“And today, Hannah is continuing to work in this field. She’s working on putting together teams to be going to the places where displaced persons are lodged and to begin working on these questions of helping people to process what’s happening, helping to start dialogue, and helping to resolve any conflicts as they might begin to occur.”
Xsenia, she continued, “is a very, I would say, strong woman, who led a large project in the past. And these days she is very humbly serving us, doing simple things, just seeing what needs to be done and then answering those needs.”
“In some ways, I think that that’s the genius often that we find in women, who are able to see needs and then out of their heart they answer them in the best way that they can.”
This genius has also been on display, the Caritas Ukraine president said, in the women who have gone to train stations just to see how they can be of help to the refugees arriving there, or the psychologists showing up at the places where internally displaced people have gathered as they look for safety.
The need for psychological support is even greater now, she said, with the second wave of refugees, which is more vulnerable and traumatized after experiencing bombing and shelling.
“There’s a greater need to show that care and that love and to calm people down,” she commented.
The theme of the March 8 seminar was “Church and Society: Women as Builders of Dialogue.” It was co-hosted by Caritas Internationalis and the British Embassy to the Holy See.
“When we talk about dialogue and restoring dialogue, we mentioned also the question of human dignity,” Stawnychy said.
“That restoration of human dignity happens through the work of Caritas, it happens through this understanding of seeing the other, of seeing the value of the other in whatever situation they might find themselves in. And it’s a restorative process. It restores the person who receives and it restores the person who gives,” she said.
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