Nunthorpe Methodist Church

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Thank you again for the chance to speak at coffee morning in Feb. I  would be happy to come back and talk about the Ukrainian volunteering  experience if there is interest.

I  wanted to file a few photos of the opening session of our exhibition  here, where we brought paintings, posters and poems from children in  Manchester, who came to see the paintings in Manchester Central Library  in February. We welcomed schoolkids from local schools in Lviv to the  exhibition, including some of the young artists who had painted the  original paintings that I took to Manchester. They are always very happy  to see their works on display. We had translated the poems and wrote  little histories of Manchester and of the project we ran with UK charity  Never Such Innocence.

Lviv is a  relatively quiet city as far as the war is concerned in the west of the  country, but the war does come here sometimes. On Tuesday afternoon, we  had an extended raid, and a number of drones penetrated the outer air  defences to the city. I was working south of the city centre, maybe 1km  or 800m from the old centre where I am sitting writing this. We were  loading finished food packets from the packaging room of the kitchen to  take for distribution. We knew therer was an alert and a heightened  alert, but when we stepped outside, to hear the drones immediately was a  surprise. Three drones in less than three minutes passed in sight. The  last two passed on and in the distance we hard one explosion and one pop  as one hit a target and the other was shot down and exploded in the  air. The first one though, did this - we saw it dive into the city  centre.  https://www.instagram.com/reels/DWRVRmYAjgv/ .

The  building it hit and destroyed in the fire afterwards was part of the  17th century Bernadine Monastery, a protected UNESCO building. The  Basilica of St Andrews behind the building was damaged in the attack.  This is one of the busiest streets surrounding the city centre, over 30  people were injured on Tuesday. The second drone hit a block of  residential flats in the NW of the city. The children meet to paint with  nataliia every Friday less than 30m from where the first drone hit. I  am confident we would have been in the basement, but the attack brings  home the fact that nowhere in Ukraine is truly safe from these terror  attacks.