Tributes paid to Trevor Jones, volunteer at Wrexham Maelor
A former accountant, with roles at British Steel and Airbus, Trevor was perhaps more well known for his volunteering with the Wrexham Maelor Hospital League of Friends.
Over the years Trevor held multiple roles including treasurer of the group, with it estimated he volunteered at the hospital for over 25 years.
Tervor Jones (far right) (Image: Archive)
Trevor was described as a much loved son, brother, brother-in-law, uncle, great-uncle and great-great-uncle, and who will sadly missed by all family and friends.
Following his passing, tributes have been paid to him, praising his volunteering efforts
His nephew, Peter Williams said: 'The time he spent at the hospital was phenomenal. He lived in Leeswood and would be there twice a day. He loved it.
'He was born in Hull but moved to Pontblyddyn during the War, where he stayed until around 1980 then he moved to Leeswood.
'He was an accountant by trade, but had jobs with British Steel and Airbus. He also did other bits of volunteering.
'Trevor was very private but had a heart of gold and would do anything for anybody.'
Colleagues from the Maelor League of Friends have also paid tribute to him.
Trevor Jones (bottom left) (Image: Archive) Chris Hughes said: 'He was a lovely, lovely man.
'He spent hours and hours here and was well known round the hospital and wards. He probably knew everyone in the hospital.
'He was quiet but was always wanting to help people and to provide a service to the people in the hospital.
'During covid, he saved himself 6,500 miles on his car from not driving here twice a day.
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'Trevor was a well known character and was famous for Trevor's trollies.
'He never wanted a fuss, but did a lot of work behind the scenes and would be organising all sorts.
'He was a true volunteer, very committed and never took a penny.'
Trevor's funeral service will take place at Christ Church, Pontblyddyn, on Friday, August 1 at 12pm, followed by committal at Flintshire Crematorium, Northop at 1pm.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Israel committing genocide in Gaza, say Israel-based human rights groups
Two leading human rights organisations based in Israel, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the country's western allies have a legal and moral duty to stop it. In reports published on Monday, the two groups said Israel had targeted civilians in Gaza only because of their identity as Palestinians over nearly two years of war, causing severe and in some cases irreparable damage to Palestinian society. Multiple international and Palestinian groups have already described the war as genocidal, but reports from two of Israel-Palestine's most respected human rights organisations, who have for decades documented systemic abuses, is likely to add to pressure for action. The reports detailed crimes including the killing of tens of thousands of women, children and elderly people, mass forced displacement and starvation, and the destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure that have deprived Palestinians of healthcare, education and other basic rights. 'What we see is a clear, intentional attack on civilians in order to destroy a group,' said Yuli Novak, the director of B'Tselem, calling for urgent action. 'I think every human being has to ask himself, what do you do in the face of genocide?' It is vital to recognise that a genocide is under way even without a ruling in the case before the international court of justice, she said. 'Genocide is not just a legal crime. It's a social and political phenomenon.' Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) focuses in its report on a detailed chronological account of the assault on Gaza's health system, with many details documented directly by the group's own team, which worked regularly in Gaza before 7 October 2023. The destruction of the healthcare system alone makes the war genocidal under article 2c of the genocide convention, which prohibits deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group 'in whole or part', said its director, Guy Shalev. 'You don't have to have all five articles of the genocide convention to be fulfilled in order for something to be genocide,' he said, although the report also details other genocidal aspects of Israel's war. Both B'Tselem and PHR said Israel's western allies were enabling the genocidal campaign, and shared responsibility for suffering in Gaza. 'It couldn't happen without the support of the western world,' Novak said. 'Any leader that is not doing whatever they can to stop it is part of this horror.' The US and European countries have a legal responsibility to take stronger action than they have done so far, Shalev said. 