Moving day
I naively really believed this time things would be different in the dorm in Vienna's 11th district. I was, it would appear for now, wrong.
I really wanted today to simply thank you all for your continued donations of Hofer cards and share some happy grocery photos, and tell you a bit about whom I have met recently. I will do that below. But first, I must unfortunately return to what I named a few months ago, The never-ending story.
Only then, I really, really wanted to believe the city when it told a prominent journalist by phone that all Ukrainian residents of Haidehof would be given new social housing in Vienna by April 15. In fact, they started to move families in March already. I was hearing, case by case, from residents who had been given new housing assignments. They would ask me, does this address sound ok? Yes, I would reply, you can cook on your own, receive social payments, and I haven’t heard a lot of complaints from there. Take it, I would advise them.
So naturally, or naively, in retrospect, I assumed everything was finally going swimmingly, that the city of Vienna had finally grown a conscience about the mishandling and mistreatment of dozens (hundreds over time) of Ukraine’s most vulnerable refugees — poor, elderly, often handicapped and/or with serious illness.
Until yesterday.
Until a team of volunteers arrived on site, in order to help with the physical moves (the city is not, as far as I am aware, providing help with the actual moving process, hence once again unpaid volunteers are filling a void). I began to hear that not all residents received housing assignments, or they received assignments they deemed unsuitable, and the clock is ticking. The plan is reportedly to send those without housing BACK TO THE ARRIVAL CENTER, which, as you all know, is cots in shared rooms, showers in containers in the courtyard, no elevator at the main entrance, and by all firsthand reports, pretty terrible food.
Recently arrived Ukrainians have been living in the “arrival center” for weeks, in some cases months, as housing assignments are either not happening or happening very, very slowly. Also, I learned this week, the center will be closed by 1 June. Naturally, when you live in limbo, you don’t have an official address, and don’t qualify for social payments. Now imagine doing this to an older man with a brain tumour in a wheelchair who has been living in a Vienna dorm for the better part of a year. That is, apparently, the plan from the city. The man wrote me this morning “I have no other option”. I wanted to throw my phone again the wall in anger. You can see him and other residents of this dorm in this video here.
I am, to put it mildly, incensed and shocked. I am angry at myself for naively believing the authorities and reassuring residents that surely if they said they will find out all housing by April 15, they will keep their word. Now I too look like someone who lied to them.
Twitter no longer lets me embed tweets, so I unrolled my thread about this dorm situation here. Please read through what I have learned.
Some were lucky and received good housing offers in March. But many were not lucky, and still have not been offered a suitable housing alternative in Vienna. The arrival center, to put it bluntly, is not a housing solution for anyone. This is vulnerable people being treated like numbers, like cattle. This is not how a “socially” minded city government should handle such situations, to put it mildly.
So my plan is the following, after parent-teacher meetings this afternoon (oh joy), I will head to the dorm this evening and tomorrow. I am one of the volunteers who is able to come with a car. I am worried tomorrow evening there may be quite an explosive situation if housing assignments are not sorted out in time. I don’t understand with two months notice why this is all happening in the final hours. There are some things I will never understand, namely that those who get paid to do social work often operate at a snail’s pace of those who do it on a voluntary, unpaid basis.
I am super grateful VM4U have totally taken the lead on this, jumping in and organising everyone and everything. I do not have the stomach to talk to those “in charge”. Not after a year of dealing with this shitshow. Nearly one year since I first shared the photos of what was sold as a hot lunch in this dorm online. I called the post back then “layers of a rotten onion”. I wasn’t wrong. Unfortunately.
I will share more when I see and hear more. I have alerted some local journalists who have been following this story. I truly hope someone might jump in now in the final hours and fix this. It cannot be that hard to fix. In a city of two million people. A few decent dorm/group housing rooms. One would think.
The good news is I received another generous donation of Hofer cards this week, and continue to distribute them by mail and in person. I was at the arrival center on both Tuesday and Wednesday, where I met many women, all with different stories. There are common themes. One is the desire to immediately find full-time employment and not be on benefits. Which is a topic I looked into a bit this week, and the results were pretty disappointing, although not that surprising, given what we instinctively know about Austria’s labor market. In short, of the Ukrainians I polled, only 10% had managed to find jobs. 30% are not looking for work for fear of losing their state-provided housing, and 20% are actively looking but so far their job searches have been unsuccessful.
Those who did find work took labor-intense work (maids and bakers in hotels) which did not require fluent German, despite both women having university degrees in Ukraine. Both are thrilled to be employed and financially independent. They work hard, and are grateful for the opportunity. They found their jobs on their own by quite literally knocking in doors and asking everyone they met to help.
So when Austria says it has an acute labor shortage, something is going terribly wrong. Because the country experienced an influx of people who would be willing to work many of those lowest-paying jobs which do not require fluent German, and yet those people cannot get hired, they don’t know how to find those jobs, no one is really acting as a middleman (that I am aware of), and often housing is the number one impediment: you need an address to register and get a blue card, you need a blue card to get a job, you cannot afford an address…if the state gives you an address, it then limits how much you can legally earn. It’s basically a devilish circle. One older woman looked at me at the arrival center and said she would go back to Poland. I told another younger women how to look for hotel jobs directly online.
I received a text from a kid yesterday. He didn’t specify the address. When I arrived, we realized he and his parents were in a different “arrival center” on the other side of Vienna. I mailed a card to them this morning. I had no idea that dorm was even still operating. Turns out, it is.
Finally, yesterday I met a lovely 18 year old girl, who looked about 15 (I had to ask her how old she is because I simply could not believe she came all alone), from Donetsk oblast — Sloviansk, which, if you look at the map, is just northwest of Bakhmut. Her parents are now in Dnipro, and she came to Austria. The plan? Work and then study, but she needs to learn German & English first. Her smile brightens when I suggest babysitting work, as there are many families with Russian and Ukrainian speaking kids in Vienna. She tells me she loves working with kids, and shows me photos of her young nephews whom she helped care for. I came home yesterday evening, and wrote a short post in a Facebook group of Russian-speaking moms. Thankfully, nearly a dozen women asked for her phone number. As a mom, I could not shake the image of this young woman all alone in a new country. Why Austria, I asked? We visited once on holiday, she replied. I liked it.
If you haven’t already, do listen to this interview with Valerie Hopkins who until very recently was bravely reporting from Russia for the New York Times. Frankly, I am surprised any foreign-passport-holding reporters are still working in Russia, but I did see on Austrian public TV news last night, their Moscow correspondent is still there.
Very grim but important reporting from the front lines: ‘They crawl forward 24/7:’ On the zero line with Ukrainian infantry north of Bakhmut
Pleasantly surprising report on Warren Buffet’s son’s massive role in helping Ukrainian agriculture.
I cannot say it often enough: thank you all so much for your continued support. The photos of gratitude and the kind letters requesting helped are addressed to us all. Here is just one example of what arrived in my inbox this week: