Rachel Clarke: Ukraine—how do you live in the face of death?

For her first six months of work as a doctor in the small Ukrainian town of Sambir, Olena Parijchuk was paid precisely nothing. She and a small group of fellow physicians had an audacious plan—to transform a dilapidated tuberculosis sanitorium on the town’s periphery into a 30 bed hospice. They toiled and painted and sawed and heaved, doctors-turned-labourers with more grit than sense. “Some of my colleagues in Kyiv told me I was mad,” Olena tells me, smiling broadly. “And maybe I was.”That was six years ago. Today, the white walls of the Mother Theresa Hospice dazzle with refracted autumn sunshine. Olena is keen to take me inside, but she can’t resist first showing off the hospice gardens. She gestures eagerly to a field bisected by spindly fruit trees. “Look! When the war began, President Zelensky told us to grow fruit, to grow vegetables. This field has every species of…
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