Out of hell, into heaven

The rewards for doing good deeds are numerous. Here is a small list.

The most important one is maintaining a balance between good and evil. An good example of tipping the balance in favour of good are all the people in Poland taking in the refugees from Ukraine. I often think about how everything in the universe is constructed from energy. And how if enough people do and think evil things the devil grows in stature, more power to create more evil. Hitler and the Nazis sent the balance of good plummeting into the dark deep depths of evil and darkness. On the other hand, with the many people of Poland showering a sky of love on the Ukrainians, the Angels are spreading their wings and mustering.

On a more mundane level when you do something good for someone else they feel happier. Then they often pass it on to others: the opposite to revenge.

Then there is karma. I do believe in this phenomenon. In the past, when I forced my girlfriend to have an abortion, darkness and shadows prevailed over me for years. I felt it, deep inside my bones. I was being punished for the evil I wrought on her and the world and how I would have to work hard for the rest of my life to bring it back into balance. One bad deed has turned into hundreds of good ones, and I still feel a guilt that will never be unwritten: and so I should.

There you have it, the battle between good and evil. It is real, and it is worth noting, how much better it is to be on the side of good. To get there you have to do good deeds, a loving soul, without expectation of rewards, yet there are many, and leave the world a better place than how you found it: is this not enough purpose for any life.

Today I felt inspired by the Romanian hotel owner who has opened, and provided, his hotel for Ukrainian refugees with free food and lodgings.

Sourced from the internet.

A hotel in Suceava, Romania, has turned its lavish ballroom into a makeshift shelter for more than 2,000 refugees who have fled Ukraine since Russia began its invasion. According to the U.N., more than 1.7 million people have fled Ukraine in the last 10 days, making it the swiftest refugee exodus so far this century.

As Olga Okhrimenko walked into a bustling ballroom-turned-refugee shelter at a four-star Romanian hotel, her corgi, Knolly, strained at the leash anxiously seeking the warmth inside. It had taken them three days to flee Ukraine by car, bus and taxi in the bitter cold.

The 34-year-old Ukrainian marketing manager could hardly contain her emotions, and a simple “are you OK?” filled her eyes with tears she thought she no longer had.

The first refugees began arriving more than a week ago at the Mandachi Hotel and Spa in Suceava in Romania, where the owner decided to make the lavish, 850-square-meter ballroom available to them. Since then, more than 2,000 people and 100 pets have taken shelter here, with row upon row of numbered mattresses under an incongruous glittering disco ball.

They are part of the swiftest refugee exodus so far this century, in which more than 1.7 million people have fled Ukraine in just 10 days, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Since the war started on Feb. 24, more than 227,000 Ukrainians have crossed into neighboring Romania, according to local authorities.

Like Okhrimenko, some of the refugees at the Mandachi have fled cities on the front lines of the war.

“Whenever somebody asks me where I am from, and I say Kharkiv, their expression, it’s like I arrived from Hiroshima,” Okhrimenko told The Associated Press from mattress number 60. “Then, I remember everything going on there and I break down.”

After five days of shelling, she decided to flee Kharkiv on March 1 with Knolly, a couple of friends and their two cats. Their car passed by the city’s central Freedom Square just 20 minutes before it was engulfed by a giant ball of fire in a Russian military strike.

“It was difficult for me before to say I’m a great patriot of my land,” she said. “But on Feb. 24, I became one 100%.”

As she spoke, volunteers on megaphones interrupted several times to announce buses leaving for Italy, Germany, Bulgaria and other European nations. The room was chaotic, filled mostly with women and children, as men stayed in Ukraine to fight. Some spoke Russian, underlining the sense of a war on family.

The majority of the refugees were Ukrainian, but there were also Nigerians, Moroccans, Italians, Chinese and Iranians. Toddlers cried in the arms of exhausted mothers, who took deep breaths to calm their children and themselves. Cats and dogs of all sizes shared beds with their owners, and one stressed Chihuahua with bulging eyes bit anyone who attempted to pet it.

Some 300 volunteers, translators and social workers take turns to help here. In the mornings, they change the mismatched sheets on vacated mattresses, placing a “reserved” or “free” handwritten sign over them. In the reception area, the two bars display not alcohol but an array of diapers, toothbrushes, snacks and even surgical masks and disinfectant gel.

At the opposite end of the King Salon, at mattress number 82 near stacks of red velvet chairs, 85-year-old Nellya Nahorna sat in silence combing her gray hair with her fingers.

It was the second time this Ukrainian grandmother had fled war. In 1941, when she was just 4 years old, Nahorna was injured by shrapnel in Nazi Germany’s invasion of Ukraine, she said.

“The first night of the war, my mother grabbed me from my cradle and ran to take the last car that carried the wounded to the border,” Nahorna recalled in a soft, low voice.

Now, more than 80 years later, it was her daughter, 57-year-old Olena Yefanova, who grabbed her on the first day of the war and crossed the border. They came from the town of Zaporizhzhia, where Europe’s largest nuclear power plant was hit by Russian shelling last week.

“This war is different,” Nahorna said in Russian. In World War II, the enemies were German “fascists,” she said. But now, she was fleeing from her “brothers.” They had to make stops along the way to get her a Ukrainian passport.

“I would like to tell the Russian mothers …. help by keeping your sons right next to yourselves and don’t let them fight and attack other countries,” Nahorna said.

