Three inspiring women from Brovary
The eighth in a series of ten posts about my recent short trip to Kyiv
It was a hot Tuesday afternoon. I had spent the morning in Bucha. I had agreed to meet Maryna, Oksana and Dasha at 4pm in front of the Golden Gate metro station. All was well, but just as I was getting ready to leave, an air raid siren started at 3:30pm. I quickly texted Maryna, asking what to do now? She calmly replied they too would not be able to get there in time, as the above-ground subway trains from the left bank of Kyiv into the city center do not operate while the sirens are on. So we waited. Luckily, it was only a short alarm, and an hour late, we met, in a leafy cafe right on the square, of which I deeply regret I did not take a photo.
A backstory first. Maryna is living in Vienna, was also home in August visiting Ukraine, and is among the many women who once received a Hofer card and is active in my Telegram group. Maryna contacted me months ago, when the horrific helicopter crash occurred in her hometown of Brovary, a bedroom community northeast of Kyiv best known as home to many warehouses and internet businesses pre-war. Maryna informed me that two small children, burn victims from the crash (the helicopter crashed into a kindergarten killing 14 people including Ukraine’s interior minister), had been evacuated for medical care to Austria, along with their parents, also serious burn victims. Maryna was in touch with a mother and a father, both of whom had a young daughter in the pediatric ICU in the AKH Wien, and a spouse receiving burn treatment at LKH Graz. The medical evacuation had been organized by the Austria’s BBU (federal agency for refugees) in cooperation with the health ministry of Ukraine. They were taken by ambulance to the border with Poland and then flown immediately to hospitals in Austria.
Maryna suggested we organise meal deliveries for the families so that we could help provide them with home-cooked, familiar food as the unharmed parents (a calm young father who did not speak English and a mother who did speak English but was incredibly traumatised by the whole course of events — for the first few times we met, she cried non-stop, she had stopped eating, she was on the edge, alone in a new country in a state of shock). The parents were spending 24/7 in the ICU. The doctors asked them not to leave, in case the girls would be brought out of their comas, so that they would immediately see a familiar face. I asked for volunteers in my Telegram group, provided some Hofer cards for ingredients, and Maryna recruited some of her neighbours in the dorm, and soon we had a schedule for meal deliveries and more. I personally drove the mother, helped her move, met her sister at the train station. I handed over cash donated by kind readers and Twitter followers. And for many, many weeks, while the girls and their parents recovered (initially they were in comas for a while), we helped the families from Brovary, none of which would have been possible had Maryna not taken the initiative to organise help for locals from her hometown.
Maryna wrote me when she read I was in Kyiv, and said there are two woman I must meet. Both volunteers from Brovary. Both doing incredible work. First, Maryna arrived with Oksana, a bubbly, beautiful woman with long black hair and a winning smile. I shamelessly asked her how old she is, because I had no idea, she seemed so young and full of energy. “51,” she replied, “I’ll be a grandmother for the second time soon.”
My jaw dropped.
Oksana smiles, and begins to tell me her story.
Oksana began with charity work about a decade ago. She was informally helping rescue children from abusive situations and homes and to provide them with immediate foster housing in the Brovary region. In this role, she worked closely with local authorities, and developed good relations with them. Her focus was getting kids out of situations in which an immediate solution was required to provide them with a safe alternative. In 2014, Oksana began working also with IDPs, as the first refugees from the Donbas region began to arrive. She helped them find housing in Bila Tserkva, helped with furniture donations, and worked via a UN program.
Later, Oksana founded a center in Brovary for autistic children. She had witnessed kids with autism being teased on an ordinary playground, and decided to build one just for them. She raised a dontion from a local businessman, and within three months, an outdoor, supervised playspace, staffed by volunteers, for autistic children was opened. Oksana saw firsthand how both children and their mothers benefitted from this public space just for them. When fall came, the mothers cried, wishing for something similar for the winter months. Oksana found a building, and opened it that fall, employing teachers offering a variety of masterclasses.
When the war began in 2022, Oksana, working with her partner, Marina, a lawyer by training, focused again on helping IDPs who arrived in Brovary from the south and east of Ukraine. They focused on accessing funds and grants which could be used to feed IDPs. They gathered donations in kind of food and hygiene items. But no trucks nor resources were provided for delivery.
An IDP in Ukraine may apply for aid of 4000 UAH per month from the Ukrainian government (about €100), but usually they use that money to pay for rent, combining resources if there are several family members. Many IDPs rely heavily on local charities for food and other basic need donations. Oksana’s Posoh Fund also provides access to psychological resources, for example for elderly struggling with dementia, and access to sports for kids. Oksana say the population segment which struggles the most financially are women of pre-pension age without children, many of whom do not easily find jobs anymore, and are also battling some health problems. She has focused her efforts on helping this group in particular. Below is a video of an outdoor workout class Oksana initiated as a way for the woman to work on both their physical and mental health. It becomes very clear that it doesn’t take Oksana much time at all to make her visions a reality. She is bursting with new ideas.
