Easter Sunday (Day 60)
Feels like a time of many transitions. Initial, acute crises turn into long-term worry, anxiety, uncertainty.
Yesterday I met briefly with another volunteer translator at Vienna’s main train station who told me she planned to bake traditional mini Easter kulich cakes and distribute them to Ukrainians arriving on Sunday. I transferred her €100 to help with the costs and fund some of the chocolate and coloured eggs she distributed. I am told all was well received and gone within a few hours.
I have spent several hours yesterday and today answering private messages, collecting addresses, and addressing envelopes, in anticipation of the post office and shops reopening on Monday morning.
A school director will give me another 30 Hofer gift cards tomorrow morning (incredible!), and I have another 23 more to send, so that will make at least 53 out hopefully with the first mail delivery tomorrow. Each card has €50 for groceries on it. Feels like a really sizeable contribution given we are a micro, micro team. There is a looooonnnng list of Ukrainians asking me for grocery store gift cards, and I haven’t even been able to answer them all yet. But I’ve got it down to a semi-organised assembly line at this point, writing down each name, trying to prioritize need (imperfect science), saying wait a second if I see the same address twice (or at least ask for clarification). I am amazed by the geographical diversity of the requests. They are coming in truly from all across Austria.
Vienna is overrepresented and you can tell the financial pressure here is real. All day long I get versions of the same message: three generations arrived from Ukraine, registered during the early days of the war with the authorities in Austria, still haven’t received any of the social (financial) payments. Not a penny. This is just one example but I could easily have taken any one of several dozen screenshots:
I am glad the dire financial situation many Ukrainians in Europe find themselves in is finally getting more media and public attention. I gave a telephone interview, which ran in a tabloid online today, and should, I am told, be in the print edition tomorrow. The comments section is unfortunately really depressing — people complain why we aren’t raising money for poor Austrian pensioners and about rich Ukrainians and their fancy cars. You get the idea.
I was busy again back at the train station this morning. More Ukrainians moving around Europe than fresh arrivals today. They worry us volunteers because some are taking advantage of the “free” rail tickets for Ukrainian citizens, and we really worry this will soon lead to an end of the free tickets in general, and then those Ukrainians still in Ukraine won’t be able to flee as Putin’s army advances. I have no problem to say this directly to those who complain about waiting in line for round trip tickets to Bratislava, with no luggage, which they want for the day because they are free. What is interesting is some nod and immediately understand the point we are trying to make, while others ignore it. Everyone has a different reaction to this whole new life many Ukrainians have had to adapt to over the past two months.
I met a group of three exhausted women with three kids going back to Poland. They had been in Italy. It was bad. They didn’t elaborate, but they only wanted back to Poland. I helped them get tickets to Warsaw, and offered some McDonalds vouchers. That brought a smile. I met two young women from Odessa on their way to Munich. Explain to everyone over and over why in Europe a ticket is not the same as a seat reservation, and yes, you would be wise to take a seat reservation too. Can’t pay? I can help with that while I’m here. We can help with that. Some people are travelling around you really cannot understand what they are doing and how they managed to get this far. An old woman travelling alone who was totally incapable to explaining to me why she came to Vienna from Germany and is now heading back again, argued with every single route option we explained to her, then grunted in frustration at the end when we secured her the best possible tickets and paid for her seat. As time wears on, people get rougher around the edges, I find. We volunteers are tired. The job we are doing is intense and should be paid work. But it isn’t.
I met a fellow volunteer who is helping at the mass housing in Wien Messe. They don’t even have a kitchen permit there. So that means 500 people are sleeping on cots and they even have a shower and a washing machine, but no one is allowed to make salads or even slice sandwiches on site. Can you imagine? I heard about people being handed a single cherry tomato each. Then I went crazy inside, gave my colleague a lot of McDonalds cards for the next visit (“I’ll look in on the families in the kids’ corner”), and said this has to change. Some people are living there for weeks as they apply for visas to Canada and the UK. We cannot even offer them grocery cards because there is nowhere to cook and nowhere to store food. Sometimes the deeper you probe, the worse it gets. You really cannot believe who makes up such ridiculous and impractical rules and who thinks they have to be enforced despite well, all common sense.
But then really nice things happen. Like ordinary Austrians who stopped by to make generous gift card donations to me while I was working, and brought many bags of Easter chocolates to hand out to the Ukrainian kids waiting at the train station. Many people care. Many people are genuinely shocked when they hear how hard life has been / is for many Ukrainians who arrived in Europe several weeks ago.