'Every tool in the toolbox should be used. This is not what we think, this is what the genocide convention calls for.' Israel denies is it carrying out a genocide, and says the war in Gaza is one of self-defence after cross-border attacks by Hamas on 7 October 2023 killed 1,200 people, the majority civilians. More than 250 others were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, where 50 remain held hostage, with 20 of them believed to still be alive. A key element to the crime of genocide, as defined by the international convention, is showing intent by a state to destroy a target group in whole or part. Genocidal statements from politicians and military leaders, and a chronology of well-documented impacts on civilians after nearly two years of war are proof of that intent, even without a paper trail of orders from the top, both PHR and B'Tselem say. The PHR report details how 'genocidal intent may be inferred from the pattern of conduct', citing legal precedent from the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda. The extensive documentation, by medics, media and human rights organisations over a long period of time, mean that Israel's government cannot claim it did not understand the impact of its actions, Shalev said. 'There were enough times and enough opportunities for Israel to stop this gradual systematic attack.' Incitement to genocide has been recorded since the start of the war. It is one of two issues on which the Israeli judge hearing the case at the international court of justice voted with the majority when ordering emergency measures for the protection of Palestinians from the plausible risk of genocide. 'We don't need to guess what Israel is doing and what the Israeli army is doing, because from the first day of this attack, Israeli leaders, the highest leadership, political leadership, including the prime minister, the minister of defence, the president of Israel said exactly that,' Novak said. 'They talked about human animals. They talked about the fact that there are no civilians in Gaza or that there is an entire nation responsible for October 7th.' 'If the leadership of Israel, whether the army leadership and the political leadership knows about the consequences of this policy and keep going, it is very clear that is intentional.' The destruction of health infrastructure, two years without medical care and the killing of medical workers also means the toll from the genocide will continue to mount even after any ceasefire halts fighting, Shalev said. 'For example, there have been no MRI machines in Gaza for months now, so what about all the illnesses and diseases that were not diagnosed all that time. There are all the malnutrition and chronic diseases that went untreated, we're going to see the effects of that for months and years to come.' While medication can be brought in within days, there is no easy way to replace medical workers who have been killed, including specialists who took decades to train, he said. 'Looking at the conditions of life opens this kind of temporal scale that is frightening if we want to believe in a future where … the people of Gaza somehow get to live their lives safely and in good health. It's very hard to see that.' The death toll in Gaza from the war is approaching 60,000, or more than 2.5% of the pre-war population. Some of those who defend Israel's war argue that is too low for the campaign to be considered genocide. That is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the crime of genocide, which the convention defines as targeting a group 'in whole or in part', Novak said. 'It doesn't mean that you need to kill each and every person.' A genocide targeting Palestinians as a group was possible only because Israel for decades dehumanised Palestinians and denied their rights, Novak said. Collective trauma was exploited by far-right politicians to accelerate an agenda they had been pursuing for years. '[7 October ] was a shocking moment and a turning point for Israelis because it instilled a real sincere feeling of existential threat. That was the moment that pushed a whole system and how it operates in Gaza from a policy of control and oppression into one of destruction and extermination.' Now Israel has launched a genocidal campaign in Gaza, there is an an urgent risk that it could spread to target other Palestinians, the B'Tselem report warned. 'The Israeli regime now has a new tool that they didn't use before – genocide. And the fact that that this tool or this policy used in Gaza is not yet (deployed) in other areas is not something that we can count on for long,' Novak said. The West Bank is a particular concern, with 1,000 Palestinians killed and more than 40,000 displaced from communities including Jenin and Tulkarem, in a campaign of escalating attacks and ethnic cleansing since 7 October 2023. 'What we see is basically the same regime with the same logic, the same army, usually the same commanders and even the same soldiers who just fought in Gaza. They are now in the West Bank where violence is on the rise,' Novak said. 'What we worry about and want to warn about is the fact that any small trigger might make the genocide spill over from Gaza into the West Bank.'