Families with children have an easier time, Oksana explains, as there are more charities focused on helping kids. Many of the women she is helping have nowhere to go home to. Oksana is focused on providing food and clothing aid, and operates a Telegram group in Brovary to share information and updates with IDPs. Here Oksana is supervising one of the food aid deliveries, and below is a video of donated clothing distribution, and unloading of donated food items.
The Brovary region is still receiving new IDPs every day. Oksana has already helped nearly 1,500 families. One woman only left Bakhmut recently. Born in 1957, she is just shy of pension age, and has nothing. She was too scared to leave. She lay in bed, waiting. She lost seven teeth. Little things, Oksana recalls, make a huge difference. She remembers one woman timidly asking for a hairbrush. She kissed it when Oksana handed her a new one. Another family did not want to leave Bakhmut, the baby was born prematurely at six months, the umbilical cord was twisted. Why?! I ask in disbelief. Why did so many stay and refuse to leave until now?
Oksana explains many local residents of towns near the front lines developed a fear of leaving their homes, a fear of going outside at all. Maybe the Russians will leave soon, they thought. Some families did not know how to transport elderly, sick, bedridden parents. They developed a fear of all soldiers on both sides. The church (Greek Catholic Ukrainian) helps now with relocations. But it is hard to find work locally in Brovary. The town had many warehouses for internet stores, but those were bombed in the early days of the war, and many of those warehouse jobs no longer exist. One woman found a job as a maid in a hotel. She is paid 7000 UAH per month (less than €200). She works twelve hour days.
Oksana tells me she knows how to smell out bullshit. After a year and a half as a volunteer myself, I know what she is referring to. “The tears don’t work on me,” she explains. She tries to focus on helping those the most in need. Pensioner IDPs cannot work but they at least have their supplementary pension income.
Oksana talks about a project she dreamed up in which IDP children made art-work in exchange for donations via a church project. She never imagined the kids would take it so seriously. It turned into a huge local event. The children welcomed the idea of a celebration, an event, after so many months in isolation. The war has made many children quiet, Oksana explains.
We talk about the coming fall. Oksana says what I hear over and over in Kyiv: she fears the war will last a long time. She is worried about the cold, about more blackouts, will they have enough warm jackets and blankets. The electricity infrastructure was heavily damaged in last winter’s bombings, can it withstand another season?
We talk about donation culture. Many wealthy Ukrainians are supporting the army financially, she explains. There are also wealth IDPs who lost everything: businesses, properties, assets. Most of the charity funds have to spend a lot of time applying for grants, searching for donations both financial and in kind. It all sounds like a kind of organized chaos at this point, and very much developed at the local, regional level.
At this point, Maryna gets up to greet Dasha. Dasha is an incredible young woman of 36, an experienced school teacher and school administrator who has since reduced her hours to focus on her volunteer work. She is also a CrossFit instructor in her free time, and actively involved in humanitarian evacuations of people from the front lines. Dasha is currently operating the NVO Fund, which is working on evacuations from the most dangerous places near the front lines, as well as humanitarian aid deliveries to these areas, and aid to the army. Dasha, like so many others, wears so many hats.
Dasha speaks in Ukrainian, and Maryna offers to translate, but I explain I am already at the point where I understand almost everything, and will ask if I don’t know certain words. Dasha explains they are trying to evacuate civilians from towns within 10 km from the front lines, and they bring donations of food, hygiene products, clothes and medicine to humanitarian centres. Dasha has been all over: Izyum, Bakhmut, several trips to Donetsk, Kherson, and Kharkiv oblasts. In Sviatohirsk they found 40 kids seeking refugee in a church. 300 people still left in the town. The church walls had even been shot up. They brought the kids books, art supplies. A little piece of normality.
I ask Dasha what precautions they take. She wears a helmet and vest as you see in the photo in the right (taken December 2022 in Bakhmut), but that is it. Every trip is a huge personal risk. The various funds work together on these rescue missions. They try to convince families with kids to leave. The kids are traumatised. The longer people stay, the harder it seems to be to convince them to go. Dasha refers to Kupiansk near the Russian border in Kharkiv oblast as a “second Bakhmut”. Her family is from the Kharkiv area. Both her parents and her grandparents’ homes were destroyed. Her mom is now with her in Brovary.
