Danke (Day 88)
Without each and every one of you, none of the beautiful grocery photos would have been possible. You all have helped an incredible number of Ukrainian families in Austria.
Hands down the best part of my days are opening photos like this one which popped into my phone yesterday afternoon. The sign says “thank you very much” in Ukrainian and German. I did the first group grocery shopping experience just over one month ago. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined how many families we would reach in the meantime. I did a little count of all the handwritten names I have written down at home (I write the names down before I send/hand over the envelopes), and the figure was astounding.
Your donations — the cards themselves and monetary — have all been put to work. Immediately. I have zero inventory. At the moment, I have 35 empty envelopes at home, addressed to Ukrainians, for which I still need Hofer cards. My piggy bank is empty as I run to the store and buy more cards each time it is filled up. I have 4 McDonalds cards left and will take them with me to Wien HBF this morning.
Mario stepped in ten days ago to take us to the next level. I didn’t want the next level. I feared what it might mean. I feared a website might result in more requests for grocery cards than funding for grocery cards, and that is predictably the situation we are in today. Because the Austrian state has failed to provide adequate funding for Ukrainian refugees, there are thousands of Ukrainian families in Austria right now, who fled war and Putin’s missiles, who do not know how to put food on their tables and pay rent and clothe their kids for summer and….I keep saying it but the recipe is simple: money, housing, jobs. None of it is happening fast enough, unfortunately.
Mario has been working 24/7, even pre-funding with his own money the first bulk purchases of Hofer cards. We raised €30,000 in donations during the first week (THANK YOU). And then PayPal froze them. And will not unfreeze them until Mario produces a Verein (like a registered charity) certificate. And this will take a few weeks, because, Austria.
In the meantime, Mario has a very creative solution for EU residents. We have an IBAN you can send funds to for the grocery project via another charity (thank you PCs für Alle). For international donors, my personal PayPal link still works for now, and I use these funds to buy cards directly, the old-fashioned way, walking into stores and standing in line and paying for gift cards with my credit card.
So yeah, it’s all a giant headache. But the most important thing is the following: we have 1088 requests for Hofer cards via the website, and only 573 of the cards are funded. That means, until we raise another €25,750, those 515 families will not receive €50 supermarket gift cards. They will have to wait. I will have to do a LOT of texting over Telegram explaining this.
I am still texting with Ukrainian families and have my own waiting list. I try to meet the neediest cases in the Vienna area in person. I try to prioritise based on what the messages say. Likewise, Mario also sends me the most alarming messages he sees via the website. We know this sounds all a bit confusing. We are learning by doing, as one does in a crisis. But I can assure you, it works. We are helping many, many families in a small but meaningful way.
You can still go out and buy physical €50 gift cards to any supermarket chain in Austria, and either send them to Mario, or to me (please DM for my home address), or meet me one day at Wien HBF (the need for translators has not subsided and I will be heading there again this morning after I finish writing this, and tomorrow, Monday morning also from 10-12:30 roughly).
To give you an idea of what we are dealing with right now in Austria amongst Ukrainian woman, I would like to translate for you this tweet from a Ukrainian-Austrian in Tirol now helping refugees there:
“The poverty that I see daily amongst the Ukrainian refugees is under any red line. The women have no money to buy tampons, the children have no money for a bologna sandwich. They have no shoes, no clothes, yesterday I had to buy underwear for some women.”
And it gets worse. Yesterday, Albina also reported it was suddenly announced an entire hotel full of Ukrainians in Tirol was told they would all have to move out on Monday without a word as to where they would be sent, and this is after many of them had found jobs and enrolled their kids in local schools. The entire story in German here:
The same thing happens across Austria. In Vienna, residents of the big dorm (400+ as of a week ago) are being given options both in Vienna and other Austrian cities. There is confusion, uncertainty, and a lot of doubt regarding which options to choose. Getting on a bus without an idea of where it will bring them and what kind of living conditions will be there when they arrive is incredibly scary for people who have in many cases already lost everything.
And then I get messages like this. I have SO MANY messages asking for second Hofer cards, and I have to refuse. Because we said one card per family one time as demand is enormous. And sometimes it feels like we, the caring individuals, are the only ones concerned the Ukrainians are all running out of money at the same time! Readers immediately jumped in to help this mom, but we cannot do this on a case by case basis! Not for 70,000+ refugees.
Oh but don’t worry, the government has a plan:
And this too:
Please do read this excellent piece by Irene Brickner. I introduced her to some of the Ukrainians she interviews in the article. I am so relieved to finally see real media attention on the invisible crisis which is everywhere around us, across Austria.
We also have happy stories. But they are one-offs. As I said, we cannot do this for 70,000+ people. But they bring us all great joy.
I would also like to recommend you read this incredible long read on what happened to Chernobyl during the Russian occupation. For my new readers, I was actually in Chernobyl on a tour on February 8, which retrospectively seems totally crazy. I can visualise all the locations in this article, except for Slavutych, which we did not visit.
That’s probably more than enough for a Sunday morning. I heard yesterday they didn’t have any translators at the train station on Saturday afternoon (the charities have apparently started to reduce their own staffing and volunteers are burned out or have jobs, university, a life, the weather was great…the predictable has already begun).
That’s what worries me the most in all of this. We start accepting a new status quo. We accept that Ukrainian families in Austria do not have enough food. We accept that they do not receive money from the state due to incompetence and considered being “fed” by middlemen. We accept there is not enough adequate housing for the Ukrainian moms and kids. We accept they cannot find jobs easily and don’t know how to survive until the first paycheck arrives and they cannot work because there is no kindergarten spot because their kid isn’t get 3 and…
We accept that life moves on and ignores this. Putin’s war is not going to end anytime soon. North America and others continue to send Ukraine weapons to defend itself. Super, but how about dealing with the humanitarian crisis now unfolding right here in Europe as a result of the war? I understand the public has a short attention span. But Olena, Tetiana, Iryna, Viktoriia, Oksana, and their kids — they are all still here. Many of them lost their homes. They have nothing to go back to right now. They need to start over. They need our help.
This was my response yesterday. I say this whenever I get the chance, when asked for an honest answer:
This particular woman does not want to keep going. Her father is in Russian-occupied territory, she wants to remain “close to Ukraine” for when she can go back. She has apparently no money. I gave my phone number. I will try and offer whatever advice/help I can. She is travelling with a daughter of 7 or 8. It is all so heartbreaking.
Thank you for still reading. Thank you for continuing to support us. I am overwhelmed with how much we have been able to do in just a few months as a totally grassroots effort only on the basis of the kindness and generosity of individuals.
For Austria/EU:
https://cards-for-ukraine.at/donate
For everyone else:
One more, published with mom’s permission (he is literally the cutest thing I have seen in forever)