KURNOOL: Yennam Anisha and her friend Ajantha walked for four hours and covered 10 kilometres in a day, to reach the Ukrainian-Romanian border. Starving throughout the way and without sufficient water, the two friends also battled bone-chilling cold on the border and hostile locals. Now glad to be talking from the comfort of her home in Banaganapalle of Kurnool district, Anisha on Thursday recollected the horrifying four hours she wished she never had to witness.
Both Anisha and Ajantha are MBBS students at Bukovinian State Medical University in Chernivtsi. Though the mentioned Ukrainian city was not that impacted by the ongoing war, the two, both of whom hail from Kurnool, panicked and decided to leave their hostel at once.“Ajantha and I walked to the border because there was no other mode of transport available. Hours later, we reached the Romanian border, from where the Indian Embassy officials looked after us,” Anisha said. “We had run out of food and water, and none of the residents chipped in to help us.”
From Romania, the duo was brought to Delhi along with a dozen other Indian students on an ‘Operation Ganga’ flight, and then to Hyderabad also via air. So far, 10 students from Kurnool who were studying in Ukraine, have come back home, while others were said to be in transit. Similarly, Laksmi Samarasimha Reddy from P Chintakunta in Allagadda mandal, walked for days and covered a distance of 30 km in total. A student of Kharkiv National Medical College, he also fought the harshest of conditions before he could reach the Ukrainian-Hungarian border.
While speaking to TNIE, Venkata Nagi Reddy said his son, Laksmi, boarded a rescue flight from Hungary, and had reached Delhi already. “He may reach home Friday afternoon.” The parent said Naveen SG, the Karnataka student who was killed during shelling in Kharkiv, was studying at his son’s college. “My son was lucky enough to have started walking out of the city a day before the invasion of Ukraine. All that he had in the four days it took him to reach the border, was biscuits and eggs.”