Growing pains (Day 85)
Things are moving so fast it sometimes feels a a hurricane. In a good way, of course.
The incredible website has made it possible to me to focus on finally answering all those messages I received but was afraid to open as I didn’t have enough Hofer cards to send to everyone. We still don’t have enough €50 Hofer cards to meet all the requests (donating has never been easier & thank you Mario for the informative real time infographic), but the website means I now have a link I can share and say “please leave a request and as soon as a card is available, you will receive it”. It is an enormous relief to have 27 unopened messages instead of 272 on my Telegram app.
The downside of having half of Ukraine in your inbox is your phone is always making noises but when you turn the sound off, you don’t hear your phone calls, which is a problem. Turn the sound on, and it never stops buzzing. It’s all a little bit stressful. I find myself losing patience with answering the same question 50 times. As one does.
I was back at the train station this morning, and I am usually super patient inside the ticket counters, because the ticket process naturally stresses a lot of people out. Today, though, after explaining the same thing five times “yes you can in theory get to Budapest with just a ticket but a seat reservation would be better”, a Ukrainian woman started yelling at me, saying I was a “rude” volunteer and should be helping her. At which point, well, reader, you can imagine what my response was. A little 101 on what volunteering actually means and when I say something five times and it isn’t understood that is perhaps not my fault, and if my help is not good enough, then she should ask someone else. In the end, another Ukrainian traveller tried to calm her down, and I realised I just need more sleep. I am probably not the right person to be helping at the ticket counters anymore when I have Hofer cards in the back of my head. It’s hard to know sometimes how best to divide my time.
But I also met families who just arrived from Mykolaiv. A middle-aged man and his very old father, who were travelling onto Leipzig. Wife and children are already there. He brought the old man out to safety. With a walker. I helped them get tickets, and seat reservations, and some McDonalds cards, and that felt good. Same with helping a mom and two teen daughters, also from Mykolaiv, to get tickets to Belgium tomorrow. They were genuinely surprised when I said the night train is full. I find it amusing that Ukraine is such a huge country (population 40 million pre war) and yet they are surprised when there are no more train tickets in Europe. I always joke, but look how many million of you are travelling around! Mom and daughters were not thrilled about the option of sleeping on cots, but I offered McDonalds cards, assured them I had heard good things about the new overnight shelter at Stadion (per our translator chat), and stressed they were lucky to get tickets tomorrow with only one change of trains.
There are no more paid seats on the direct trains back to Kyiv. Sold out for all of May. June schedule not available yet. This is causing a lot of anxiety. A lot of people want to go home. They can instead get tickets to the borders (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary), but still need to find their way home from there.
I keep meeting some of the most vulnerable refugees in person to give them Hofer cards. From the dorm in the 11th district which is still forcing most of its 400 residents to move out tomorrow, as I understand. I was told those who could stay are people in wheelchairs/limited mobility (“Andrey” moved into a new home today in 1090 and sounds happy) and those with children attending nearby schools. The others, one woman told me yesterday, will be put on buses tomorrow to places like Linz, Salzburg, Tulln. This is all very stressful. Pack your things, bus, unknown…will it be worse…will it be better…I don’t like at all the way people are shuffled around like numbers. They are not numbers. I wish those in charge would talk to them, some of them, even one of them. But that’s my problem.
The story is not me. The story is the Ukrainians and what is happening to them. Their lived experiences. I keep spending my time on media interviews in the hope of attracting more funding from the grocery gift card distribution project, and the story keeps pivoting to Tanja when it should be to Iryna, Oksana, Olga, Tatyana, and Lena.
This article came out today for which I translated for over an hour for a very fearless Ukrainian woman from Kyiv oblast named Larysa, one of the very few brave enough to speak on the record, and reader, do you know how many of her quotes ended up in the article? Zero. This made me really upset yesterday. A lot of things make me really upset. I guess that is the new normal. Since March 7. Yes, since March 7 my life has not been the same. I looked up the tweet the other day for a journalist asking about the exact date. Can you imagine?