Times
2 days ago
- Times
I'm safe now but my family in Gaza are starving before my eyes
For a moment, I could not recognise her. The video call had finally gone through after days of failed attempts. The connection crackled, the image was grainy, but then her face appeared and I froze. It took me a few seconds to realise it was my mother. Her face had changed. The woman I knew — strong, warm, composed — now looked frail and unfamiliar, her skin pale, her eyes sunken. Her voice, once clear and confident, had become raspy and strained. 'Look at my wrinkles,' she said, forcing a smile and pulling at the skin on her cheeks. 'I've grown old in this war.' I tried to keep the tone light. 'You're still the most beautiful woman I know,' I said. 'What's your skincare secret?' She replied: 'We haven't had proper food in days.' My parents are among many from the town of Khan Yunis in central Gaza who fled west to al-Mawasi — a narrow, overcrowded strip of land by the sea that Israel declared a 'safe zone', though it offers neither safety nor food. Like everyone else here, they live in a tent, surviving on lentils and rice, if they're lucky. Sometimes they grind lentils into bread. These are not poor people. My mother was a director at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Gaza Training Centre. My father worked in public relations at the University of Palestine. Today, they boil water and throw in whatever food they can find to keep hunger at bay. My younger brother Mohammed, 18, should be in his second year of university. Instead, he often queues for hours in the hope of getting a bag of flour. I worry every time he leaves home not just because of airstrikes: stories abound of young men being stabbed to death and robbed of their flour or trampled in the chaos of the food lines. This is the worst phase of the war. Not only because the bombings have not stopped — the air rumbles almost constantly with Israel's airstrikes — but because people are also dying slowly. Starvation doesn't scream like missiles. It doesn't flash across headlines. It kills quietly. In December, I was forced to flee our home in Khan Yunis with my husband and our two children, Maryam, seven, and Wajih, six. I didn't want to leave. I told the children again and again: 'We'll come back soon.' But we never have. Before that, our home had already become a shelter. My parents, siblings and their children had all taken refuge in our building. My husband's family lived on the first floor. We were upstairs. We sheltered about 100 people in that home. When the strikes intensified in December 2023, my family moved to the Khan Yunis Training Centre, where we were crammed into a single room. I took our children to Rafah, where we ended up living in a basement with 17 others. There was no running water or toilets, let alone electricity. Then, in January, an Israeli airstrike hit an apartment next to us in Tel al-Sultan, a neighbourhood we thought was safe. Eleven people were killed, most of them children. That night, I fled again with my children, this time to my sister's home in east Rafah. Even that area was marked in red on Israeli digital maps, meaning it could be targeted. But we had no choice. Eventually, The Times helped to arrange an evacuation for myself and the children. My husband had to stay behind. Friday, July 25, was our wedding anniversary — the second we have spent apart. I wish more than anything that he could be with us. After seven long months in Egypt, I received a Safe Haven fellowship from the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, allowing me to continue my work as a journalist in safety in Amsterdam. Here I have shelter, warmth and food — unlike my family. Communicating with them when they live in a land without electricity can be complicated. Some people in Gaza with access to solar panels charge a fee for an internet password and signal strong enough to allow video calls. My husband is working as a journalist for NBC and living in Khan Yunis. He tells me that hunger has changed how people look at each other. 'We stare longer,' he said. 'Sometimes we don't recognise faces we once knew. War and hunger have reshaped them.' My mother, for her part, tells me that she recently went to the market hoping to find something to cook. She came back with one courgette — just one — for 40 shekels (£9). It had to feed ten people. She told me how she tried to stretch a kilo of flour into enough dough, how she spent hours trying to find something to use as fuel — bits of wood, cardboard, anything that would catch fire, how she eventually managed to bake 12 loaves — one for each person. My aunt fainted from hunger one day and had to be taken to hospital and fed on a glucose drip. My diabetic uncle, who needs a strict diet, is now at constant risk. My sister, Riham, also lives in a tent with her husband and children in al-Mawasi after being displaced four times. Her husband spends his days waiting near the main road where