In an astonishing accomplishment, the same grandmother who leaned on a cane to make it from her mattress to a table a few steps away had walked the last 5 km (3 miles) to Romania by foot. At one point, Nahorna’s heart seemed like it was giving up, and a doctor gave her some pills so she could continue, her daughter said.

“My mother clenched her will into a fist and left,” Yefanova said proudly. “She understood that this is going to be hard but she took it steadfastly.”

Yefanova had left her husband and one son behind, enlisted to fight the Russians. She wept as she showed a photo of them on her phone screensaver.

“Our kids play a game called little tanks – (Russian President Vladimir Putin) is playing his own version of this game,” she said. “And he is (using) his people in this game.”

A row behind Yefanova on mattress 34, Anna Karpenko thought of her partner as their 6-year-old son played with a yellow balloon.

Before she left him at their home in Chornomorsk, on the outskirts of Ukraine’s biggest port city of Odesa, he promised they would get married after the war. But “when we said goodbye, it felt like it was forever,” Karpenko said, wiping tears from her eyes.

Normally, she said, she’s an optimistic person. Now she and her son both cry every day.

Russian ships have made repeated attempts to fire on the Black Sea port of Odesa, according to Ukrainian officials. Karpenko said people in her town had gathered on beaches to fill bags with sand.

Originally from Crimea, Karpenko speaks Russian, worked for a Russian language school and has relatives in Donetsk, one of two Russian-backed separatist regions in eastern Ukraine. The war in Ukraine has divided her family, with her Donetsk relatives supporting Putin.

“They think that all of their problems are caused by Ukraine,” she explained in frustration. “They worship (Putin) as if he was a God.”

She’s given up trying to tell them it was Russian strikes she was fleeing.

By the next morning, Okhrimenko and her corgi had left. Her husband, who had moved to Germany only a few months ago, drove down to pick them up. She had planned to join him eventually, but never thought she would suddenly be chased out by sirens and explosions.

“We just took a deep sigh of relief together and hugged each other so strong,” Okhrimenko told AP by text message from the road to Germany.

Karpenko, her son and her mother boarded a bus also bound for Germany. On the same bus were Yefanova and Nahorna, the 85-year-old grandmother.

Thirty hours after leaving the makeshift shelter, they were still on the road. “The longest journey in my life,” Karpenko texted AP from a gas station in Austria.

As one bus left, others arrived at the Hotel Mandachi, full of freezing refugees carrying their children and their belongings. With no end to the war in sight, the wedding parties that once took place in the ballroom have been postponed indefinitely.

Roditch 2022

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Your Biography

I am a retired Photography Teacher, Refugee Settlement Manager, and Builder. For the past 10 years, I have been teaching part-time, writing books, taking photos and doing lots of research.

All the books I write come from experience and research. Yes, in my life so far I have worked with refugees, taught art, built houses, studied herbs, and health. I have also studied astrology spirituality including meditation, animal welfare, and poetry.

I sincerely hope that you can gain valuable information from my books (usually short and sweet introductions) to different facets of life I have visited.

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Website: http://roditch.com

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Light and Shade Series Book 2 by Roditch

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Black and White portraits by Roditch the photo poet from OZ.

Light and Shade Series Book 1 by Roditch

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Black and white photographs accompanied by poems by Roditch

Beautiful Buddha Series Book 3 by Roditch

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Buddha loved people and animals. He teaches us how to do the same.

Beautiful Buddha Series Book 2 by Roditch

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Poems and photographs about Buddha and the Buddhist religion

A Candle to Myself by Roditch

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A story about my life in Warrnambool, Castlemaine and Rushworth

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Time to dropout and start a new, secure and sustainable life.

Portraits by Roditch

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Portraits by Roditch. These photos are a collection of Roditch’s portraits over the past 5 years. They are a reflection of the person.

Thailand by Roditch

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This is a collection of photographs of rural Thailand. Including farmers, Monks, temples and farms

Buddha by Roditch

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Original Photos of Buddha sculptures Thailand taken by famous photographer Roditch

Sentient Series 1 by Roditch

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One reason I love Buddha is because he knew that animals had sentience, consciousness, and that consciousness was as valuable, respectable, sacred as any Homosapien.

Thailand of Dreams Series 1 by Roditch

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Thailand is a country is worth exploring to regain your imagination, love of nature, fairy tales and spirits of the land.

Portraits and Souls Series 1 by Roditch

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Portraits have always been there as a window into someone’s soul if only we are to look and care.

Beautiful Buddha Series 1 by Roditch

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Buddha is the peace in the world. Everyone can benefit from Buddha,s teachings.

Angels Series 1 by Roditch

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Children are the magic in the world. NASA has done research that confirms that all children are born creative geniuses, but, by the time they are 7 years old their genius has been retired by cultural and family conditioning.

Musing with the Fishes Series 1 by Roditch

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It is a wonderful way to relax and tune in with nature; just looking into water and musing with the fishes.

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This book is a collection of posts I have made over the past 3 years.

Musing with the Fishes by Roditch

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Heartland by Roditch

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Right now you are creating your future if nothing else. This book is about a future that belongs to the rich and powerful.

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10 years of experience teaching ESL English to Kindergarten, Primary, Secondary, University, and Teachers.

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