Help Gusev Family Rebuild Their House

Gusev Mykola and Halyna have a big family, especially for Ukraine. They have 3 daughters – Anna (15), Marharyta (9), and Elizaveta (1). They also have 5 sons – Serhiy (12), Semen (11), Ruslan (8), Lev (6), and Oleksandr (4). At the beginning of the war, Halyna was pregnant with Elizaveta. Here is their story:

When the war started, and we heard the first explosions, we couldn’t believe it for a long time. We couldn’t sleep, so at first it seemed like we didn’t even have time to be scared, and we were just waiting for this horror to end. In our time, we thought, humanity should be civilized – how could a war come to a European country? But later, when we began to realize the full horror of the situation, the countdown of internal tension began to grow. They say that a person can get used to anything, but not to such horror; when the house trembled and the windows vibrated from the explosions and we lay on the floor and prayed to God, (my wife was pregnant at the time), it seemed that something inside of our heads was stretched, and soon some string would snap and we would become insane.

We endured for two months, and then we left our nest and went 100 kilometers to a safer place. Many times we tried to take out some belongings from home, but everything was blocked because of the shelling, and we couldn’t go. When we finally could go, we realized that our house and almost everything in it was destroyed.