Summer calm before a stormy autumn
Friday evening thoughts after an emotional rollercoaster of a week.
I cannot remember more ups and downs in one week. I kept saying “now I will write” and it kept getting delayed over and over. So now it is nearly 9pm on a Friday evening and I have crawled into my teenager’s bedroom to try and clear my head and share what it feels like is happening right now.
I am extremely worried about a housing crisis in the next few weeks, definitely by September. For all sorts of reasons, I am hearing of Ukrainians urgently searching for housing. Naturally, if they have been in Austria already a while, they want to stay near to where they have settled in: attending German courses, kids in schools and kindergartens. But the authorities will naturally also argue you can find a school nearly anywhere, that isn’t a reason to stay in Vienna. And there simply is no “social housing” (free provided by the state) left. I was advertising one double room in a group home in Burgenland in my group chat last night. One room. Balcony. Small town. Not near Vienna.
The reasons are many: Austrian hosts who agreed to house Ukrainians until the end of summer, but now need them to find other housing. Summer cottages not suitable for winters. Dorm rooms rented out but now need to be cleared before the college students arrive back (university in Austria only begins in October). And then, of course, Ukrainians are still arriving, from occupied territories, from Donbas. Even Ukrainians with a decent budget cannot find apartments to rent in Austria’s big cities: they are simply full. Landlords want proof of income for at least three months (payslips) and in many cases prepaid home insurance for a year. Even a Ukrainian with funds doesn’t come armed with this paperwork. So there is a storm brewing, and I can feel the wind picking up, and I can see images this September of families literally sitting again on their suitcases. Because even if you found a job, how to put together enough money for a deposit if several months are required?
The bureacracy isn’t going away, either. There are complaints of lost insurance coverage when one family member takes a full-time job, and social payments are immediately cut off (which means refugee insurance, too). I have been spending a lot of time sharing information on the “Familienbeihilfe” which is like child support which all parents in Austria receive, and Ukrainians are now also entitled to. We have organized a session with a volunteer, herself a Russian-speaking tax advisor in the private sector, to help 14 mothers fill out their applications on Monday (a national holiday here) in a central McDonalds near her office where we she can run back to use the Xerox machine. This in itself has been time consuming, but I feel it is time well invested, helping those least able to help themselves through pages of paperwork in German and photocopies of supporting documents…
It is also not yet clear if all the states (Bundesland) within Austria will be paying out these amounts in full, or if some will reduce the social payments (which would be absurd, to take away one form of support because one qualified for another, but absurd is sadly often exactly what happens here). Vienna has said it will pay everything in full. Some other states are not even paying the increased social payments yet (Austria’s government raised them by €45 per month — yes you read that correctly — this summer). So far only Vienna and Tirol are complying with these new amounts, to my knowledge. One mother told us people queue up at 5am in Carinthia, there are fist fights with refugees from other countries, and the cash runs out by 9am. No words.
On Thursday morning I had agreed to accompany a woman to a doctor’s appointment. There is a Google doc Ukrainians can use to request translators, and we see the requests in a Telegram chat, and can respond when we have time. Many volunteers had helped “my” Ukrainians while I was on holiday, so I thought I should repay the good deed. I met a woman in her mid 60s in time for her gynaecologist appointment. I will not share any details as obviously doctor-patient confidentiality, but the doctor kept us waiting 90 minutes past the scheduled appointment time, and we left basically not having achieved anything tangible for those 90 minutes of waiting. The woman was fairly upset, and I had to run to my own next appointment. I made a note to self: I do not have the patience for this kind of help either. I will stick with what I do best: purchasing and distributing supermarket gift cards and communicating with a thousand people at once through my iPhone.
On my way home that afternoon, after a personal appointment (may I just say that in the world of beauty treatments there is no war Russia and Ukraine are getting along just fine it is like a fascinating sparkly bubble in and of itself), I was thinking — I will have to start sending messages to Ukrainians saying I am very sorry but we have no more funding for cards and won’t be able to send you one. I had 76 empty envelopes on my dining room table and no idea how to fill them. I hadn’t been able to buy or send out a single card on Thursday morning. So when I walked in the door at 4:30pm yesterday, and to my surprise a little box and a very kind letter of encouragement were waiting for me, I opened it with caution. Inside were 50 Hofer cards of €50 each. I started sobbing right there standing over the kitchen stove. It was like a sign. I am not religious but I do believe certain things happen for a reason. I wiped away the tears, send messages of gratitude, and got to work.
By 1pm this afternoon, all 50 cards had been distributed, mostly by mail, and about 10 by hand delivered to a dorm in Vienna’s third district. This is what I heard there:
This also happened:
I ran into Amalia and her grandmother. They are very grateful for the aid with school tuition. They also had a disappointing doctor’s visit yesterday. The doctor said he/she wasn’t the right person to help them, basically sent them away saying to try elsewhere, but not explaining where. I know Austria’s social medicine system has been massively strained not just be the covid pandemic but also by the huge influx of refugees. I understand that. But it’s still hard because you want to help but you can’t change what is.
This evening a woman shared a positive pregnancy test with me, and asked what to do — an ob/gyn who accepts state insurance only offered an appointment in October. I said I will try to find a private doctor who can see her earlier. I cannot imagine a pregnancy (she is here with a preschooler already) alone in a new country, and think one appointment with a private doctor will give her peace of mind even if then it may take months to see a doctor on the government health insurance. Mom speaks English. We will find the €100 or so. So far, we have always managed to do so.
They write asking for laptops in Tirol for dozens of school children. For clothes and shoes from a village near the Slovakian border. A charming video arrives of a Rewe card grocery haul.
In short — you keep going, one message, one text, one voice memo, one phone call (try to avoid those I am very much like a teenager in that sense), one background chat with a journalist (two of those today), one grocery card at a time. Talking to the teenage boy today, as old as my son, but here all alone, I realised the importance of what we all are doing.
That brave kid, here all alone, bought healthy, balanced food today because someone caring and generous went out, bought cards, put them in a box, sent them to me, and I open every message that arrives in my phone. And I texted the boy “1pm tomorrow?” and he immediately replied “yes, thanks so much!”.
Because Mario and I couldn’t send out a single card without private donations. And we have received nearly all of our funding from individuals; we have not received NGO nor corporate funding, nor of course anything from the state. This is something the Ukrainians themselves simply often do not understand. They look at me and ask about “next month” and I explain this is a one time thing and this is all money from people who want to help you and they perhaps just cannot believe that it is possible so they assume I am representing some bigger organization that can do more?
We have a waiting list of 1,779 Ukrainians and their families waiting for €50 grocery cards on the website. Anyone can offer help towards this here. My own private waiting list is much, much smaller, currently around 30 or so cards, but I try to prioritise the neediest cases. I got two messages from a group home in Vienna today I know to be problematic, both families mom + teen (in one case, the teen himself wrote me instead of mom). I invited them to our info session on Monday for the Familienbeihilfe, and promised to bring cards to them. I will buy 2 cards tomorrow myself, hope the funding comes in soon. You can always send/hand me cards, and to help towards my little pile, please donate here.
Before I end and wish you all a nice (in some cases long) weekend, I would like to share what I have been reading lately, in no particular order.
I have been thinking about the precise hits of aircraft Ukraine achieved inside Crimea and Belarus this week. About that viral video of the Russian mom crying in a car on its way back to Russia…her holiday now over… “we felt so at home” in occupied territory since 2014. About chatter from Russians my age about the visa bans, about how my Moscow diet guru has now reinvented herself as a travel coordinator, flying off with well off Muscovites to exotic destinations of the once Soviet world: “Uzbekistan, Krasnodar Krai, the Far East, and now Armenia, the best is yet to come!”. It doesn’t sound like she is missing the EU that much. A born entrepreneur always looks for the next profit making opportunity, and she is certainly that. Muscovites, many of whom now live in Europe, upset about a potential wider tourist visa ban, making jokes at the expense of Estonia (there is a terrible Soviet joke that rhymes in Russian and says chicken is not a bird, Bulgaria is not a trip abroad), only I wonder why the venom is not once directed towards the government, the state, the dictator so many Russians these days likes to act as if he/she has no individual responsibility for. What could we do, say 140+ million, with a collective shrug of the shoulders. What could they do. Like we Americans rolled our eyes when asked about Trump during his presidency. What could we do. What can anyone do. Ask the Ukrainians who have had to start over with zero. What could they do. They woke up one morning and their lives changed forever. They have lost loved ones. I overhead a conversation in Serbian today, it was also nasty, talking about why ‘the Ukrainians get the “red carpet” treatment in Austria’. Many people misinterpret some fancy cars and blue and yellow flags everywhere, not understanding the average Ukrainian refugee really still worries about how to buy enough food every month to feed herself and her family.
This is Anna’s story. She is from Zaporozhye; much of the region is now under Russian occupation.
Hi. We left Ukraine on March 16, we spent several days travelling across Ukraine by train, we waited eight hours on the border, and at 5am we arrived at a station in Poland. The children slept in a room for mothers and children while I got tickets onwards. Two hours and a change of train in Poland, at lunchtime we were in Krakow, and at 9pm on March 18, me, my two kids 1.5 and 4 years old, and my sister who is 17 arrived in the middle of a totally new city, the bus station was closed, they left us on the road next to is. We were lucky. We met people, we asked them to show us the way, and they ended up to be living in a dorm run by the Red Cross. One hour later we were given a room in that dorm. And we still live there today. It was scary. While the kids were sleeping, on the journey, I cried more than once, I didn’t sleep for several days, we had two backpacks and a bag with the kids’ things. But we found housing.
The first week they offered us food, but it was not food suitable for young children. So we fed ourselves with what money we had. I learned about the Hofer cards much later, when many people moved into the form and began to share information. During the early days we really tried to save money, and buy the things we really needed, like pots and pans for cooking. There weren’t enough in the dorm for everyone. In short, thank you, that you are organising such help, which allows people to go shopping with those cards. That kind of help also gives a bit of hope in tomorrow, and helps you buy what you would like, and cannot afford due to the circumstances. We, for example, bought a lot of fresh fruit.
Thank you for reading. Thank you for your continued support.
€1,000 donated to us is a week’s worth of self-selected groceries for 20 Ukrainian refugees like Natalia, Kira, Lia, Iryna and Olena and their families in Austria.
Credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay super easy two clicks or Bank transfer (IBAN): https://cards-for-ukraine.at/donate
PayPal (Tanja uses directly for her smaller waiting list of urgent messages she receives): PayPal.Me/groceries4Ukraine
Or please feel free to send us €50 supermarket gift card cards, either to the address on the website above or if you are in Vienna I even have a teenage courier this month and will happily send him to collect cards and/or cash anywhere Wiener Linien reaches at your convenience.
DANKE! Thank you! It takes a village. A global village.