It was another warm September day and, as always, work brought more trouble than pleasure. Dreams that it would all end one day had stopped being any comfort, and I simply had to drift through a world of material things and human foolishness. Then a phone call from my good old friend Tanya Tupyi, inviting me to volunteer with the service team at an Active Rehabilitation Camp, turned everything upside down.
A phone call from my good old friend Tanya Tupyi, inviting me to volunteer with the service team at an Active Rehabilitation Camp, turned everything upside down. The wish to go and help people outweighed all my current plans, but a close friend’s birthday and another friend’s wedding kept me from saying yes at once. After a week of hard thinking I made a difficult choice: I am going, and my friends will understand and forgive me.
And here I am, at the National Paralympic Centre «Ukraine». The first rush of emotion came when I learned we would be staying in the «Shtormovyi» building — the very place I stayed at my first camp back in 2007. From day one I was back in a working rhythm: there was a lot to recall, as four long years had passed since my last camp. Under the close supervision of Tanya, head of the service team, all volunteers went through an intensive course in transfer technique, spotting and everyday assistance for people who use wheelchairs. Those skills became part of each of us: only by following every rule can you help correctly and without injury — to the participants and to yourself. The philosophy of active rehabilitation camps is that we volunteers must help without hindering, exactly where a person with an injury physically cannot manage alone.
From the first to the last day, the experienced team of instructors and volunteers worked tirelessly so that everyone who came to the «Tetra Rullit 2013» camp would take away as much as possible — knowledge that would later help them become more independent and live an active life. In that short time every participant tried archery, table tennis and swimming, gained general physical training skills, and learned from qualified instructors how to sit and move properly in a wheelchair.
All good things come to an end, and this camp was no exception. I want to thank the organisers personally for the chance to find myself again in this «utopia» — a world of equals, a world without material values. It was my fourth camp, and I had never met such a close-knit and responsive team of volunteers. Each of them helped me become a little better and was there in a difficult moment. A separate word about the instructors: their knowledge and their willingness to help knew no limits. I was especially inspired by those instructors who had once been participants at the camps I attended. These are people who showed me by their own example that your efforts are never wasted, and that life goes on, whatever happens in it.
Yehor Burenko
Tetra…
We reach for ever higher summits
and never care to look below,
we rush about in daily errands
and are not afraid to die…
But there is something worse than dying —
it grants us every right to live,
yet takes away the joy of daylight
and leaves us hanging by a thread…
Once you have met that grief in person,
a metre or two closer than the rest,
only then you see how happy you had been —
and all the idle talk falls silent!
I will not give this up to gossip,
oh, how hard it is to bear…
To try to live your life in a wheelchair
when your whole body has been taken from you…
Having met that fear face to face,
I understood: my strength is not in the body,
but in the spirit, in will and in mind,
in the kindness of a smile and the warmth of the soul…
But all these feelings cannot be retold!
It is hard… there is so much inside!
I only tried to help without hindering —
and you, my friend, do not waste your life!!!
Oleksii Khomenko
