Day 23
A short one today...mom life has caught up with me...a lot of recommendations on what to read/watch.
This morning we raced out of the house at 7am because my eldest had a biology test during first period. By 7:30am I was at the bank, making a transfer to Hungary for help out a Ukrainian mom and her kid who are flying tomorrow to Spain to start a new life with a backpack and $50. I snapped this photo while at a red light through my sunroof around 7:45am. I was on my way to volunteer as a translator at one of the hotels Ukrainian refugees have been “housed” at in Vienna.
I don’t want to write in detail about what I saw today because the whole thing upset me and I won’t go back. My work is more effective on the train station, where I can reach more people over a shorter period of time and work intensely from one mini-crisis to the next. Today I saw the longer-term problems for which I have no good solutions. An old man with one leg, let’s call him Vassily, had crutches in terrible shape. He asked me if we could replace the rubber bottoms. They are slippery, he said, pointing to the marble floor. The crutches were held together with tape and who knows what else. I asked Vienna Twitter if they could help, and within an hour Vassily had a new pair of crutches. That made me happy. That felt like we made a difference.
Otherwise, women asked me questions I have no answers to. I don’t know how to find affordable housing for everyone. I don’t know which real estate brokers they can trust. I don’t know where there is a good single room available. A few miracles have happened, like the mother and daughter from Mykolaiv who are now in a comfortable private home in Wiener Neustadt, again thanks to Twitter. You are all angels, you who open your homes and take in people in need. But we don’t have offers like that for everyone.
Today I promised one mom to help her find an affordable apartment in Vienna near the school she managed to enrol her child in. Will I be able to do that? I don’t know. I don’t know anything about renting apartments here. Another family asked me to talk to an Austrian host and work out the details for them to move in to share a single family house in a Vienna suburb. It sounds great, I assured them. No one knows who they can trust. One well dressed middle aged mom asked me if her train back to Ukraine will also be free. Back to Ukraine, I asked? Yes, she said. I bring the kids to France and then I go back. Wow.
So it is a lot. All of it. I will head back to the train station on Sunday where for the moment I feel I am most useful because I work well under pressure and most importably, fast. I cannot stand the sitting around when there is nothing to do. In that case, I just leave. Which is basically what I did by late morning today. Lesson learned.
Keeping this vague on purpose — the bureaucracy needs to get thrown out the window. People need long-term housing. They need bank accounts and jobs and not more paperwork. The paperwork will turn them homeless and vulnerable. In-kind donations need to be provided to the people in need and not stored away goodness knows where. Again, I cannot say everything I saw but please believe me when I say some of this is Austria’s old demons coming to haunt us all during a time of real crisis.
Oh goodness I have only 10 minutes and I have to be a mom again driving like Cinderella about to hit midnight. Ok. A few recommendations of what to read and I promise deeper writing this weekend.
In no particular order:
Brave and very disturbing reporting from Kharkiv
Russia attacks Ukraine’s food supply
Mega thread on the Russian army
Matzah in Dnipro (I had no idea!)
Finally, the tweet I wanted to search photos for and post, but someone did first, much better than I could have:
And if you didn’t hear this last night, from this Ukraine via Telegram update yesterday evening thread here:
I’m sorry it’s so short today. The best I could do with the half an hour I had! Promise to make it up to you this weekend.
Thanks so much for reading.
Hope your person's test-taking was a success. Thanks for the thoughts on the issues, even if you, or anyone else for that matter, has a solution at the moment.