You know, her son is such a fascinating place for me because I felt this both when I was

there last year and also this week.

Samantha Schmidt is a foreign correspondent for the Post, and she's been reporting from

the Southern City of Herson, which was occupied by Russian forces, until it was liberated

by Ukrainian troops.

Then the city was bombed relentlessly by Russian forces, and now flooded when a major

damn collapsed.

You walk through this city, and first of all, when you're in the city itself, the main

kind of center of the city is dry right now, and life is going on normally.

Supermarkets and restaurants and cafes where people are sitting on the patio and, you

know, just kind of sipping on lattes with their friends.

There was a man playing in a accordion outside the supermarket.

There seemed to sort of be this mentality that this is just another day in Herson, but

then you get closer to the flooded areas, and you just see the level of destruction, and

you hear about the bombings that have happened, even as people were trying to flee the evacuated

areas.

And you realize that things are not normal in Herson, but the people here are just so used

to being, you know, hit with catastrophe and devastation time and time and again, and

it seems that they are just so good at sort of picking up the pieces and organizing themselves

and figuring out, you know, what help do we need?

How can we get aid to the people who need it?

There was no panic that I could tell.

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