Stephanie’s Piece #6: Part 3 of 3 — Veriko’s Story
Photo Credit: Clare Harbage/NPR
Veriko Ekhvaia had to flee Abkhazia for the first time in 1993, at age 6.
Her parents told her they were going to visit her grandmother in Zugdidi, Georgia, but that visit stretched to three years as Russian-backed Abkhaz forces took control of the region. After the conflict died down, her parents moved the family back into its old home, but everything felt different. A few years later, Veriko heard gunfire from the next village and saw people running away with children in their arms. Her father reassured her that the fighting wouldn’t come to them. Still, he sent her and her three siblings to stay with an aunt in Georgia’s capital city, Tbilisi. Once things cooled down, he reassured her, they would be able to go back. But this time, they didn’t.
Veriko was celebrating her 21st birthday when she learned her country was at war with Russia over the breakaway region of South Ossetia. That night, August 8, 2008, her family turned off the lights so it wouldn’t be bombed; everyone was terrified that the fighting would spread to Zugdidi. As she huddled in the dark, she found herself wondering if she would be forced to flee a third time because of war. “The fear came back — that what we had gathered, everything we had built here, however little, that we would lose it again,” she said.