The long haul (Day 65)
What was a crisis has turned into a long-term challenge. The war in Ukraine isn't going to end anytime soon, and the humanitarian fall-out will be Europe's burden to bear for the foreseeable future.
Between incredibly busy “shifts” at the train station in Vienna, and working on distributing grocery store gift cards as fast as I receive them, I have run out of time to write. Apologies. I will start by introducing you all to Mira, cute kitty from Ukraine, arrived yesterday in Vienna, should be in Switzerland by now. Everyone was fascinated by her astronaut backpack which her owner wore on her chest.
Yesterday was totally overwhelming. Today, only a little less so. None of this is sustainable. I wrote a thread about it yesterday. It got a lot of attention, and I’m happy it did, because people should know how a huge humanitarian crisis is essentially being left in large part to to volunteers, rather than to professionals and more importantly, rather than to people with Ukrainian and Russian language skills paid by governments and international organizations to assist in crisis management. I normally don’t like to paste a thousand tweets but to save a bit of time, I still agree with every word I wrote yesterday:
In the end I didn’t write last night because I was so exhausted. From collecting addresses and sending out grocery gift cards. From answering individual messages along the lines of “we have only €10 left”. From the non-stop nature of the requests and questions and urgency of it all. Plus my own family and their needs. It is a lot.
One woman took a train for two hours today to meet me at the Vienna train station, get a grocery card, and I gave her €50 cash. She is staying in a small village with her children and mother. Another elderly man came to me today and asked for help. He is living in a dorm and says he isn’t getting enough to eat.
I obviously cannot help everyone and cannot judge every individual situation, but it is absolutely clear that Ukrainians are running out of their savings they brought with them, and are not yet receiving enough financial support from EU governments, nor unbureaucratic access to the labor market. This is a ticking time bomb. I am already telling people where they can go in Vienna for a warm meal, while it lasts, and who might be able to help email the authorities and ask why the promised social payments in many cases haven’t been paid yet. Now multiply this by hundreds, thousands. An unseen disaster. You hear Ukrainian and Russian everywhere now in Vienna, but have you thought about how many don’t have enough money to buy food?
I am a translator wherever I go. This morning I was waiting in the pharmacy, my phone rings, it is an older woman, asking me for a grocery card. No idea who she is or how she got my phone number. As I explain that I need her address, a Ukrainian woman next to me asks if I can help her buy medicine. I translate from Russian to German. I start to think we translators should soon have paid jobs everywhere and yet…you get the idea.
Today I met women from Mykolaiv who arrived in Europe and had no idea. They were crying. They didn’t know if they wanted to stay in Austria, go to Germany, or maybe France, after one woman in the ticket line told them Cannes was nice. I asked her, if it is so nice, why are you here? I’m going back to Poland, she replied. There is this permanent flow of people around Europe. I met moms going back to pick up kids in Romania. How and why they got separated? No idea. I helped some people get paid tickets back to Kyiv for May, while others just arrived from Kyiv (“they hit our neighbourhood yesterday” and want to get to Düsseldorf tomorrow. The sea of Ukrainians does not end. Amsterdam. Brussels. Venice. Warsaw. A lot of people going to Poland. I heard rumblings of quite generous social payments there, some kind of combination of government aid and possibly UN money if I understood correctly?
We are going to soon need to differentiate between different parts of Ukraine, in my opinion. I am already hearing from several sources of real tensions between those in war zones who lot everything (and often native Russian speakers) and some of those from the west who are making money in this whole situation, renting out housing in western Ukraine, going themselves to Europe, collecting money, sending “humanitarian” aid home to their own people, you get the idea. Of course with millions of people on the move, this was bound to happen. It is important to differentiate in our response between you fled Putin’s missiles vs you heard Germany was paying more than France. Again, in my opinion. Perhaps not now. But at some point…
For now, my focus is on direct aid to those most in need with the understanding that measuring need is a very imperfect science and there is no way I can reach everyone. I hope that my efforts will shine a spotlight on the gaps in state aid and this will be addressed at the government level. A one time direct deposit to all Ukrainians with Erste Bank accounts who asked for state money would be a stop-gap. Not rocket science.
Many people are really struggling. They have started to write me their stories. I cannot answer them all. I am thinking a lot about a buddy system. Each local family adopts a Ukrainian family they check in on. We invited our neighbour and her son for dinner this Sunday. Perhaps I can make it a weekly thing. See how Anna is doing, one hot meal, a conversation. I am happy to facilitate introductions, as I cannot help everyone personally. Yesterday I introduced two cat owners: local whose cat had just passed away, and Ukrainian, in need of cat food. These connections make me smile. As do the messages from afar, about families I met long ago, who have now settled in other countries:
I haven’t read the news, or at least not much of it. My phone is full of messages of gratitude like this:
If you live in Austria and would like to help, the best way is to mail me please Hofer or Billa gift cards in €50 instalments. Please send me a message for my address. Or I can meet you at Wien HBF. If you live abroad, please send me a message, I have a PayPal. I use it to buy these cards, McDonalds vouchers in €10 increments, and also to help specific families in need, pay for seat reservations, etc.
Thank you!
Thanks for this info. I am sad about folks wanting to take advantage of others' misery, but I'd like to imagine this is a small percentage of folks. What seems to me to be the issue across social media, permeating into the larger society at whole, is the idea that one or several examples "bad" out of 100s, 1000s, or many more, is representative of the whole for the sake of the "whataboutism" our cultures are devolving into.
It saddens me to see the graft and corruption taking advantage of the system. But i know there are more good folks than bad, and Tanja, you are certainly totally in the former camp. Keep listening to your gut and leading with your heart; with this, you make a difference.