by Fabio Brioschi
The story of Polina Buhrova and Yevheniia Kantemyr, two young Ukrainian athletes fleeing the war it has already been told in these pages. Today, thanks to cooperation of inhabitants of Cinisello Balsamothis story is enriched with a new element: welcomed in an emergency, they became members of the Diaz cooperative and today they are also assigned accommodation. Two perfect Cinisello members.
February 2022: war disrupts Ukraine and the lives of Polina and Zhenya, students at Kharkiv Polytechnic, a city 30 km from the eastern border with Russia. It is to build a bridge to Italy for them Luca Crippa, from Cinisella and technical director of the Ukrainian Badminton national team. Together with his wife Gloria PirvanescuLuca organizes their arrival first in Sardinia, then in his city, where he knows the cooperative tradition of the area well.
The arrival in Cinisello Balsamo was made possible by the collaboration between the municipal administration and the Casa Tua Consortium – formed by the inhabitants’ cooperatives UniAbita, La Nostra Casa and Diaz – which guaranteed the two athletes initial emergency accommodation. After months spent between temporary solutions and uncertainty, finally a fixed point.
Cinisello Balsamo’s welcome did not stop with the emergency. Polina and Zhenya chose to enter the cooperative system: they signed up as members of the Diaz cooperative and have applied for housing enjoyment. A path that takes time for the ranking, but finally the good news: permanent accommodation, no longer temporary, in the full cooperative spirit.
It’s a story that tells the story capacity for inclusion of Cinisellese cooperation: not just emergency help, but real integration path, from temporary hospitality to entry into cooperative communityfrom the fragility of arrival to the stability of home.
They don’t yet know for sure what they will do in the future, but being two international level athletes – Polina is among the top 40 in singles and together they are in the top 30 in doubles – the prospect is to continue playing sports at a high level for the next ten or twelve years.
As he explains Edoardo Visentin responsible secretary of the Diaz cooperative: “It is thanks to the synergy between the Cinisello cooperative movement and the sporting world that it was possible to find a solution to the serious housing emergency experienced by Polina and Yevheniia. Theirs is a story that has profoundly affected all of us cooperators and also the social body. In addition to having given them the opportunity to train in our gym, the Palacooper in via Diaz, we satisfied the request for accommodation: in the first period with hospitality in the temporary accommodation structure in via Palestro, subsequently the A. Diaz Cooperative was able to permanently accept their request. The cooperative’s buildings are inhabited both by those who have lived in the area for generations, and by children and grandchildren of those great migratory movements of the 1950s and 1960s, which imposed a timely response to an unprecedented housing emergency”.