aid trucks might pass. After waiting every day for hours, he came back with a 25-kilo bag of flour on Wednesday night. Riham sent me a joyful message — not just because they finally had food, but because her husband had returned alive. Their children greeted him as if he had brought home a rare treasure. The family stayed up baking late that night outside their tent. Riham sent me a photo of Baraa, her ten-year-old son, carefully watching the flames as he flipped dough on a blackened metal tray balanced over bricks. With no oven or gas, people rely on open fires like this built from scraps of debris and wood. Baraa helps to make bread after his father managed to get a bag of flour 'But many nights, all I can give them is soup,' said Riham. 'They fall asleep hungry and wake up the same.' Even those who still have money, like my husband, cannot find anything to buy. 'We eat olive oil with dry bread,' he said. But even if you can afford the food when it exists it doesn't mean you can get it. There's a severe cash crisis, too. Many shops and vendors no longer accept banknotes because they are worn out and torn. Israel hasn't allowed any new currency into Gaza since the war began, so most of the remaining bills are damaged beyond use. This has given rise to a new job in Gaza: banknote repairers. They charge a fee to 'laminate' old banknotes, which is meant to keep them usable. Cash machines have long since ceased functioning. So 'cash brokers' are charging huge commissions to help people access their own money in banks. My mother recently paid them 1,000 shekels (£220) via a banking app. She was given only 600 shekels (£130) in cash. People have turned to bartering. Several of my friends now use Facebook groups to exchange basic goods — a bag of lentils for a bag of rice, or sugar for flour. A can of fava beans costs 25 shekels (£5.50). A kilo of lentils is 60 (£13). Tomatoes and cucumbers go for 100 shekels (£20) per kilo if they can be found at all, onions for 120 (£26.50). As for flour, it is gold: 'Before the war, a kilo of flour cost no more than three shekels (65p),' said my sister. 'Now a 25-kilo sack costs up to 2,000 shekels (£440) if you can find it.' I now live in the Netherlands, far from Gaza. But the hunger is never far. It's in my phone calls, in the words I hear every day: 'We're hungry … there is no food … we are waiting to die.' ABED RAHIM KHATIB/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES Since I left, I've learnt how heavy a full plate can feel. I look at food and see faces: my husband, my mother's, my father's, those of my nieces and nephews. I eat only once a day, not because I'm fasting, but because I can't bear to eat when they have nothing. And beyond the hunger, there's the fear. My husband is still there, still documenting, still surviving. He's come close to death more times than I can count. Our days revolve around short messages, unstable signals and constant dread.
The Guardian
2 days ago
- The Guardian
Battles of the mind: drawing Ukraine in this endless war
In Ukraine, many people affected by the conflict are being treated and supported by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). I was able to meet some of them: in a rehabilitation centre for war veterans in Cherkasy and a mental health clinic for internally displaced families in Vinnytsia. Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I've drawn many political cartoons about the war; drawings that feature Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Vladimir Putin and the occasional bear. It looked very different from the ground, where war is fought and lived by ordinary people, just like us. In the hospitals I visited in May this year, I sketched the precise way in which war is mapped on individual bodies and listened to the stories behind their scars. I drew what people told me, as well as what I saw, because trauma and hope are intangible things of memory and imagination. There's nothing left to draw of an amputated limb but memories – the same could be said for a lost home or relative. These things are beyond a camera's reach, which I think gives you licence to reach for a pencil. I watched an MSF psychiatrist help a soldier regain feeling in his paralysed hand using tiny scraps of textured materials intended to evoke strong memories. As she brushed them against his fingertips, she explained: 'This cable-knit might remind him of a grandma's jumper; this fluff, a child's teddy; this one, grass.' I saw echoes of this image throughout the hospital in injured people reaching back or forwards to life beyond the war. People described their memories of peace in vivid terms, but when I asked what victory meant I was met with nonplussed stares. One soldier said: 'No idea … but when it happens, I've promised my wife I'll shave off my beard.' His beard was long. His wife was perched on his hospital bed and asked if I'd like to see how well her husband can lift his dumbbells with his one remaining arm. After Dima regained consciousness in the hospital, he phoned his mother to tell her that 'everything was fine – just a few scratches'. 