Helping a journalist in exile to improve her health condition

BYSOL opened a meet­ing for a jour­nal­ist who faced threats of crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion and was forced to leave Belarus urgent­ly. The deci­sion to make the gath­er­ing anony­mous was dic­tat­ed by her dif­fi­cult psy­cho­log­i­cal state.

Hel­lo.

As a jour­nal­ist, I worked in sev­er­al Belaru­sian inde­pen­dent media. In 2020, I was detained twice in the streets of Min­sk while per­form­ing my pro­fes­sion­al duties. Although I had a press sta­tus, it did not save me from deten­tion. I was accused of par­tic­i­pat­ing in an unau­tho­rized ral­ly and sen­tenced to admin­is­tra­tive arrest. In 2021 I was threat­ened with crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion and had to urgent­ly leave Belarus.

The deci­sion to make the gath­er­ing anony­mous was dic­tat­ed by my dif­fi­cult psy­cho­log­i­cal state. I am putting my life back togeth­er piece by piece, and so far I am doing it rather bad­ly. But I real­ly want to regain my health to be able to live and work.

The hard­ships of emi­gra­tion, not hav­ing lived since 2020, and the war in Ukraine have tak­en a heavy toll on my health. As a result, I lost my job, expe­ri­enced severe and pro­longed depres­sion, devel­oped ane­mia and a num­ber of oth­er health prob­lems on the back­ground of unem­ploy­ment and hunger.

For health rea­sons I can’t work now, because I can’t just go to my lap­top (pre­vi­ous­ly this hap­pened only after heavy inter­views about mur­ders). No con­cen­tra­tion: read­ing any text requires a lot of effort (as if I can see the let­ters, but I don’t under­stand the mean­ing and have to make a lot of effort). After watch­ing short videos I feel very tired, as if I had worked all day with­out a break. Some­times it’s hard to get out of bed at all to even brush my teeth.

I am des­per­ate and am turn­ing to you for help because I am not cop­ing with these tri­als myself.
Thank you from the bot­tom of my heart for your sup­port!

How much is needed?

€2750

€1500 — rent of an apart­ment for 3 months
€1000 — psy­chother­a­py course (10 con­sul­ta­tions)
€250 — med­ica­tion for 2 months