Scaling up (Day 61)
Today we distributed 83 Hofer gift cards of €50 to Ukrainians in Austria. I also translated for the lunchtime rush at Wien HBF. A few stories and recommended reads.
My morning started at 8am meeting a very generous and proactive school director who raised 30 Hofer gift cards of €50 each amongst her community. I handed her 30 pre-addressed envelopes to Ukrainian women all over Austria. They would take care of the postage, too. As I was leaving I turned around to see a Ukrainian mom I had helped a few weeks ago with her 13 year old son. It was his first day of school this morning. I wished him good luck. He is lucky. He will be in good hands there. The school already has 11 Ukrainian students attending.
Quick trip to the post office, long line, think smarter — buy 100 stamps. Stop at Hofer on the drive home, buy another 20 Hofer cards using funds donated by generous readers. Apologise for holding up the check-out line. Monday morning. The other customers restrain from complaining. All in all it’s a pretty fast process. Arrive home. Stuff the 20 cards into pre-addressed envelopes, add stamps, run down to postbox. That’s 73 cards out by 10am.
Get ready, drive to Wien HBF. Spend three hours helping translate at the ÖBB ticket office. The “Kyiv” train is late. Will arrive around noon. It always gets busy after that.
A lot of Ukrainians arrived from Myoklaiv today. Donbas. People fleeing active fighting. A pregnant woman, her 13 year-old son, and her mother-in law. Her husband is in Mariupol. Fighting. Wow, I said. She nodded. Wow. They were on their way to Italy. We helped with tickets, explained about the cafeteria, a McDonalds ticket for the evening. They have an overnight train to Venice. Someone has a room somewhere in Italy but they won’t all fit. Not for long. I took the mom’s phone number. When are you due? Late June. I nodded. We’ve been travelling for five days, she said. I nodded again. Sometimes all you can do is listen and try to reassure even when each and every person in the conversation knows that no one really knows what tomorrow will bring. Do you have a bag, she asks? I run to my car and grab and extra IKEA blue bag. That brings a smile. It’s the little things.
An adult daughter and her 82 year-old mother from Kyiv. On their way to Switzerland. If the train arrives at neary midnight in Zurich, can they still get to Basel tonight? Yes, but only around 1am. How will my mother make the connection if we only have ten minutes? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. I reassure them no matter what they will find someplace to sleep that night in Zurich, although I of course cannot know that. I can only hope there will be volunteers there too. I took them to McDonalds. It is the shortest possible walk from the train ticket counter. With all the bags. I introduce them to another family of four I also sent to McDonalds.
They, mother, daughter, two kids, have been bouncing around Austria for over a month — first lived with an Austrian family in Lower Austria (that didn’t work out), hospital in Vienna (all with some kind of food poisoning and/or virus), housing in the middle of nowhere Burgenland (5 kilmeters to the nearest shop; they left, came back to Wien Messe). They had an offer from me a while back to go to Belgium, they turned it down. Now they want to go to France. They know someone in some smaller city about 175 kilometres east of Paris. So I helped them get tickets for a very early train to Frankfurt tomorrow. Will there be volunteers there, they ask me? It is one of the largest train stations in Europe, I reply. What do they really want? They really want to go home. But home is Poltava oblast (not safe yet) and the little girl, a toddler, has Hepatitis C. It’s complicated. I am convinced in a few weeks I will get a message from them and they will fill me in on their next adventure…
I worked the line, explaining about needing to reserve seats on the big trains to Germany, Italy, Netherlands, until it was 2pm. At 2pm, a cameraman and a journalist arrived from ORF to interview me. They wanted to ask my about my Hofer grocery store gift card project. When they asked me where we should meet, I naturally suggested the train station, which has become my second home over the past eight weeks. It seemed like the only appropriate setting. I hate being on camera but I know the more publicity I can get, the more people we can feed. It is as simple as that. We are filling the gaps in what should be an official response. The official response is insufficient, flawed, and lets people fall through the cracks. We are only plugging a few of them, temporarily.
Tonight the messages have started rolling in: thank you! my card arrived today! The Saturday post was delivered on Monday. I feel myself planning my days around the post office collection schedule. My box gets picked up at 10am. I have until 10am to drop off the next bunch of addressed but not yet stuffed with Hofer card envelopes. My little assembly line is picking up speed. But the list of people in need is long, and as word spreads, I am sure I will receive many more requests for help. I haven’t even advertised yet in the local Telegram groups. Only one Facebook group for moms. And amongst other volunteers. They know better than most who really needs help.
A text this evening from the mom from Dnipro who lives on my street and came over for dinner the other day, with the little boy. She was invited to clean hotel rooms for €9/hour for 30 hours per week. I google the address. Looks like an agency. An agency that specialises in outsourcing cleaning staff. I tell her I cannot say if it is legit or not — she should be cautious and check it out. Her son is only in kindergarten until 1pm. She is going to have to sort that out too. I am sad she cannot work as a video editor, but I know how important for her it is to find an income, any income. She like many is in a very vulnerable position and this means she will agree to anything that seems halfway acceptable just to have some money come in. And I worry. I cannot check every offer of employment. I have no idea what is an honest offer and what is a scam. Now multiply this by thousands of Ukrainian women who find themselves alone with their kids in Europe, whose savings is running out. They want to work, but they won’t all get jobs with “proper” companies. How can they know what is a real offer and what is a trap? It’s overwhelming.