Do you remember the story about the mom and young son who live just near me and were told they need to pay €42 per month for kindergarten? A reader offered to pay these costs, quarter by quarter, and she, the mom, stopped by last night to collect the money from me. She and her son ended up staying for dinner and then tea and then dessert and then her almost 4 year old spent a few hours playing with my girls’ old pink my little ponies. It was really nice. She needed to talk. I was happy to listen. I cannot do it for everyone all the time, but it was nice to be there for someone very far away from home who is trying to keep it all together but it is not easy. Her entire family stayed behind in Dnipro. Parents, brother, sister-in-law. She is a single mom. She hopes to find jobs in either video editing (profession) and/or knitting (hobby), but no leads yet. Kindergarten is so far only half days. The apartment is only hers until June. A lot of open questions.
Switching from the micro to the big picture, some recommended reading / watching today. Again, in no particular order.
Something I am thinking about a lot more recently, particularly as Germany shows its true colors (see this below and the expose on Schröder which I initially was really surprised the NYT ran with until it became clear much of America has no idea about the depths of Germany’s (DACH’s) Russia problem. Germany has a really deep Putin’s Russia problem. It isn’t just a few politicians.
Thankful France at least proved it’s on the right side of history tonight.
I usually try to push such thoughts to the back of my head, but sometimes I wonder if all the running around we are doing to help Ukrainians here in Austria is only the prelude for when we ourselves will run. And then I push those thoughts away as quickly as they arrived. Because you don’t say such things out loud.
This sums it up perfectly:
I also heard today from the Mariupol family. They are now in Germany. The son shared with me his impressions of the first days in Deutschland and interacting with his compatriots there. I asked him if I can translate and he said sure, but he wants to expand his thoughts a bit for you, so stay tuned.
Tomorrow I’ll be focused on getting as many grocery cards out as I can, and will give a few interviews in the afternoon, hoping that publicity will mean more cards donated, more families we can reach, more tables we can put food on here in Austria. Perhaps I’ll also be able to squeeze in a few hours on the train station translating at the ticket desk. I’m now planning by the hour and it’s starting to feel almost normal. Almost.
Thankful. Grateful. Going to keep going as long as I have the energy to do so.
I do hope this grocery card distribution micro grassroots project eventually illustrates the gaps in the official response and translates into the powers that be actually finally doing their jobs.
I was thinking tonight about how I wrote in the early days they should have just registered every Ukrainian in Austria online, build a simple website or app accessible by smart phone, and could have given out logins, passwords, ID numbers, entered bank account details, received payments. The Ukrainians staying in Austria all opened Erste Bank accounts which took all of five minutes they tell me. They have all registered with the police. There is no reason that social payments, financial support, should not have been paid by now to people who arrived in Austria over six weeks ago. If you ran a business like that, it would go out of business, and yet with governments and non-governmental organizations, there is no bar. The bar is so low it’s not existent. And ordinary taxpayers assume everything is fine because the Ukrainians who arrived don’t have a public voice yet and are afraid often to speak up for fear they won’t get anything if they start complaining.
So I will keep talking. Because it is important to know if people around you are going hungry. If moms in your child’s school or kindergarten don’t have enough money left to buy meat, fresh fruit or vegetables. If they are travelling halfway across the city just to get a few free diapers. If they are afraid to go to the doctor or get some medicine from the pharmacy for fear it will cost too much. If the mom’s bra she arrived in broke and she doesn’t have enough money to buy a new one. If the child is now attending school with books in a shopping bag because there is no money for a new backpack and she doesn’t know where to find a used one. The fear of what will happen should the android smartphone with the cracked screen finally break. Got scammed on Willhaben. Topped up the mobile phone SIM card but it didn’t work. Bought cheap strawberries on the market but they were rotten. The room is nice but it is only until June. What then? Who knows. Will the kids have to move schools? Will I finally get a job? When will I see my husband and parents again? Eight months pregnant need to move furniture, who can help? Gave birth to third child a few weeks ago, but the buggy they gave us is broken. And on it goes…
Thank you for reading. Thank you for you ongoing support.
Grateful you seem to have gotten your “second wind”. I continue to be amazed by your fortitude, resilience, street smarts and compassion. You are a blessing to all who encounter you.