Beautiful Autumn with his clothes
Autumn with his almost lost beauty
The winter is coming to steal the journey

I keep my papers in the tree.
The tree will be naked when the wind comes.
Lovely autumn, never become winter weather.

Seyyid-Ali from Algeria

Loss is something that is inevitable and that is part of human life, part of existence. Every human being that is born is born to die and that is where grief comes in. Grief, having grief is something almost everyone has gone through; you must have lost a member of your family, must have lost someone that you feel very sad about. Grieving for someone, when someone dies, you grieve for a certain period of time, and then life goes on, and that is the season. When it is the winter, everyone feels the cold and it is difficult to go on. And when it is the summer, people feel the heat, the sun and everything, so that is how grief comes. Grief comes and goes. It comes and you go through it and then it goes. The important thing is when you grieve, you try to speak about it, try to share it, try to find a way to take it out of your mind, try to be distracted by things. When you are distracted, you will be able to manage the grief – doing something that is very hard to control. But it is like a season. It comes and it goes.

Ibrahim, from Sierra Leone

My name is Viktoriya, I am from Ukraine, and, as you know, there is the war in my country. Russian Federation occupied part of my Motherland, and almost every day it has continued to bomb our cities, towns and villages. Unfortunately, we, all Ukrainian people, know very well right now what it means grief. Today, for instance, in Kyiv, where my husband and son lives, at the morning four people were killed by Russian rockets and sixteen were damaged, one of them is a pregnant woman.

We always pray to stop it. But for the last two years we know very well what it means – community! When you sit in a shelter without light and water in cold with people who you haven’t known before. And now people, who you haven’t met before, just share their meal and house with you, try to support you and your children in many others ways.You begin to understand that community is only one necessary thing for human being, not only because some material staff but moral supporting. Now you realise that the worst punishment it is not loss of something but not to be with people.

Viktoriya, from Ukraine