'It wasn't true,' he tells me. 'There was a big hole in my leg and in my ear and arm.' He still can't sleep. 'My nightmares are always the same. They're taking me from the hospital back to the trenches, and then I am above – I am the drone making the projectile drop that hits me.' Dima flies first-person view (FPV) drones so he knows how this looks. His psychologist tells him he might sleep better if he wasn't on his phone all night. But he likes watching videos on Instagram and YouTube – mostly bodycam footage of the war that, he explains, help him to understand the 'subtleties' of his own memories: what he did, what he could have done. He tells me about his mentor, Matrovski, who made him stay down in the trench while he looked out to see if the Russians were still there. Matrovski was immediately shot in the neck and bled to death. The shard of shrapnel that buried itself in Dima's body when the drone projectile detonated is now sitting on his bedside table. He tells me: 'It momentarily paralysed me from the bottom of my spine to the end of my extremities. I thought it had injured my spinal cord and I wouldn't be able to walk. I thought 'this is the end'. But I started to touch my head to see if I had any blood. I didn't find any and I said to myself: 'I am alive, I am not dead.' I could hear the enemy drones watching. FPVs have a horrible squeaky sound – like Formula One [cars]. If it's high, then it's quiet. When it gets louder, then you worry. I could hear them watching so I lay very still and pretended to be dead. I heard them leave. Then I was screaming from the pain. I thought I would bleed to death.' He survived, he says, because 'I am my mother's only child. When I joined the army she cried and so I'd promised her that everything would be fine.' She is a kindergarten teacher, 'the kindest person in the world. She has brown hair and green eyes like mine. Always smiling – even when she's sad.' I ask Olena where home is. She tells me about the clouds in Luhansk. 'They're really beautiful, like mountains because there aren't any tall buildings there. Home is where the sky has no missiles, just clouds and the sun and birds and planes – but not military, safe, with passengers. The most important thing is the feeling that you can look at the sky without being scared. After 2022, I had to again learn how to look at the sky without fear.' The first time Olena was displaced by conflict was in 2014, when she was 19. She 'got on a train to nowhere' and wound up in Kyiv, searching through old Facebook friends for somewhere to stay. She rebuilt her life in Luhansk. She says: 'I loved my flat. The children's bedroom had pastel wallpaper with balloons. My husband and I built a big balcony and I pasted these stickers of pink peonies all over it. We had a great life, we didn't expect to have war … even more war. Then we started hearing explosions from the frontlines … we saw the first missiles in the sky, interceptions – the children were terrified.' When the invasion happened, Olena and her family fled to Vinnytsia. She says that now 'I feel like I have two lives. Part of my soul is left there back in that life. So I'm here, but at the same time I'm there.' When I ask her what she hopes for the future, she says: 'I don't see the future, for now. I live in the present day … I just think 'I woke up in the morning, thank God, I went to work, thank God. My children went to school, God thank you.'' She has portraits of her children tattooed on her arms. She shows me her other tattoos: a mandala, a daisy with a plaster, birds. 'They're all connected to the war,' she says. 'They're like scars.' I show her my tattoos, and some of my drawings. Olena likes drawing too. She shows me a photo of one of her paintings – a road leading to a little house on a hill covered with bright yellow wheat. The sky is dark blue, because, Olena says, 'it's stormy, like it's about to rain'. She points to the single lit window of the house. 'I added this to be like hope.' I ask if this drawing is of a real place where she lived. She says no. 'It's an abstract place – a home in the heart.' In 2022, Roman quit his job collecting parcels and joined a medical brigade collecting wounded and dead soldiers. He says that 'sometimes the body parts were blown up into the trees'. When the drone detonated, his legs didn't get that far. They ended up in the box next to him in the medical stabilisation centre, still with their shoes on. He says: 'I remember looking at my legs in the box and I was so scared when I realised that I couldn't get this part of my past back – that now my future would be very different. I was so sad to say goodbye to what was in the box … Then I realised it was too early to die. I hadn't said goodbye to my family, or finished the house that I'd been building for them.' When Roman started building the house many years ago, he'd gone to the bank to take out a loan from a 'very beautiful woman with white blond hair. I told her all about the house and she said: 'Maybe one day you'll show me.' So I took her number and invited her to coffee.' Tanya and Roman married soon after and now have two children, Alexi, 12, and Yvan, 21. Their house is finally almost finished – 'white pillars and blue walls – only a few tiles on the roof still to complete … maybe also a swimming pool'. He tells me how his family loved to go swimming in the sea in Odesa. 