In some ways, camp scared the boy almost as much as the war did. He had no friends there, nor anywhere really, and he was not sure how to make them. He had the wrong clothes and the wrong phone and he had never talked to girls, let alone danced with them.
And then there was the pool. Artem Miz, 12, wearing a yellow camp T-shirt and long black pants, sat alone in the shade as kids in swimsuits splashed in the water nearby.
“Honestly, I don’t want to embarrass myself, because everyone would laugh that I can’t swim,” said Artem, a skinny boy with dark hair and dark eyes. “I’m so big, and I can’t swim alone. Everyone else can.”
A nonprofit run by Ukraine’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, created this 10-day camp in late August as a respite for kids who have endured nightly barrages of drones and missiles and often much worse during Ukraine’s war with Russia. Some of the 51 children at the camp lost their fathers in the fighting or saw their houses leveled by airstrikes. Some fled their homes, taking only what they could carry.
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