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When frozen protesters at Independence Square grab plastic cups of hot tea, served constantly from the makeshift kitchen in the Trade Unions House that acts as the headquarters of the protest movement, they might notice that great care was taken to remove the tags from teabags for the comfort of drinkers. For that, they might thank Liza Shaposhnikova.

Shaposhnikova, 27, volunteered to remove the tags from the teabags because it’s the easiest kitchen task for her. The woman has cerebral palsy, an illness that has deformed her arms significantly, making even easy actions a challenge.

When she’s sitting in a crowded kitchen on the first floor of the Trade Unions House with fifty other kitchen volunteers around her, Shaposhnikova’s tiny figure is barely noticeable. She doesn’t laugh or chat with other women. She bows her head and carefully picks teabags from a basin that she holds atop her knees. With each one she slowly tears away the tag and puts the teabag in a grey bowl.

“I’m not very used to this much attention,” she says bashfully. The young woman has been interviewed by media several times since her photo was posted on Facebook by one of the protesters.

At the end of her shift, Shaposhnikova goes to the building’s seventh floor for a short nap. A resident of Druzhkivka, a town in the eastern region of Donetsk, Shaposhnikova came to Kyiv alone on Nov. 24 after she saw the protests in the news. When she decided to sleep at Maidan for the first time on Nov. 29, the riot police brutally attacked in the early morning hours of Nov. 30.

Shaposhnikova remembers standing by the square’s monument with other women while all the men encircled them in order to keep police away.

“When the police started beating people, somebody shouted to me, ‘Run!’ but the steps were blocked, so I slid off the monument on the glass windows,” she recalls.

A young man from the crowd of protesters caught Shaposhnikova and led her out of danger.

“I glanced back and saw the police running after us. Oh my! And I ran away. Fortunately, there was a taxi nearby, so I jumped in it and headed away,” Shaposhnikova says, flinging her arms in an emotional gesture.

“I can’t say it was scary that night, but it was spooky because of all the blood,” she says. “I remember seeing one injured man going out of the crowd and falling down – on one knee, then on both knees. Another man picked up his arm, I took his second arm on my shoulder and we carried him away together.”

At 8 a.m. that same morning Shaposhnikova was back to the protest. And on Dec. 2 she began her volunteer work in the Trade Unions House kitchen.

“They wanted to scare the people. But no way! After that I decided to stay till the end,” she says, grinning.

The end, she hopes, will be President Viktor Yanukovych finally signing the agreement with the European Union.

Shaposhnikova hopes that her story can inspire people who are not yet protesting.

“Maybe when people find out that a disabled person came here to protest in such difficult conditions, maybe more healthy people will come, too. I hope they will,” she says before rushing back to her work station and a heaping pile of tag-less teabags.

Kyiv Post lifestyle editor Olga Rudenko can be reached at [email protected].