Ivan Subbotin: delivering groceries to 200 grannies in Kyiv and Zaporozhye
The fifth in a series of ten posts about my recent short trip to Kyiv.
I first wrote about Ivan and his volunteer work here, after I saw his work on social media several months ago, and we chatted by video call to learn more about each other’s projects. I was really excited to meet Ivan in person, and experience a morning in his life as a volunteer. As promised, Ivan met me at my hotel at 7:30am on Monday morning. I was dragging a big duffel bag on wheels filled with €100 of canned fish from Hofer — “long-lasting sources of protein” was the request I had received before leaving Austria. Ivan grabbed the handle of my duffel bag from me, and began giving me a tour of his neighbourhood, as we walked through the early morning streets, through the heart of old Kyiv, and turned left onto a leafy green boulevard where Ivan lives with his wife and 10 year old son in a modest, ground-floor apartment.
We take a seat in his kitchen, and Ivan shows me the handwritten shopping list for the day, his storage cupboard for non-perishables, and tells me a little bit about the two grannies we will visit later that morning: Vera Grigorievna (stroke, bedridden) and Liubov Federovna (nearly blind). I am immediately impressed by Ivan’s organisational skills. Everything is neat and tidy and clearly written down and accounted for and in short — nothing like my semi-chaos. “I am like a German,” Ivan explains, proudly. He needs the order and structure to function. He records and documents everything. After all, he and two other volunteers (one in Kyiv, one in Zaporozhye) are single-handedly delivering groceries once per month to 200 elderly residents of these cities. Each delivery costs around $40. Ivan selected each case carefully, focusing on those who do not have children to care for them, and are alone. The grannies found him through word of mouth, and both deliveries we make that morning are done on foot, a short-ish walk (but not if you are carrying heavy bags) from Ivan’s own apartment.
Ivan is under pressure to keep fundraising in a way that feels like far more responsibility than I carry. He and his team have committed to 200 elderly, vulnerable people living in poverty (because that is what it is when your pension is $80 per month and your utility bill alone is $50 per month) that they will bring them a proper grocery shop once per month. As you will see from the photo above, we are not talking about fresh meat or fish or chicken. We are talking about the absolute basics for a balanced diet, providing long-lasting grains, dairy, eggs, sugar, and some fresh fruit and veg.
The local Novus supermarket opens at 8am. It is a lovely, huge new underground store which recently opened just a short walk from Ivan’s apartment. He explains that the prices are similar to a discount store for basic items. I push the cart as Ivan whizzes through the sections. He shops like a man: targeted, strategic not getting distracted. He works off his list and already knows where everything is and what is the cheapest brand for everything he needs to buy. We head to the self-checkout (it is still early and the cashiers aren’t ready yet), where he pays in two batches because the food weighs more than the scale can hold at once. Ivan will not let me carry anything. I ask several times. Instead, we walk back to his apartment, where he will now sort out each delivery.
Ivan sets up each delivery on his kitchen table and/or sofa, laying out the long-term items: oats, cooking oil, grabbing a few potatoes and onions, and adding to them the perishables we just bought: a range of dairy products, fresh fruit, some veg, a large green head of cabbage sliced in half (one half for each granny). He adds in some of the canned fish I brought with me. And a package of traditional oreshki cookies (cake-like texture with caramel-flavoured condensed milk in the middle in the shape of a walnut shell) for the daughter of Vera Grigorievna, who can no longer work as caring for her bedridden mother post-stroke is now her full time, unpaid job. Next, he calls the grannies and/or their caretakers, to make sure they know we are coming today. I can only imagine how they wait for this phone call every month.
We take the first bags, two quite heavy shopping bags full, and begin a fifteen minute walk to Vera Grigorievna, who is completely bedridden (she does not move) after a stroke and is being cared for by her daughter, a pleasant, exhausted woman in her 50s. We walk though courtyards rather than streets, taking shortcuts through Ivan’s neighbourhood. He points out his son’s school. About 40% of kids left, 60% remain in Kyiv. School will be in-person this fall for those who are here. Online for the rest. We walk through a mix of residential and commercial streets. We pass a hospital building. A middle-aged man walks past us in a camouflage t-shirt with metal pins sticking out of his shoulder. I think about what K told me the day before: they call Dnipro now the “hospital city”, so many wounded soldiers recovering and being treated there.
We approach a courtyard with a view towards a beautiful church. The entrance stairs are crumbling and the elevators make me want to cross myself three times even though I am not religious before we step inside. Ivan says something to me about which elevator does not work on which floor, but I am only half listening. I am taking it all in. It has been years since I was in such a building; in central Moscow you would be hard-pressed to find something still un-renovated. In Kyiv, you see this. We take the tiny lift up to a top floor, and I admire the view from the balcony as Vera Grigorievna’s daughter greets us, a giant smile on her face. She had been quite depressed, Ivan tells me later. He spoke with her for a long time, and managed to convince her to see a doctor to start anti-depressants. I see immediately Ivan is much more to these families than someone who simply delivers food. He is a caring and listening ear. He gives advice when he can.
We step inside a very crowded apartment filled with decades of possessions. It smells like a mix of cats (I am told three were taken to the countryside by the uncle who did not feel like caring for his sister anymore) and stale air. We step into the living room where Vera Grigorievna lies motionless in her sofa bed. Her eyes move as she sees us. Ivan greets her and begins to unpack the delivery on a chair next to the bed. The daughter shows us the huge stack of free adult diapers social services brought her. We are pleasantly surprised to see that is at least working. We are offered to take with us some apples from the tree in the countryside house. We accept a few. On our way out, we stop to take a few photos from the balcony. We are told the church below stopped feeding local homeless after it was accused of being a pro-Russia church. We shake our heads. And on it goes.