Dasha talks about families sitting and living for months, in cellars. Even when the dam flooded in Kherson, many did not want to leave. Donations of mattresses and blankets take on a new sense of urgency. I ask why so many refuse to go. There are so many reasons. Rents in western Ukraine are high. Many believe they simply cannot afford to go anywhere. Some people even returned to Izyum to live in their cellars. They live from one day to the next. They plug the holes in the windows. Volunteers leave donations of non-perishable food, tea, goods that will last a while.
I ask about the big aid organisations, the international names we all know, how much of an impact are they having? Not much. I am left with an image of a myriad of small teams just like Dasha and NVO Fond coordinating such aid deliveries and dangerous evacuations all over the front line, which itself, don’t forget, is incredibly long.
In terms of fundraising, Dasha helps fundraise using her social media for tourniquets, tactical medicine, gas money of course for their journeys. They drive all the way in and they drive all the way out. And yes, there is a risk male volunteers could be handed draft papers at any checkpoint. Dasha talks about how much work goes into fundraisers, such as a recent charity market she organized, but only managed to raise around €1,000. The cost-benefit analysis is tricky. She agrees with what every volunteer I spoke with in Ukraine told me: it is harder to raise funds the longer the war drags on.
Dasha shows me a video of a man in a frontline village from one of her Instagram stories. He used to be a farmer. He says, matter-o-factly, directly to the camera, “Now I am a bum.” It is so terribly sad. I don’t know how she has born witness to this for so many months now and still has a smile on her face and a positive glass is half full attitude.
I ask Dasha how she feels when she sees so much “normal” life like that around us in the cafe in the center of Kyiv. Is she angry at her fellow countrymen and woman for not doing as much as she is? No, she says. She has spoken with a psychologist. She is not angry. She says she hopes they are all helping in their own way. Donating to support the army and humanitarian causes. If they donated, let them enjoy their lives, is her attitude. Very pragmatic and mature. I admire it. She refers to her sports as a means of getting rid of aggression. Dasha thinks God gave her the ability to help and now this is her calling. Of course she is disappointed in those who do not help: “it is a war in our home”.
She tells me an uplifting story, about a group of ten families, all IDPs from the east of Ukraine, which historically had no shortage of wealthy businessmen from the many factories and industries in the east of the country. These families all came to Brovary and got together, pooled resources, bought some agricultural land, and have now applied for permits to construct new housing. A new development. So there is hope, there is light, there are many Ukrainians working towards positive change even in these dark times.
By now it is a pleasant summer evening, I bid farewell to Maryna, Oksana, and Dasha. I leave, amazed by their stamina, their motivation to keep going, to come up with new creative ideas, to brainstorm new ways of helping and fundraising, and of course, in Dasha’s case, her raw bravery to over and over put herself in places where she is in great personal danger on a regular basis. I ask her if she has kids. She does not. I nod in understanding. There are risks some of us as mothers would have to ask ourselves very hard questions before we could undertake.
Izyum, Kharkiv oblast, June 2023
Below please find links to both Oksana’s and Dasha’s social media and fundraising information pages. Dasha’s Instagram posts are filled with incredible videos from her trips to the front lines as well as her impressive athletic achievements.
OKSANA
Two charity funds, “The Children of Mriya” and “Posoh” worked independently, and then joined forces in February 2022 and are now operating as “Posoh” Fund.
The Women’s Club for women of an “elegant age”: “The Happiness of the Heart”, including a swimming group Oksana organized for the women.
Interview with fund director Marina (YouTube, in Ukrainian, about humanitarian aid for IDPs from Donetsk in Brovary)
“Our current needs. The Children of Mriya fund was gifted a Mercedes passenger mini-bus, which drove kids for ten years. The bus is now old and broken down, and it will cost between $5,000-$6,000 to repair it. We don’t think it makes sense to invest so much in an old bus. Therefore we need to acquire a new (used) minibus. And for our IDPs we still collect donations of everyday items: food, hygiene products, sheets, mattresses, blankets.”
Posoh Fund bank details for international donations. Posohfund @ gmail.com for more information.
DASHA
NVO Fund translates as “Independent Volunteer Organisation” Fund from Ukrainian.
Fundraiser donation link (Apple Pay or credit card). Dasha is currently fundraising for:
“A car 💙💛 Urgently needed for one of the divisions of the 8th SSO regiment. The boys courageously defend Ukraine in Donetsk region on the front.”
NVO Fund bank details (sorry only in Ukrainian)
Thank you for your patience! I was away this weekend and hope to write my last two stories for you over the coming days. Up next a volunteer also performing front line civilian evacuations, and the harrowing 36 hour bus journey back to Vienna…
Inspirational. Just inspirational.