Like everyone else in the country, visually impaired people in Ukraine were terrified when the invasion began. In their case, they had an 88-year-old liaison for visually impaired Ukrainians to retreat. Kit is the director of a Dnipro factory that assembles railroad components and was founded in 1945 by the association, one of the oldest organizations in the country. The factory is non-profit, which is managed and staffed mainly by visually impaired people. Kit’s plant is one of 48 owned by the organization in areas controlled by Ukraine. Another 32 companies are located in Russian-occupied Ukraine. Serhiy Kit, director of the Dnepropetrovsk educational and productive enterprise of the Ukrainian Blind Union Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Guardian “We were the first shelter to open in Ukraine on February 25,” Kit said. “Twenty-six of us [association] members in Kharkov called me and asked me to help them leave. We said they could stay at the factory. “ Kharkiv, 18 miles (30 km) from the Russian border, has been bombed by Russian forces since the first day of the invasion, while Dnipro, in south-central Ukraine, has been relatively calm. Kharkiv members drove with their families to Dnipro. “We knocked and found mattresses for them and cleaned one of our offices,” Kit said. “But then the calls kept coming. “We had never done anything like this before, but we could not stop.” The factory houses about 90 people who fled the bombing. Many others passed on their way to relatives elsewhere in Ukraine. Their former offices and basement are full of beds and bags with people’s belongings stacked nearby. Anatoly Savelevic says he left his house near the front line because he could no longer stand the sound of artillery. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Guardian Although Kit initially tried to accommodate visually impaired people, they gave beds to neighbors and relatives of club members, people with other disabilities and displaced people who arrived in Dnipro with nowhere else to go. Anatoly Savelevich, a 71-year-old blind man from Slovyansk, a town in eastern Ukraine near the front line, said he left because he could not stand the sound of artillery. He was evacuated by volunteers but left his wife behind after refusing to leave. “I am still young enough to remarry,” Savelevic said with a laugh. “I did not see why we were being tortured anymore, but he wanted to stay.” He arrived at the factory in pain, the aftermath of a heart attack he suffered last month. He said he had not eaten in 24 hours. The others, non-visually impaired residents in his dormitory, give him tea and cookies. Andriy Kit helps Anatoly Savelevich. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Guardian The director’s son Andriy Kit, who is a factory manager and standup comedian, went out to buy some drugs from Savelevych. He refused to take Savelevich’s money. Other visually impaired people have come with their relatives as well as children. “For the blind, what worries them most is their children because they can not see the danger,” Andriy said. Andriy, who has no visual impairments, grew up with a blind father and a visually impaired mother in a dormitory for the visually impaired – the norm in Soviet times. “The Soviets ghettoized visually impaired people and kept them out of the rest of society,” Andriy said. “There was even a city outside Moscow called the Blind City.” The factory stopped production when the war broke out, but its workers, Andriy said, used to go on the bus alone. “They know the route, sometimes they come in teams, but mostly on their own,” said Andriy. “Our idea is to integrate visually impaired people with the rest of society, so that people learn how to behave towards them and not be afraid of them.” Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am The money has become tight for Andiry and his father as the factory reserves have run out. They receive some donations from sponsors and have most of the food provided by local restaurants. The city still charges them business prices, despite the fact that they are registered as a refugee center and the factory is not working. In Ukraine, where the average salary of a civil servant is £ 300 a month, the cost of maintaining so many people is huge. People make a bed for those who have arrived at the shelter. Photo: Anastasia Taylor-Lind / The Guardian “I do it because if I had to leave my house and go to another city, I hope there would be another Andriy, who is like me, who would help me,” Andriy said. Serhiy Kit said their motto was always to be as independent as possible and not accept donations before the war. But now they are desperately looking for partners to restart the factory. “We want to be independent and to do that we have to make money,” Keith said. “We are looking for collaborations” Most of the plant’s raw material came from the now-devastated city of Mariupol, south of Dnipro. The collapse of logistics routes has made it extremely difficult to import goods into Ukraine and suppliers are afraid to send goods, Kit said. Even before the war, he added, they struggled financially as their handmade products struggled to compete with mass production. “Our handmade parts last four years compared to mass-produced equivalents that last about six months,” Kit said. “This is the work of our team, not me or some people and we will not stop hosting displaced people.”
