Buryak
Another whirlwind few days. A lot of heavy situations. Feeling very much in over my head / areas of expertise and as if the adults left the room (if they were ever there?).
On Saturday I was golf mom an as such, after I wrote this (do read if you haven’t yet), I drove through the back roads of Lower Austria
to pay a quick visit to Natasha and Pasha. Natasha has a magical tiny vegetable garden, and fed us the most delicious homegrown eggplant fried with her own homegrown heirloom tomatoes and onions with a little cheese. Heavenly. She sent me home with a bag full of fresh produce (I arrived with a selection from a local butcher shop and some chocolates). Another Ukrainian gave me this bracelet. She is heading home. I didn’t want to say goodbye, in very large part because I do not know how Natasha and Pasha will manage without her. Natasha gifted me four giant buryak (beetroot — the Ukrainian word sounds nothing like the Russian word, svyokla). I came home and whipped up to giant pots of borsch-like soup. I send Natasha the soup photos. She gave me a thumbs up.
On Saturday I also received a sad message. He continued to write me from the road. Bratislava was beautiful, reminded him of a Ukrainian city. Passing through Hungary. Hungarians gave him trouble on the border (of course, more than 90 days, he had no blue card to show)…made it to Lviv but not without adventures, as he writes. A local taxi driver tricked him. He is not the only Ukrainian who left that bad dorm in Wien, went home to Ukraine, and continues to write me. It must be like a form of therapy. I don’t mind, really, it’s just texting, but it’s hard not to carry all those emotions around with you. Now he says maybe he will try Romania or Poland, which do I think is better?
Monday morning I went to the AKH (Vienna’s largest hospital, and one of the largest in Europe) with a thirty-something mom who arrived a month ago from occupied Kherson with three kids and a boyfriend. She has stage four breast cancer. She just came back from a chemo drip in Ukraine. She is trying to get treatment in Austria. They are living in a not great dorm (usually it is a homeless shelter in winter), only one of her three kids has a school assignment so far, she hasn’t gotten her payments yet, and is trying to get into the Austrian healthcare system for cancer care. We found via Twitter an organisation to translate her medical records for free, but the translation isn’t ready yet. We both had to take covid tests ahead of time and show QR codes to enter the hospital. We had a panic when she forgot her insurance card but they let us in, thankfully. Once we were in front of a doctor, it was good. I translated, they gave her time, they listened. I added an important piece of family history I learned while we were waiting and chatting: when she was 17, her own mom died of breast cancer, aged 40, leaving behind five kids. The doctor immediately ordered genetic testing, too. A dentist. She must see one at once. We go to Starbucks when the appointment is over, I promise to call my own. She cannot smile, she says. Her teeth are falling apart. The chemo made them worse. She would like to be able to chew properly. I nod. I book my own dentist. It will cost €106 for the scan and the letter, they say. I say to myself, we will find it, we always do. I promise to come to the dentist and next week back to the hospital to translate again. I stress she must open a bank account, must get the kids’ blue cards, must get those translations. I know it is way too much information too fast.
I buy a magazine for €4.90 from the newspaper seller and take photos of two articles I worked behind the scenes the help produce. I translated and made introductions. I send the photos to all the Ukrainians who gave interviews.
I get a call. It’s Sonya’s mom Larysa. Could I help Sonya sell two paintings? Sonya is 13, living in a commuter town not far from Vienna. I promise to post them online. No inquiries yet. I asked for close-up photos. What a talent. I wish I could do more.
In the evening, another crisis. My phone starts ringing non-stop. A situation in what is now privately-run housing. Ukrainians reportedly locked in their room by landlords. Police called. Police don’t listen to us, I am told. There is shoving, I am told. Talk with others, try to provide advice, ask and fail to find alternate private housing, make the only suggestion I can: please come to Vienna to the welcome center at Stadion and ask for help. They will try to help you. Again, this is not a state organisation that is filling a super critical crisis role.
When you are working, as a refugee from Ukraine, you cannot ask for a free room from the state. Therefore, if you are working and have a shitty landlord, you basically are on your own to find one who isn’t. If there is a hotline to call for “Ukrainians are in trouble and local police are not helping” I don’t know the number. So I wrote this, this morning, sitting in the airport, waiting to meet my own mother (terminal cancer, hasn’t seen the grandkids in years).
There is a total lack of resources. Way too much is falling on the backs of smaller organizations and burnt-out volunteers.
This afternoon I got a panic call from a very vulnerable woman who had mistakenly been told by an organization that I have housing. You can imagine how upset she was when I explained to her the reality on the ground at the moment. Fast forward: try to calm her down, get in touch with said organisation, say please don’t give out my number, please help this woman, encourage her to ask them again for help…she writes me “thanks for not being indifferent”. Heart breaks. I beg her to really check all options before giving up and going back to Kharkiv.
Reader, if you are getting the feeling the refugee system in Austria is not working smoothly, and no one is really in charge, no one is taking ultimate responsibility, you are correct. The challenge is enormous and I think (much) more could be done at an EU-level to ensure more fair and smarter distribution of resources and funding. To prioritise the most vulnerable first, who are often arriving last.
Austria at the moment in general feels like a kindergarten in which the teachers all didn’t show up to work and the four year olds are running loose. There are elections and political failures and economic collapse and inflation and covid and basically no one has any capacity for this refugee crisis and it too has not gone away.
Therefore, I believe it is important to talk about how we could change things to better use and allocate what seem to be very limited resources available.
Also, we private initiatives, we are so exhausted and so tired we will not be able to keep going forever like this. I am supposed to be distributing €50 supermarket gift vouchers, or helping with train tickets. I am not qualified to advise cancer patients, search for urgent housing for women with trauma, and call the police over a dispute which may turn violent. But if you do not ignore messages because you care, you get dragged in. And yes, emotionally, it is very hard to always be the bearer of bad news.
I talked on Saturday evening late to a woman who works in social housing. She called me at 9:30pm to talk about how we could potentially help which Ukrainian family. I know a hard-working white collar professional who spends her weekends and free time helping on Familienbeihilfe and school applications. We are not alone. But we are tired. And it is not sustainable going into fall/winter. So if Europe cannot handle more Ukrainians, then give real money to Ukraine to house and feed them in the (relative) safety of the west of the country. We must think and act now before waves and waves of the most vulnerable arrive when it gets cold in active war zones and occupied territories. And by all means open up the labor market and stop preventing refugees on state support from working when you have a crisis of “no one” to fill low-paid jobs.
I wanted to share some news articles on the war itself and Russia’s economy, but this got a little long. Tomorrow then.
In the meantime, this is how things stand. Word of mouth spreads fast, especially when Ukrainians are living in group homes.
This photo is perhaps my favourite this week. Sometimes you think here is a problem that can be solved with one simple Amazon order, at least temporarily, and you do it immediately. Two clicks and voila. Next day delivery.
Thank you for reading. Thanks for not turning away. I know it is so hard to read this day in and day out. It’s hard to hear it all, believe me.