768: The Other Front Lines
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbpeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. W-B-E-Z Chicago, it's American Live. Okay, so going down the stairs to walk the dog, reluctant to use the elevator today because there are explosions in my area, mostly pretty rare ones, but over the last hour, maybe more frequent. This is recorded in a cave by a woman named Kacha, and it takes you into the everyday ness of this war in this very intimate, three-dimensional way. I'm going to play you a bit more with this before I say more about it. And I already have noticed that the best way to know if they are really close is to observe the birds, if the birds start like panicking and like flying away, that means that explosion is probably relatively close. Oh, here, there was another one. I really need to have my dog pee. There's a beep of the door, and so day, I think second of the war, I think it was February 25th, there was shooting that I could hear from three directions. And then when I came home, almost immediately, I heard this loud, metallic noise, and I looked out the window and there was a tank driving along my building. So there is a dig in the ground where Russian tank was driving, and my dog is considering peeing on it right now, which is frankly hilarious. But if you go along them, you can clearly see, okay, the birds are flying, I think. I will try to head back in general direction of my house, I'm sorry. My dog is stubborn, he doesn't want to. I think he wants to go poop. Risking my life for you, asshole. No, he's not an asshole. He's a very sweet and kind dog. He is very, very calm about the, okay, I'm going home because this one was really loud. Koch actually recorded these for the Vice News Report's podcast, starting at the beginning of the war. She asked that they, and we did not say her last name, or what part of the city she said, or what kind of job she does, other than it's an education. War is personal. We don't usually talk about it that way, but Ukraine had over 40 million people at the start of the war, and there are just all kinds of ways that they're going through it. And all sorts of front lines. For Kocho, the front line has been a bunch of different things, but one of them is her decision to stay in key with her parents, her dad's 87, her mom's 73, and both are medical issues. My dad has cancer. He's not treatable, basically not treatable anymore. He's also almost completely blind, and so he's basically lying in bed the entire day, apart from walking or lying the corridor a little bit and eating. And he's listening to radio. My mom has diabetes. She also has trouble walking. They are choosing to stay here because they can't just go to the bump, shelter back and forth all the time, and we're just hoping for the best. She shops with them. It stays up nights to help her dad with whatever he needs.
Transcription truncated.