Last Saturday and Sunday (27 - 28 July 2024) a psychological training seminar was held at the ASB Hamburg office.

The seminar was attended by thirteen Ukrainian women who were forced to leave their homes in Vinnitsa, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Luhansk and Kherson regions, Mariupol and Kiev after the beginning of the full-scale Russian military aggression and ended up in Germany.  

The project ‘Psychological Assistance to Victims of War in Ukraine’ is implemented by Russian political emigrants Alexander and Galina Goncharenko with the participation of Ukrainian psychologists Alla Danilich-Skakun and Natalia Stepanenko.

The participants of the seminar are women with difficult life fate, with difficulties in adapting to new life realities and with different degrees of severity of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Despite all the difficulties, the professionalism of the psychologist (Natalia Stepanenko), the experience and desire to help of the project organisers, Ukrainian national cuisine, forest air and wonderful weather helped the women to overcome psychological problems.

By tradition, at the end of the seminar the participants and members of the project team summarised the results of the two-day work, exchanged their impressions and wishes.

Project manager Alexander Goncharenko shared the results and plans of the project.

Fifty-three refugee women from Ukraine received psychological assistance during five training seminars, and two more training seminars are planned for this year (September, November).

Alexander and Galina Goncharenko thanked Martina Baeurle, Managing Director of the Hamburg Foundation for Politically Persecuted Persons , for her help in implementing the project, and Günter Arndt, Head of ASB Hamburg , for his hospitality and financial support of the seminar.

 

Photo 1.  Group photo of the fifth seminar-training;

Photo 2. Alexander Goncharenko opens the seminar;

Photo 3. The ASB garden is cosy and warm;

Photo 4. The Buddha statue became a kind of good talisman for the participants of the seminars;

Photo 5. Training is training, but lunch is on schedule;

Photo 6. Practising psychological exercises in the fresh air;

Photo 7. Collective photo in the ASB library.