Lana Nicole Niland: I escaped Kyiv for safety. Part of me is still there
Lana Niland is a dancer and the owner of several enterprises in Kyiv connected to arts, culture, and human empowerment. She is the founder of Ukrainian Patriot, a new NGO raising funds to help protect the country’s volunteer battalions and civil volunteers.helling and bombs in the distance reverberate against the buildings on my block in the middle of the night, waking all of the animals in my care.
While I believe this, I also want to live. I want to be able to sleep more than an hour or two without being slammed into consciousness by bombs and the terror of beings I cannot calm with logic. Whether animals, or children, or women, or men, no one deserves to live in statements that constantly end in a question mark., I take some of these creatures over lands that have seen fire in the sky across a geographical border to find their owners.
Despite the fact that we are on the run, the drive is like a meditation and the scenes I pass take me back to childhood. Car rides with my dad behind the wheel and the prairies of Saskatchewan, where I grew up: beautiful blue skies, rolling hills, and incredible wheat fields. Here, Ukraine’s famed black soil may well see more shrapnel than seed this year. Likewise, Canada’s Yellowhead Trail features no such thing as a checkpoint. On this trip there must be 30, at least.
Through the kindness of strangers and sheer adrenaline, my nine traveling companions and I make it to Poland, to what we hope is a blanket of safety. I think for a small moment that I too have crossed some sort of threshold. The truth is, however, I have not escaped, as some might say. I may have departed physically, but I am still there, and I am fighting the powers that be in the best way I know how. I find roofs for those in need of them, connect healers with the traumatized.
And yet, who am I at the end of the day? A small drop of water, slipping and sliding, eagerly searching for other similar drops. Coming together to create some kind of puddle, then a pool, then a lake, a river, and only if I close my eyes so tightly, does the ocean come into view. I can smell it. I can taste it. I am a part of it, and we are moving together, as one, making change we never thought possible.
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