In stark contrast to the Ukrainian 'beauty' (who hates everything Ukrainian she said, before having to delete her social media after the outrage she caused) who boasted about using looted mascara online, there is a very moving Wall Street Journal article here about the local villagers around the scene of the crash.
As I always suspected, these are self sufficient, strong and practical people. The local miners are accustomed to dealing with deaths and accidents, and the protocols involved. They were ready and able to help store passengers bodies and possessions safely, but waited in vain for any directions from the Russian backed rebels.
' "In mines, you don't remove a body until they investigate it," he says.'
'While most of the bodies have been removed from the crash site, the roughly 6,500 residents of the villages remain traumatized by what they saw, trapped by debris and passengers' belongings scattered across the local landscape. Pieces of other people's lives haunt their own.'
They are absolutely heartbroken. But they have managed to retrieve a large pile of belongings and the lady mayor, whose husband is a miner and helped find bodies, is keeping them safe.
'On Thursday, an elderly woman showed up at her office in tears and handed over a doll with the name Emma stitched in pink across its shirt. The woman was digging potatoes. Emma turned up instead.
Ms. Voloshina is keeping the doll in a purple plastic bag on top of a large pile of passenger belongings that villagers keep finding every day: suitcases, wallets, a USB cord, and on and on.
"We're keeping them, we're waiting," Ms. Voloshina she says. She vows to get Emma home.'
The article is long but well worth reading. Note how locals describe the emergency workers who rushed from Donetsk to put out the fires, while the rebels simply stood above them with guns, doing nothing. The photo shows wreckage in the mayor's relative's cabbage patch, a week after the crash.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/afte...and-heartbreak-in-ukraine-villages-1406335532
