“I never, ever, believed that anything like this could happen,” says Valia*. “Not for a second.”
Just two weeks ago, the English teacher says, she had been living a normal life in Kropyvnytskyi in central Ukraine with her 13-year-old son. But on February 24, she woke up to the news that Russia had invaded her country.
Struggling with stigma and discrimination in an unaccommodating environment, Nujeen Mustafa knows all too well the difficulties children with disabilities face in emergency and protracted crises.