Three months (Day 90)
Lots of thoughtful conversations yesterday, Hofer cards continue to serve as a temporary bridge, grocery aid for Ukrainian families -- but they are not the solution to unresolved structural problems.
It has been three months since Kyiv woke up at 5am to air raid sirens and life changed forever for millions of Ukrainians. Three months which feel like three years. And I cannot even begin to imagine what it is like for those who lost loved ones, limbs, their homes. In that context, the trauma that we encounter in our work is minor. We meet the lucky Ukrainians: those who were not killed by Russian bombs or soldiers, those who managed to reach Europe, those who have been clever enough to find us and ask for help. I must remind myself that I really have zero insights as to what life is like on the ground in Ukraine right now. Normally. But last night, I received a message over Telegram from a pensioner who got into a little habit of coming to look for me at the train station. For a Hofer card, a chat, advice, a train ticket. This is what he reported from Kharkiv last night:
The last few days I have felt pulled in a million directions at once. It is an imperfect science trying to figure out how to balance my time. On Sunday, I went back to the train station, where it was madness — hundreds of Ukrainians waiting in line for free train tickets, of course the vast majority of which did not just get off a train via Romania and Hungary from Ukraine. So the free train tickets thing needs to end. Germany and the Netherlands already put a stop to it. Austria is going to have to do the same before the entire summer tourism season really gets into full swing. I already read in our translator chat this morning that there are already no more seat reservations possible to Germany ahead of this long weekend (we have a four day weekend this week from Thursday) — advice was to either put Ukrainians on trains without tickets (not great advice given police do sometimes get on board and “clear out” trains of passengers who did not reserve seats) or have them take little regional trains with lots of connections (nearly impossible if you have older folks who will never figure this out or moms travelling with little kids etc).
In other words, we have a perfect storm. We have many Ukrainians taking advantage of a loophole that hasn’t been closed. Yesterday two women asked me about Paris, I said Paris is closed, then they asked me about Italy, and I looked them in the eyes and said the train travel is not with the intention that every Ukrainian sees Europe for free — it is because of people like you that those fleeing war are not able to get seats, I added, which is always met with silence…because of course they still really want to go to Paris or Italy as long as everyone else is doing it too!
On Sunday I helped a man who had fled occupied Kherson. He spoke Russian with an accent, I figured he was Georgian. He was going to Germany. I gave him a McDonalds card. Half an hour later, he ran back to find me, screaming about a McDonalds staff member who told him his €10 card was not charged (reader, it was, I even gave him the receipt), mumbling something about Muslims…and then another volunteer translator explained something akin to an Armenian-Turkish conflict must have occurred at the McDonalds ticket counter. I told him to stop shouting racial slurs, that you cannot do that in Europe (“they can arrest me!” he shouted), I ran down to the ATM, handed him €10, and he was quiet. I told him to go back and try to buy that Big Mac again. I thought about the employee and what motivated her to keep a card that was charged. The man even produced a receipt. I don’t really judge. I can imagine previous waves of refugees to Austria have their own views as to how the Ukrainians are treated now. It’s complicated.
After I left the station on Sunday afternoon, I got a call from a refugee who got my number from a volunteer in Budapest. She was at the station in Vienna, not sure what to do. From the east of Ukraine, house burned down, father still in occupied territory. She says she wants to go to Denmark. Good, I say, explaining how to go get a ticket to Hamburg. I add, “you’ll need to pay €3.50 for the seat reservation.” But I don’t have €3.50, she says. I have nothing. I tell her to ask the volunteers for help. We lose contact, she hangs up, she was calling from someone else’s phone. Another volunteer runs over to the train station, tries to find her in line. No luck.
The next day I get a text, “I found someone from Caritas and they gave us a place to sleep.” Meaning she decided to stay in Austria because she didn’t have €3.50. Despite us warning her the better choice would be to keep going. You cannot help everyone. And I could not understand why the volunteer in Budapest put this woman and her child on a train without even €10 in their pocket. I just wish more ordinary people understood what kind of decisions are being made because a mom doesn’t even have €10 to their name. As I said to someone yesterday, you know exactly this mom and her daughter will end up at one of those hotels in the middle of nowhere where they will be “fed” and no chance of work. Because they will not be able to advocate for themselves. She didn’t even manage to get a train ticket onwards.
Yesterday morning, I met with a few women from the dorm in the 11th district. One told me she has already been moved, to a former home for the elderly in a nearby neighborhood. Her son, 13, cannot attend school yet because she has sent emails to the official address but the reply is “please wait” and the director of the local middle school told her he unfortunately cannot accept her son until he gets the orders to do so from the central coordination office, and the central coordination office tells her to wait so….and mom is worried because as of September she knows she can be fined if he child isn’t enrolled in school. Certainly not for lack of trying. It took her four different attempts to get an e-card number (social insurance number, without which you cannot work or go to language classes). Work she cannot anyway, she explained, because the social worker told them as soon as they get a job that pays anything more than €110 per month, they would have to start paying €600/month rent for the tiny room she shares with her son, and would lose her benefits of €215 per month per adult and €100 per child. In other words, as the social worker explained to them, the system is designed in such a way that “it doesn’t make sense to work”.