Today I tried to combine giving interviews with meeting Ukrainians to hand out grocery cards and collect cards from generous Austrians who met me at the train station. It was a lot, and sometimes too much at once. The cameraman scared off both one Ukrainian and one Austrian. You cannot point a camera at someone who hasn’t said yes. I am very sensitive to this. I apologised. I spent the second half of a long interview in a nearby cafe worrying about a woman from Mariupol who was late to get a card from me and we had moved location and she had no internet and no money on her SIM card (they all have no money on their SIM cards and therefore cannot place calls or text without internet). In the end, we missed each other, will try again tomorrow. I spend a lot of time worrying about other people. I know I have to create a distance. I do that, time wise, I don’t give anyone a disproportionate amount of my time, but I hold onto the worries. I carry them with me. I cannot get rid of them all.
In between I try to answer the zillions of Telegram and Messenger messages. I try to respond to Austrians asking me about special situations. I talk to journalists, giving every one the benefit of the doubt, the hope that this story will really be about what it is like for Zhanna, Svetlana, Nadezhda. Does anyone care? Does anyone really know?
These stories. These are the ones I worry about.
Update: the 82 year-old man who wrote me received his card today because I passed it to a woman in her 50s who also lives in the same “hotel” and came to Vienna to meet me. She sent me a photo of all three of them (with the man’s wife, too) tonight. A Vienna resident asked me if the old man and his wife would like to move in. I have asked for more details and will try to play telephone, again. I don’t “do” housing, but in the meantime, I end up doing housing, and sometimes, it works. And you play angel. For two minutes. Two minutes of connecting people to each other who would otherwise never find each other. Time well invested.
Housing. Which is worse, a container in a city or a refugee hotel in the middle of nowhere? Honestly, probably the latter.
Jobs. Jobs is the next big hurdle and it is always in the back of my mind. As is this story.
The happy photos keep rolling in. They quite literally keep my spirits up, even on hard days. Today was a hard day.
And this one. This one touched me, really. And, it must be some kind of Hofer secret: they all buy the Tiramisu! All of them. It’s totally nuts. I will definitely go find one tomorrow. It is in nearly every Ukrainian shopping card! Who knew?!
Finally, I cannot describe my gratitude to Mario and his team, who by miracle of digitalisation and military-like precise organization (all the skills I lack), stuffed 250 Hofer cards into 250 envelopes addressed to 250 Ukrainian families all across Austria tonight. What would be a week’s worth of work for me, on a good week, they did in one evening:
And none of it would have been possible without you all. We cannot thank you enough. I keep sharing all the message of thanks on Twitter so you all can translate and read for yourselves. They are so touching. This woman received her card on her birthday, today:
Yesterday, a TV journalist asked me for a Ukrainian woman already working full-time in legal employment in Austria. I only know one. Lena. Let that sink in. I only know one, and I swear I have half of Ukraine in Austria in my iPhone. Voila, a brilliant report about why Ukrainian working mothers are being underpaid compared to their Austrian counterparts doing the same jobs (no child benefit), featuring Lena, who is an excellent hair stylist and colorist, single mom of three big kids, and has cut both my and my son’s hair at a salon on Mariahilferstraße. Her new life here is anything but easy. Here is the segment from last night’s evening news:
I haven’t had any time for news but I did stop for this article yesterday about Ukraine rebuilding itself, and I keep thinking about it. About all the people I meet who are on the one hand so desperate to go home, but on the other hand know it is too early, know that nothing is certain yet. So much feels in limbo. And for some, as they tell me in their text messages, there is no home to go back to. “We lost everything,” they write. Everything but their lives. And now they try to start over.
Thank you for reading and for your patience with my erratic publishing schedule. My phone keeps buzzing as I type. It is driving me a little bit mad tbh. Thank you for your donations which keep this entire endeavour going. Please do share the website, if you can. If we want to keep going, we are going to have to reach new audiences, new donors, who hopefully aren’t tired yet of all my grocery photos on Twitter!