'We used go all together. But if I imagine going back, I cannot understand one thing – how will I be able to go in the sea? Can you swim in a prosthesis?' I don't know the answer but – after a long pause – Roman does: 'Yvan goes to the gym. His muscles are even bigger than mine. He can bring me on his back into the sea. And I will swim with him. Then he'll take me back out of the water and put me on the chair, and I'll put the prostheses back on. That's how it will be.' Roman called his wife from the hospital to tell her that he'd lost his legs but 'not to worry: everything is fine'. He said to her: 'Nothing has changed. I don't want anything to change.' Inna and Tetiana come to talk to me together, exchanging glances before every answer, sharing tissues and whispered encouragements. Tetiana's son, Valeria, and Inna's husband, Mykola, are prisoners of war in Russia. They were captured on the same day in May 2022. Valeria is 27 now. Inna struggles to remember her husband's age. She says it's because 'we don't celebrate birthdays any more. When they were captured, everything stopped.' But when I ask what Valeria and Mykola look like, Inna answers: 'Now or before?' Inna and Tetiana wait at every prisoner exchange in the hope that their relatives will be among those released. When they're not, sometimes the soldiers who have been bring back news of them. That's how Inna and Tetiana know how different their loved ones now look – 'exhausted, so thin'. For the first year of her husband's captivity, Inna struggled to eat. She says she's a bit better now; she's found Tetiana. 'We have the same pain, we understand it.' The women believe that they have a 'spiritual connection with their loved ones', that they 'must stay strong and cry less so they may also feel our hope and prayers'. Inna describes how her husband comes to check on her in her dreams. Inna says she likes to picture sitting with her husband in their garden back in Mariupol. Mykola liked to grow flowers there, 'wild forest flowers – I don't even know where he got those seeds. At the time I didn't even like them! But now nothing would make me happier.' Tetiana says she also likes to picture Valeria 'somewhere in nature – a field of white chamomile with the sun shining really bright … birdsong, fresh air.' Neither Inna nor Tetiana have had any direct contact with their relatives for three years. If they could talk, Inna tells me she'd say 'that I love him – that we're waiting'. Tetiana adds: 'We're waiting. We're definitely going to wait.' Tetiana cries silently throughout our conversation. She doesn't want to stop or skip any questions; she always looks me directly in the eye. Her son Maksym was born in 1995, the same year as me. He was killed fighting in Donetsk on 8 May 2022. 'It's not possible to describe the burden of the pain I'm bearing,' says Tetiana. 'I think about him every day; when I wake up, when I go to sleep. Sometimes when I'm walking and I see a young man who resembles mine – tall, gentle, strong – I think 'oh', because I had once such a boy.' She says her grief is 'like the evening sky, like twilight – there's still some light there, and the light is all Maksym'. Tetiana was born in Russia and came to Ukraine in 1974. She says they're a railway family. 'I worked there for 40 years. It's where I met my husband. We wanted Maksym to join the railway too, but even from his childhood he always dreamed of joining the military.' As a boy, Maksym played zarnitsa in the woods. It's an old Soviet war game, and the name translates from Russian as 'heat lightning'. 'This is how he will remain for ever for me,' she says. 'Running through the woods. There's a photo of his dead body which his commander took. I still haven't looked at it: I can't. Let him remain alive for me, for the rest of my life.' He was 'always a military man – he loved his country', but she says he was gentle too. In the trenches, he'd feed the lost cats and send her photos of them. She says he'd call to say: 'Mum, don't worry. Everything's going to be fine.' Petrov says he and his older brother, Dmytro, have been 'making little models of soldiers together since childhood, and conducting fake wars. Then we grew up and had a different kind of war.' Dmytro says that 'in the war, we were always together'. They were together when the drone detonated under their car, killing the other two soldiers with them. The brothers are now