Everyone knows that for my birthday, gifts should be something for "Velyka Rodyna" (The Big Family). So on February 7th, I received two virtual peacocks.

Materializing them was complicated by the need to set up a "closed sky" (you know, like the anti-drone protection on our ring road). We fussed over this for almost two months, and finally, a sunny day arrived when everything seemed ready.

The vehicle's size was debated for a long time—a semi-truck, a Gazelle, or maybe a Fiat Doblo van? We even joked about tying a red ribbon to their tails if they didn't fit in the trunk!)) Then it was amazing to see Mr. Viacheslav cutting a corner off a construction bag, sticking that divinely beautiful head with funny little horn-like feathers through it, and wrapping all the rest with regular old tape! And that was it!!! You could put it in a passenger car, or even in the "Birkin", and entertain people on the subway.

Upon arrival at "Velyka Rodyna", it turned out that peacocks are just pimped-out chickens. When we let them into our poultry yard, our regular chickens turned around in indignation and left the battlefield, hiding in the barn.

In short, BEAUTY WINS. "People, be mutually beautiful!" As always, Lina Kostenko is right.

Ever since the Remember Us community stepped in to support our shelter, the pace of change has noticeably picked up. People and organizations that are just trying to survive usually look very depressed. Every month for four years, we had no idea what would come next. We wrote grant applications with very little hope of success, held charity events abroad, and reached out to the authorities (with zero success). Despite everything, we kept working, we kept saving lives. But it is one thing to balance on the edge of survival, wondering if you can even pay the girls for their incredibly hard work, and a completely different thing to plan major structural changes.

A new, larger kitchen, our first isolation ward, renovated rooms, an extra workspace—we now get to decide for ourselves what is most important right now.

Here is a fresh example: an elderly woman from Kharkiv used to live with her daughter. Her daughter decided to end her own life, and the grandmother was brought to us. She was crying her eyes out, thinking she had been brought here to suffer and die—because that’s exactly how Soviet-style elderly care used to be. But our wonderful Christian came up to her, helped her onto a walker, and guided her down the hallway. He showed her the kitchen, the bathroom, took her out to the terrace, and showed her the fireplace, the dogs, and the chickens and ducks.

Do you see her smiling in the photo?

This summer, we read an announcement about two elderly Labrador sisters who had been abandoned by their owners. Our intuition told us right away: they are ours. We could hardly wait for the morning to go and pick them up.

And oh, how much joy they brought! The girls, the grandmas, and Christian took turns walking them, treating them, taking them to the vet, and later raising funds for expensive specialized food. They became the very soul of our shelter. They didn't bother the ducks or chickens and cuddled with every single resident without exception—they brightened our every day. It was actually because of them that we rushed to get the terrace glazed!

Then, in the autumn, Mr. Dmytro arrived with a small, barky dog named Bax. Like all mutts, he turned out to be incredibly smart, musical, and very freedom-loving. He was the one who taught Angie and Schena to escape from our cozy yard to the neighboring auto shop. It added to our troubles, but no one was particularly worried—where could they possibly go? Honestly, they needed mobility walkers more than territorial restrictions!

But things didn’t go as planned.

One evening, Angie was nowhere to be found. Not in our yard, not at the auto shop, not anywhere around. Everyone joined the search: the girls, the nurses, the mechanics from the auto shop. Our work chat was blowing up with messages. We wrote to newspapers, search services, animal shelters, and put up flyers. Lara, our administrator, cried for her like she would for a small child. Later, Bax—the instigator and troublemaker—was found. People who saw him running along the highway brought him back. But there was no sign of Angie… It was terrifying to imagine her, old and confused, wandering in the freezing darkness. A whole day passed like this.

And then, a text from Lara popped up: "Olyaaaaaaaaaa! She’s been found!"

In a residential area, inside one of the high-rise building entrances, the poor thing was nudging her nose against every apartment door. Some awful person had cut off her collar with the QR code, but a girl recognized her simply from our photos!

We are so incredibly grateful to her, and to everyone who shared our posts and physically combed the woods around the shelter for a full day. So here is the thing: there are many of us, and we are unstoppable! During those 24 hours, we united even more and truly felt like "Big Family."