Bigger Buses = More People Evacuated
April 1, 2022
I heard from Andriy after their previous trip to Zaporizhzhia. He had already made more connections in Lviv and secured this large bus for rent for their next trip back to Zaporizhzhia. At this point they had spaces for 120-130 people in their small fleet. More spaces means faster evacuation for more people.
In a voice message Andriy told me that now, the coordination of evacuees was being organized by region. Initially, evacuees were connected with any vehicle going away from Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia. Now their contacts in Zaporizhzhia are coordinating evacuation transport according to the regions people were wanting to go to: for example, to Rivne, to Chernivtsi, Odessa, etc. Andriy was waiting to hear how many people were going to be assigned to be evacuated to the Rivne direction.
He sent the message while in Lviv, waiting for this bus to be loaded with humanitarian aid. Once loaded up, he was setting out from Lviv to Rivne, and then on to Zaporizhzhia.
The following are a couple videos. The first video, sent on Thursday, March 31st, is of the bus en route to Zaporizhzhia, filled with supplies. The second video, from Saturday, April 2nd, is the bus on its way back to Rivne filled with a different kind of precious cargo - people from Mariupol.
Andriy noticed when they arrived in Rivne and were starting to connect families with the places they would spend the night, people kept asking, “What do we owe you?”
“What do we owe you?”
“Nothing, you don’t owe us anything.”
“What do you mean? You transported us here…”
Andriy kept explaining that they just want to help, sometimes with things they bought or could share, sometimes transporting aid from other people. For Andriy it is his faith that motivates him.
A brief aside: If you don’t personally have a proper Ukrainian in your life, you should know that giving money in thanks or accepting money for a gesture – for literally anything, or nothing at all – is a complicated and even treacherous sport. An attempt to thank someone with a gift can range from a pleasant but committed banter of who can make the best argument, to a more competitive and sometimes physical tussle to pass off that wad of bills or jar of borscht or half a torte, to hurt feelings of various degrees. (In fact, the last time I tried to give Andriy gas money for driving me 5 hours across the country, it ended in an actual chase in circles, me unsuccessfully trying to stuff cash somewhere in his jacket. It wasn’t easy, but I (secretly) won in the end.)
So, when someone really insisted and really wanted to “give from their heart” (and when Andriy saw that they were truly in a position to do so), they accepted a few dollars for gas money so that they could continue making these trips. But the main motivation and goal is to help in this way because they want to and are able to.
While others of Andriy’s team drove the big bus, he was in a smaller one with more supplies. And on the trip back, he had with him a pastor of a church in Mariupol that had just escaped that city with his wife on March 29th. What they lived through and have managed to escape from—there are no words to properly convey the horror.
I will share what he shared very soon.
Every single story needs to be told.
