Name: Yuriy Didula
Age: 28
Education: Bachelor’s degree in history, Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv;
Master’s degree in Central and Eastern European Studies, La Salle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Profession: Manager of the We Build Ukraine Together project at Lviv Educational Foundation
Did you know? Didula is a former soccer player and used to play in local leagues.
Lviv native Yuriy Didula, 28, manages We Build Ukraine Together, a volunteer network that rebuilds homes damaged in Russia’s war on Ukraine in the Donbas.
In four years of mending mortar shell holes in the walls of damaged houses, the project has also helped to build bridges between Ukrainians in the western and eastern parts of the country divided by propaganda-fueled prejudices and overblown differences over language.
Didula’s first volunteer job was to repair a balcony and windows in an apartment in Kramatorsk, a Donetsk Oblast city of 150,000 people located located 689 kilometers southeast of Kyiv. The city was liberated in July 2014 by the Ukrainian army after two months of Russian-backed occupation.
“When we finished, other residents of the building were lining up asking to help them,” he said. “But the most amazing thing was to see how their attitudes towards the Ukrainian-speaking volunteers were changing.”
At first, residents of predominantly Russian-speaking Kramatorsk were wary of volunteers from western Ukraine.
“Kremlin propaganda was very strong,” Didula recalls. “There definitely was a lack of trust, and locals didn’t understand why we were there. They thought we were nationalists who had come to force everyone to speak Ukrainian.”
For Didula, too, the experience has been transformative. He stayed in Kramatorsk for a year, where his organization started a youth center.
“For me, there’s no geographical divide: Ukrainians living in Kramatorsk are not different from those living in Lviv,” he says. “Although we spoke different languages, we understood each other and wanted to live in Ukraine.”
In 2016, a group of volunteers from Kramatorsk went to Lviv to help rebuild the fire-damaged house of a local activist. It was time to break stereotypes about the Donbas people in the west, Didula said. Lviv saw a surge of internally displaced people who fled the war, which stirred suspicions of newcomers and “their Russian mentality.
Over four years, 1,500 volunteers have joined in the We Build Ukraine Together effort, repairing nearly 200 homes in 48 towns and villages. The project has received support from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Black Sea Trust, the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine and receives other donations.
Didula says the biggest reward for him is to see people they helped going on to help others.