I find myself trying to outsource the 1-on-1 consultations so I can do more for more people. A woman I helped moved into a Vienna apartment asks for help. One hour, she says, to make a few phone calls in German. I ask another volunteer to help instead. He realizes within ten minutes she wants him to solve the impossible (get the authorities to speed up and move an appointment date). I thank him for his time. And so it goes.
Tomorrow a photographer will come to the train station take a few photos for this article, which hopefully may run in print later this week in an expanded version. I say meet me at 1pm, when the “Kyiv” train rush hour might be winding down.
Switching gears, very briefly. Many strategic military objects have been exploding in Russia in recent days, or catching fire. This is no coincidence. The first news I remember was a few days ago, a massive fire in a secluded Russian defense institute in Tver. Now Tver is nowhere near Ukraine which means if we assume Russia is not blowing itself up (I think in this case a fair assumption), Ukraine has some really good moles working inside Russia. Which, I think, is grounds for optimism. I’ll take it where I can get it these days.
What to read, in no particular order.
NYT on one family’s escape on foot from Mariupol (I don’t have a subscription but would really like to read this)
WSJ on why the U.S. did not sanction the mother of Putin’s youngest illegitimate children (lamest excuse ever)
Newsweek on dead Russians in recent family murder-suicides (added bonus of a character who was born with the last name “thick neck” in Russian and then changed it to Watford.
Moscow Times photos from Mariupol. I know how hard it is, but it’s important we don’t look away.
Washington Post photos of religious celebrations in Ukraine despite war (and not just Easter).
Finally, this, in Russian by the BBC Russian Service, on the Ukrainians whose only way out of war is via Russia:
I got a few messages last night on Telegram from twenty-something Aleksandr from Mariupol. He and his family (mom, dad, younger sister) are now in Cologne, Germany. Aleksandr gave me permission to translate what he shared with me:
“Hi. Thanks that you helped us. We got to Germany, will stay here for now. We are in Cologne, they gave us a hotel, because we have a chinchilla pet, and we are still looking for an apartment. There are as many Ukrainians here as were in Vienna. They aren’t even embarrassed, they tell us that they rent out apartments to refugees from Eastern Ukraine for $500-700/month (the average salary in Ukraine is $300-400/month). They say, that they came here to get the aid money. They say everything is free: excursions, transport, food, money. Basically, they are happy with everything.
We were in the Russian Orthodox Church. We thought we might get some food and clothes there. Three Ukrainian women sat there with name tags, we thought they were volunteers. But it turned out they are simply “helping” and are refugees themselves from western Ukraine who have been here since the beginning of the war and found themselves housing with no trouble and come here to take the good things for themselves: kitchenware, food, the things the Germans donate. While I was there a German brought in three mattresses, and one of them immediately said ‘don’t put that out for everyone — I’ll send that one to Lviv’. As soon as they brought a bunch of clothes, the women began to search through the stuff under the table so no one saw what they were doing.
A volunteer from the church said that at the beginning of the war, Ukrainians were well received, they were given 1000 Euros as initial money, because people thought they came with nothing. And then Germans started to understand, that the first people to arrive were those who have everything. Money, a house, work. They came to get richer. And now those of us who arrive from Eastern Ukraine, who don’t have anything (editor: Aleksandr and his family fled Mariupol via DNR to Russia to Georgia to Turkey to Bulgaria to central Europe, travelling by bus for a month), are faced with restrictions, and we aren’t helped the way those who arrived first were. Those who arrived from the west are sending everything home, from sanitary pads to laundry soap, because it’s all free. It’s really disgusting.
They put us up in a hotel and the city is looking for social housing for us. They are feeding us, it’s warm, we have a shower. That’s what we needed! No one has given us any money, they say there will be social payments after we are registered. We are sitting and waiting.
So, basically that’s it. We will put the idea of Canada on hold for now. We will wait and see what happens here.”
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your ongoing support. I am so grateful to have the opportunity to be a communication bridge of sorts between the Ukrainians I meet in Vienna and the English language readers/speakers and Austrians who want to hear their stories. I am also mega grateful for the resources to pursue the €50 per family supermarket gift card project. I have been getting messages this evening of gratitude (card arrived in the post), as well as some from Ukrainians who think I have forgotten about them (I didn’t reply yet). I am one, you are many. I say this a lot lately.
Keep after the media! I have DM through LinkedIn some of the Hofer management located in Vienna. Not sure what kind of response I will get--a lot of the profiles appeared dormant for a bit...I was thinking of trying Aldi here in the states to see if someone would respond.