Narania Yan
Google
It happened two years ago. At first, everything was fine. The owner Hanna seemed like a kind and friendly lady. I was a Ukrainian refugee, a young teenager, one of the few who came to her house. I always tried to help her along with the other refugees: planting vegetables in the vegetable garden, helping with seedlings in the greenhouse, helping with cleaning the rooms before they put someone in. It was on a voluntary basis, it was not my obligation, because the landlady received money for my stay there. Even when I was invited on the radio, I only spoke well of her there.
But then... then gradually things started to change.
She was very much obsessed with sorting rubbish. We don't have anything like that in Ukraine, so sometimes it was hard for us to switch to that in one day. We tried our best, but of course we made mistakes sometimes. And if you accidentally threw a small piece of plastic in the wrong place - Hanna called the whole house for a two-hour meeting because of a small piece of plastic. And it happened many times over, over every little thing. She didn't care about your time, your health - you had to be there and lose two hours of your life. And that's not all.
Hannah used to buy a lot of food with her government payments for refugees. And we couldn't keep track of everything, and sometimes one or two things would go bad. She would buy something we didn't eat and then make a row about not eating it. Anyway, with lots of people in the house, it's pretty hard to keep track of everything. When we were handed gift vouchers by her friends, Hannah said, "You don't deserve that." I tried to help her as much as I could, to build relationships - but she still treated me and many others like rubbish. And she would tell her friends how wonderful and good she was, because she wanted to look like that in their eyes.
And then one day she called me and told me to pack my things and leave her house because "I don't want to see you here anymore.", she started screaming. I started crying, asking where to go and what to do now. After all, I'm in a country that is foreign to me, where I have nothing, I have nowhere to go. Her answer was "I don't care, it's your problem.". At that point I was severely depressed and with it severe psychological trauma from the war, falling bombs and losing everything. To which Hannah said to her friend with a smile, "Oh, she's such a baby! Such a crybaby!". Hannah brought me to tears and "gloomy thoughts" and ridiculed me, which made me feel bad for days. I had a massive migraine, felt so bad I threw up, had a pain in eyes because of light and I had to go to the doctor.
Then, with shouting and threats a few days later, she threw me out on the street with my belongings. She didn't care what happened to me next. She also lied about me to her friends and the people I used to be good friends with blocked me.
I'm only talking about myself and what happened to me specifically, and I'm not talking about other specific people. And what I've written is hard to argue with, it's hard to deny. Hannah, you want to appear nice to everyone, but you put on a fake smile and sling mud at others behind their backs. You can justify it with other people's actions, but I didn't do anything wrong. Maybe you were hoping that no one would find out about what happened. I've always tried to help you, Hannah. What did I do to deserve that?
