The Chain of Breath
There are cities that keep breathing even when it seems that the very air has turned into silence. Kharkiv is one of them. Its breaths are the hundreds of voices speaking words of support in hospital wards, shelters, and the corridors of social services. And among those voices are the voices of our Kharkiv social workers, who every day map the geography of human compassion — from the “You Should Know About Tuberculosis” project of the NGO “Labor and Health Social Initiatives” (LHSI) to the center helping survivors of domestic violence.
It was there, among stories of pain and new beginnings, that Serhii’s story began.
His name may not be widely known, but something else matters more — how one person, ordinary and a little lonely, managed not only to recover but to remind others that human life is always bound by invisible threads of responsibility.
A woman who had turned to the center for help remembered him between two breaths — the way one recalls a dream or a forgotten address. She had lived in a dormitory then, where the walls were thin and the neighbor’s cough was louder than one’s own thoughts. Her screening and her daughter’s both came back clear, but the thought of Serhii wouldn’t leave her.
She told the social workers about him — and they, like true chroniclers of human destinies, found him. Serhii turned out to be open and kind: he agreed to screening, and then to medical examination. The diagnosis — multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. A difficult illness, like a long Latin phrase that must be pronounced precisely so as not to lose its meaning.
And so he began treatment — first in the hospital, then at home, with hope and patience. Meanwhile, the world was changing: the COVID epidemic faded, leaving behind fear and the experience of isolation, and then came the war — closer, more real. In the first months of the full-scale invasion, social workers personally delivered medicines — like medieval wanderers carrying healing potions through the ruins.
And yet — the treatment ended. Serhii recovered. Not because fate was kind, but because there were people beside him who never stopped believing in the shared breath of the city.
Kharkiv still holds many stories. Some begin with a cough, others with compassion. But all of them lead to the same conclusion — one that Umberto Eco himself might have written: Human life is a chain of breath, where each person’s inhale becomes another’s chance to live.
The “You Should Know About Tuberculosis” project is implemented by the NGO “Labor and Health Social Initiatives” (LHSI) with the support of the Alliance for Public Health under a grant from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.