On the walk back Ivan and I talk about the burden placed on adult children when they are forced to care, alone, for elderly parents. There is no culture of placing parents in nursing homes. Many Ukrainians will tell you an institution would be unthinkable. I see how this burden affects women, women who still want to work, live, love, and are instead bound to this 24/7 care work. It was difficult to see, more difficult than I expected. I had naively not expected to see such poverty right in the center of Kyiv.
We return home, briefly, and grab the groceries for Liubov Federovna. She is 84 years old, nearly blind, and lives on the same street as Ivan, in a no-elevator low rise turn of the century building. She walks down the steps slowly and meets us at the metal entrance door, as the buzzer does not work.
Ivan recently had to testify in court. Fraudsters targeted Liubov Federovna, hoping she would sign away her apartment. Ivan had to testify as a witness to what had happened. Lonely elderly living alone in prime locations are targets of real estate thieves across the post-Soviet world. These stories are not unique to Ukraine. I had wondered about this when Ivan told me about his work. I think about what might have happened had Ivan not been there to defend this lovely old lady. Ivan shows Liubov Federovna with his hand what each package is, as she doesn’t see well anymore. She oohs and awes over each item (grapefruit! ohhh bananchiki!) like a child at Christmas. I stare out at the view through her kitchen (it is hot, no A/C and the sun goes right through the glass panes) into the courtyard, and the scene and the lighting remind me of a 19th century painting.
Liubov Federovna, whose beautiful blue eyes tell a story on their own, and flowy white hair pulled into a bun, blue summer housecoat which matches the blue of her kitchen tiles, then tells us about how the gas company tried to install a new counter. She goes on and on about not wanting to let the man into her apartment. I realise the elderly live in permanent fear of being tricked or swindled. I take a photo of her notes to herself in giant letters and numbers as she cannot see. The magnifying glass. The medicine. Medicine is expensive and many elderly cannot afford it on their pensions. Liubov Federovna tells us about how she was recently yelled at at the pharmacy for speaking Russian instead of Ukrainian. “I went to school from 1947 to 1957. We only had Ukrainian for one hour every two weeks, just like English. How can they now expect me to speak it fluently?”. I get the sense L.F. would have kept talking for hours. Ivan wishes her all the best and we get up to leave. 84 years old. Imagine what she has seen in her lifetime.
Ivan insists I come back to his apartment for a meal now that our work is done. His lovely wife Yulia makes us a greek salad and rice. His son Danny is eating oatmeal pancakes for breakfast. We talk about his fish in his aquarium, about the porcupine Yulia rescued and nursed back to health last winter. I think about how much work Ivan is putting in: creating lists, doing the shopping, doing the actual deliveries, then spending his afternoons trying to fundraise on social media and inform his donors, share photos and words of wisdom from the grannies. He tells me openly how hard it has become to raise funds, that if it were not for a few regular donors, he does not know how he would keep going. Still, donations have dropped recently by about 30%, and he is worried.
I think about all the volunteers like Ivan around Ukraine working on micro projects like this, quite literally feeding people in need, and shudder to think about what might happen when those funds run out. We talk about international media coverage of the situation in Ukraine (less and less), we talk about domestic issues (much of which was off the record and I will not include: I owe you readers at least a comment here to say there are things I am not including and there is a reason for that, and this pertains to all my conversations in Ukraine, unfortunately), we talk about some of their friends who did go to Europe, we talk about worries for the winter and expectations of further blackouts. I tweet out immediately a call for fundraising, and promise to write in detail later.
Ivan explains it very matter of factly. If you have a pension of $80, you pay your utility bills of around $50 (and that is with the discount for the elderly), you are left with $1 per day on which to eat and buy medicine. That means you can eat kasha or bread if you do not have family who help you. Ivan says one of his grocery deliveries lasts a granny about two weeks, leaving them with $2 per day to feed themselves for the remaining two weeks of the month. He spends $40 per shop and visits 200 grannies once per month, so Ivan and team need to fundraise at least $8,000 per month. No small ask, but these are the commitments they have made. Ivan and his two fellow volunteers also feed their own families. This is essentially his full-time job now. Ivan previously worked in HR, you can see what an amazing people person he is, how much empathy he shows, how he speaks with respect and most importantly, listens.
Many of the grannies have only home phones. He has all their phone numbers written down, one page per granny. Ivan makes smaller purchases of perishables each morning, and does one big shop of longer-lasting items on the weekends. He makes deliveries and social media posts each day of the week except Sunday. They began on March 3, 2022. On September 3, it will be one and a half years. Since they began, about twenty grannies have died. Ivan recalls attending one funeral by candlelight, during the blackouts last winter. Sirens going. All dressed in black.
I thank Ivan and his family for their warm hospitality. I am rather tired and it is only 11am. I think about how Ivan does this every day; it makes my sending Hofer cards by post and answering text messages look like a walk in the park in comparison. I step outside into the mid-day sun, and walk down the boulevard, past Liubov Federovna’s apartment building, and stop at a hole-in-the-wall to go coffee kiosk. I order an iced latte and pay less than €2 with Vasily's Monobank card. I sip my cold drink and wonder just how everyone is surviving. How many volunteers are helping? What would happen if they would stop? About how much Ukraine’s elderly have seen in their lives. And now this. And now war. People like Vera Grigorievna cannot go to a shelter when the air raid siren rings. She can lay in her sofa bed and listen to the sirens. But she cannot move. And her daughter cannot even convince her mother to sell the apartment to raise funds (e.g. move to countryside) because her mother cannot even sign a paper. They are stuck. Ivan and team are a huge help to them and many others.
Ivan Subbotin
Facebook including Candles for Grannies group
PayPal: ivansubbotin1983@gmail.com
Thank you for reporting. So much could be said, should be said....but for now thank you.