Which, in my opinion, is the biggest tragedy of all. I am extremely concerned about what will happen to the mental health of all these women and kids as they sit around for months with all the time in the world, simply wondering how to survive on €300. Instead they could be learning German and integrating themselves through work. They want to work. But they have been told the way the system is designed it is not in their interest to work. As this Ukrainian mom put it, “we met Syrians on the playground. They get €800 per month. They also do not work. They told us it makes no sense to work when this is how much they get for not working.”
The Austrian asylum system is a byzantine mess designed to discourage anyone from coming here in the first place. There is a certain amount of racism and two-class system built into it: first, while waiting for your asylum case to be reviewed, you cannot work (this was the case for Syrians, Afghans), then, if approved, you can work, but as I understand only if AMS approves that job for you (in other words, you are not taking the job of an Austrian away…). Ukrainians are under “temporary protection” which means they are treated as if they have all already been granted temporary asylum, but they are being cared for using the same system of “Grundversorgung” (basic care) which hasn’t been updated in the past decade and was kept very low on purpose to discourage new arrivals by a conservative government.
Except now you have Ukrainian women and kids trying to live on these insufficient amounts, and essentially being barred from work if they receive housing from the state, and none of this was the intention of the EU when it said to Ukraine, yes, we will help your people fleeing war. And yes, you can have immediate access to the labor market.
Yesterday I was invited by an Austrian member of Parliament from the Greens, Mag. Faika El-Nagashi, to meet with her and her team working on integration issues. We talked for over an hour about all the challenges and problems facing the Ukrainian refugees in Austria. The conversation I hope was helpful. I shared what I see as the main roadblocks (money, housing, jobs), and they explained to me more about how the process works from the government side. One element I had underestimated because I do not know Austrian politics from the inside is the amount of negotiations and finger pointing and fighting over funding which takes place between the federal government and the nine Austrian states. Later that day, an Austrian journalist who has been covering refugee issues for twenty years, explained to me that since 2011, the funding for refugees has been split 60/40 by the Austrian federal government and each state which accepts refugees, so fighting over money is a lot of the fighting.
Of course none of this helps Ukrainian moms and kids understand why the hotel cannot feed them food the kids will eat and why if they get a job they will lose their dorm room and why they haven’t been paid their money promised by the state even though they arrived in Austria in early March and why now even some local mayors have to hand out advances of €100…
I got the impression the Greens are aware of most of the issues affecting the Ukrainian women in Austria now (if not so much from firsthand conversations, at least in theory), but I also didn’t get the impression they have a lot of power to change anything within the government, as the junior coalition partner (my words, not theirs). I can assure you they are all really nice people you would want to have coffee with. I only wonder how much the Greens can do within a system that does not need to be reformed; it needs to be blown up. At the end of the day, they are in bed with the devil from a political point of view. And you get the impression — broadly — the entire political dialogue in Austria is living in fear of a return of the far right. The far right are a minority but they hold the majority hostage with the looming threat of racist fascism hovering in the background. All my words, not anyone else’s.
One common trend which winds into all conversations in Austria is this idea that “you see things are fucked up because they have been fucked up since 2011” rather than “things are fucked up so we must blow them up and start over”. To be fair, we have the same in America, where we have a zillion guns and no affordable childcare and everyone knows these are major problems and yet no one really ever does anything about it.
So I keep thinking about summer. What happens when money really truly runs out, we run out of Hofer grocery stores cards, many Ukrainians cannot work without losing their housing if they are living in dorms or other rooms, such as in former hotels, provided by the state, and what if they, like my pensioner friend in Kharkiv, cannot go home now, because the bombs are still flying, what then?
Switching gears, a few links to share with you.
This needs no introduction, please read it in its entirety:
This excellent op-ed: Putin Rules Russia like an Asylum
12 good sources on the war in Ukraine including a shout out to us and Mario’s amazing website which now accepts credit cards, Apple and Google Pay!
A video in English of me explaining to ZackZack about the problems Ukrainian refugees are facing in Austria right now, and why we are distributing grocery store gift cards to families in need.
Thank you for your ongoing support. I managed to send out 29 Hofer cards yesterday in my own little handwritten operation. Mario is on fire and the website now accepts donations via credit card, bank transfer, etc. Our funding gap remains huge as more Ukrainians learn about us and our offer — at the moment we have 1,363 requests for grocery cards and only 573 of those are paid for. Which means those 790 Ukrainian families will have to wait until we receive money and/or cards. We are working as fast as we can, and trying to prioritise the neediest cases (I will meet two more women from a dorm at 11am today), but we are limited by fundraising.
https://cards-for-ukraine.at/donate
Thanks for reading.
Sending some funds. Hoping it will help the depleted piggy bank.