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In this week's assignment, the story of a sister, a minor and the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.

I'm Natalia Antalava.

Malaysia Airlines tweeted that it had lost contact with the passenger plane

MH17 reports started to come in that the plane had been shot down. We now know

it came down on the Ukrainian Russian border in an area which is controlled by pro-Russian

rebels.

So here we are, deep in the rebel-held territory and the very fields where the plane crashed.

That was me a year ago reporting the crash. There are three things about MH17 that I'll never forget.

The first is a glass jar of face cream. It was the day after the crash. I had just arrived with the BBC team.

The sun was setting over spectacular fields of

sunflowers. Scattered through these fields over a huge area covering 10

kilometers were the bodies of 298 passengers and crew of MH17.

After filming, I wandered away from the debris and bodies for a bit, trying to process what I was seeing.

It was there, in the middle of a sunflower field that I stepped on something hard, a jar of

Esther Louder face cream. A mundane object a Malaysia, a businesswoman maybe, or one of the scientists heading to a big HIV conference, or maybe

she was the mother of one of the 80 children on the plane. My second memory is of a tall man sobbing by the side of the

road. He must have been a journalist. No family members or

international rescue workers could get to the area in those early days because of

the fighting. The man was on his phone speaking English to someone back home.

He was describing duty-free whiskey bottles that we'd all seen amid the debris. He was crying because he like the rest of us could not

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