Artiom, 16 years old, lives in Mariupol

»I met Yellow Bus last year in October when they made a tour in the Donetsk region and they came to Mariupol, too. The second time I met Yellow Bus in a summer camp near Kyiv.
Yellow Bus has shown me that my interests are journalism and that I would like to work in the media sector in future. I tried for example to film my own reportage with the help of Yellow Buss and these are unforgettable impressions gained there. That was really a nice thing.
I look at different channels from Youtube bloggers and my main source of information is a news channel on Telegram.
We also shot a report about false news with support of Yellow Bus. The Russian propaganda had spread false news, namely that tanks would be on the beach at Mariupol. But that was not the truth: This Russian propaganda video was filmed somewhere else and not here on the beach. Then we created a counterstatement to these false news stories.
Personal, I had only little experience of the war because my entire family moved to a village near Zaporizhia when the war started.
Strangers can not really understand the war through media alone. Maybe some will manage it, but it's very difficult to grasp what has happened. Everything which is only described or told is different from feeling it directly.
I especially like text and video in journalism, because I find it exciting how the content is presented there. You can view and highlight the same information from different angles. I also have a girlfriend in Horliwka in the occupied territories. And I know another girl who lived first near to Awdijiwka, but now she moved to Kyiv. These two girls joined Yellow Bus, too and we became friends. But we did not talk about the war.
The worst personal result of the war was that my father worked and lived in the Donetsk region (DNR*) and has not been able to return home for five years.
Now, he is here again and everything is fine. We see us often and we are talking to each other. But in the five years when he lived in the DNR region our communication was very disturbed. We rarely talked and I was only ten years old in those days.
For me, not much has changed due to the war, I go to school, talk to friends and everything goes on as before. The summer camp of Yellow Bus not only helped me in regard to orientating myself, but it also offered workshops. I was particularly impressed by speaking with the people working in these workshops. That was a very good experience.«

* DNR: Donezkaja narodnaja respublika, the Donetsk People's Republic is a self-proclaimed state in the Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine.

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