hundreds of photographs posted on her page on social networks, it is in hundreds of memories of adults and small Luhansk residents, for whom Elena Sankova pushed the war into the background.
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