As a child, Halyna Aivazova dreamed of becoming a doctor and helping people. But the path to this dream was not so straight. Initially, Halyna received an education as a design engineer and worked for about 5 years at the Zarya-Mashproekt plant. Only in 2018 did she finally follow her heart’s call and began studying at the Gestalt Institute. In November 2019 she resigned from her position as an engineer, telling herself that she would never return to the factory.

Just before the war, Halyna was a mother on her third maternity leave, she was enjoying motherhood and studying in her favorite field, going to yoga in the morning and regularly to the sauna and coffee shops with her friends.

"Now I have a new home and new friends, but every time I watch the news and remember my past life, tears well up in my eyes. In Prague, I learned to find places that are familiar and similar to my native places - streets with cherry blossom, five-story buildings in a residential area, or rows of Lime and Chestnut trees as in Mykolaiv," Halyna says.

Now she is finishing her studies at the Gestalt Institute of Ukraine. The war pushed Halyna to start practicing earlier than she had planned, but she is happy about it, because she is gaining invaluable experience and making her childhood dream of helping people come true. "When we came to Prague, I also really wanted to help people in some way, and in Rodinném centrum Jablíčkov I was offered a place and time where I could do it. In the beginning, these were children and adult groups full of emotional response. When the avalanche of feelings subsided, there was then an opportunity to seek individual therapy, and adults mostly chose this option. Children worked better in a group format, the children's group ended in 2023," she says. Now Halyna works individually with adults, and also teenagers from 11 years old.

When it became clear that the war would not end and her three children would go to school in Prague in September, Haylna’s husband joined her here. He was able to come due to the ‘three child’ rule of moving from Ukraine. This enabled Halyna to work as well as to rent an apartment for them. Since September last year, she has also been working in a state school as an assistant for Ukrainian children.

"In the future, I plan not to stop at what I have achieved, I like to improve my professional skills and knowledge. In Mykolaiv, my husband and I, he is a massage therapist, planned to open a joint office where people could come to treat both soul and body, so these plans are still in my head and we dream of doing it, but maybe now in Prague," Halyna says.