Locations‘Holding on through words’
At night, when sleep doesn’t come, 63-year-old Valentyna Karpliuk writes. In the quiet of her home in Pavlohrad, a town in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast where the echo of explosions has become routine background noise, she turns her feelings into verses.
Valentyna’s journey into poetry was born from a deep, personal silence. Three years ago, she lost her daughter to cancer, a tragedy that left her as the legal guardian of her granddaughter. Amidst this grief, the full-scale war arrived, adding collective trauma to her individual loss. For Valentyna, writing became more than a hobby; it became a vital tool for survival and a way to process a world that had suddenly become unrecognisable.
“Whatever I feel, I put into words,” she explains. “I write about the war, about the fates of the people I see on the news, and about the quiet strength we all need to keep going.”
Her poetry does not stay hidden in notebooks. Valentyna’s words travel to the front line, often tucked into care packages sent to soldiers. These handwritten verses reach men and women in the brief moments of quiet between shelling, offering a human connection that transcends the distance.
To Valentyna, that connection is everything. As her grandchildren and great-grandchild moved away or grew older, she realised that to stay part of their lives, she had to master a world that once felt alien to her: the digital one. She joined digital literacy courses at the Pavlohrad local library, a Digital Education Hub, the network of which across the country is supported by the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Library Association, the United Nations Development Programme, and the Government of Sweden.
Learning to navigate the internet and social media was not just about technology; it was about breaking isolation. Now, her words travel both by hand and online, reaching her family and a wider community through social media. The library has become her second home, a place where she can share her work with children and other residents during community events.
“The library brings people together,” she says. “I see how children sit with their phones, but when they hear a poem, they look up. They start to listen.”
Her life is a complex tapestry of care. Despite her age and heart problems, she remains a pillar for her family, looking after her grandchildren while her sons work in demanding roles in the local mines and for the road services. Her story is one of many in Pavlohrad, a city where industry and war collide, but where the human spirit remains remarkably intact.
Valentyna’s dream is as modest as it is profound. She hopes for peace and for the safety of the soldiers who read her poems. For herself, she simply wants to keep being useful, holding on to memory and connection through the simple power of words.
In a time of destruction, her poetry serves as a quiet reminder that as long as we can share our stories, something human remains.