recuperating from their injuries in the same hospital, in different wards. I talk to them separately, but each brother tells me mostly about the other. Petrov says that when the drone detonated, 'I felt a very strong burning sensation and I was screaming. My brother was screaming that he was injured too and I was so happy that he was screaming because it meant he was alive.' Dmytro says: 'I heard my brother's voice and I calmed down. It probably all happened very quickly, but it felt like time stopped. When I realised that Petrov was seriously injured in all four limbs – how much blood he was losing – I knew that I had to provide medical aid for him or he would die. I've been on the frontline for a long time. I've tied a lot of tourniquets. So in this situation I'm not panicking. I'm calm. I tied the tourniquets. But I was worried about him.' Petrov says Dmytro worries too much, 'but it's natural, I'm his little brother.' Dmytro says: 'I've been protective of Petrov since picking him up from kindergarten. He's not weak, he's very strong. But I have to look after him. He's my little brother.' They are now healing well, although Dmytro says he's worried about Petrov's hands. His doctors say he'll never regain full movement. Dmytro says his brother has 'golden hands: whatever he likes to do with them, he does so well. He's very creative: a sculptor, he plays the guitar.' Petrov says it was Dmytro's guitar – his brother bought it but got bored after learning one song and quit, so Petrov learned to play instead. Petrov hopes the war has left him with enough movement in his hands to go back to making sculptures, and there's one sitting on his bedside table in the hospital. It's a phone stand with the insignia of his village's brigade, which he insists on giving to me. I'm concerned that without it Petrov won't be able to hold his phone, as one hand is swathed in bandages and the other sutured to his midriff. When I ask the doctors about this they explain: 'To encourage the skin grafts on his hands to take, we connect the hand to the midriff where the blood supply is better.' They say Petrov spends a lot of his time on his phone, mostly video calling Dmytro in the hospital ward downstairs. It was a rainy dawn and Valentyn had been sweeping for mines; dawn so as not to be seen, rain because it makes it harder for the drones to fly. He tells me that he never touched the mine – it reacted to the electromagnetic field of his body with a flash that, weeks later, he still can't get out of his eyes. He holds up the bandaged stumps of his arms. 'For this hand there is no hope. But for the other – one finger is still alive.' He displays the prosthetic he's been given to hold a spoon. 'The next device must be to hold a fishing rod.' With his one remaining finger, Valentyn mimes reeling in a fishing line. Valentyn's grandpa taught him to fish and he still goes to the same spot on the Dnipro River. 'It's very beautiful, very calm. Just trees by the river. I like to go there alone. If I go with my friends they get drunk and scare away the fish.' I meet Natalii at a women's support group in Vinnytsia for refugees from Kherson. Today, they're making flowers out of colourful pipe cleaners. The windows of the community room are filled with flowers that Natallii grows in little recycled pots. She talks about her garden back in Kherson, where she lived before the invasion: 200 sq metres filled with apricot trees, grapevines and flowers; her favourites were the pink roses. She shows me photos that a friend who stayed behind took recently. Their house has been utterly destroyed, but the roses in the garden are still blooming. Now Natalii lives with her family in a small apartment in Vinnytsia. 'There's no garden but a good window. For my birthday I was given a huge bouquet, and there were still some roots! Now I have seven big bushes in water on the floor in front of the window.' Natalii says her family think she's mad, apart from her nine-year-old granddaughter, Anya, who also has green fingers. Anya's father – Natalii's son – always buys her flowers from the supermarket when he comes back from the front. For Natalii, 'the flowers are like a memory from home … peace is the memory of the life that we were living there. Here, we are just waiting. My soul is in the garden back home in Kherson.' As Natalii talks, the other women twist their pipe cleaners into flower ornaments. Svitlana, 68, also a refugee from Kherson, has hands that tremble so violently Natalii helps her with the fiddly bits. I tell her about this project, and she says: 'No picture could capture what we have lived through, what it is to have everything, to be together with all your family in your home, and then be living by the side of the road.' It's a fair point. This project, facilitated by Médecins Sans Frontières, will be exhibited at The Arcade at Bush House, King's College London, in September About the author Ella Baron is a political cartoonist at the Guardian
