Food Assistance Despite Difficult Circumstances
May 22, 2022
It has been almost a month since I’ve shared an update from Andriy. I’ve been a bit delayed in putting the update together — trying to find a work-life-war balance is a constant challenge — but the team has still been active during this time. On May 2, I received a video message bringing me up to speed.
Andriy said that a few factors had changed the pace of their activity there in the last few weeks. First, the has been a serious fuel shortage in Ukraine. Lines at the gas station would stretch for kilometers, the wait hours long. The quality of the available diesel was poor, while the cost much higher. (We did a price comparison when I talked to him on the phone a few weeks ago and the cost of fuel was the equivalent of $2.12 CAD/L that day.) For a while they didn’t have access to diesel to make a trip to Zaporizhzhia. There were also Easter holidays, first in Poland and then in Ukraine. At the same time the line-ups at the borders were very long, delaying volunteers from bringing in humanitarian aid coming from Europe.
In addition, for a while there were no humanitarian corridors established, so there were fewer people able to to evacuate from occupied areas. Since only small groups and smaller vehicles were allowed in and out of places like Mariupol, there was not a need at the time for the bigger buses. Instead, Andriy’s team left a few smaller cargo vans there in Zaporizhzhia for local people to use for evacuation as they were able to. (In a later phone call Andriy told me there were tentative plans for some of their team to transport some of the evacuees rescued from Azovstal steel plant, but those plans changed at the last minute.)
So, they spent a week and a half in Rivne, doing some vehicle repairs and sourcing food items to bring with them for their next trip. Their plan was to leave again for Zaporizhzhia at 6am on May 4th to deliver more aid, and bring people back with them if there were any that needed transport in the direction of Rivne, Lviv, Poland.
The situation with evacuations (at the time of this video message) was that fewer people were moving far away from their homes. Andriy said people simply didn’t want to abandon their properties and instead wanted to relocate to the nearest possible safe place. He said those that had been wounded or had other health issues were willing to travel further to get treatment or to stay with a contact further West or outside of Ukraine. But generally, people in the area, especially from neighboring villages, didn’t want to move far from their homes.
In fact, someone had just told him about one woman in Mariupol whose house had miraculously somehow been left standing and was not at all damaged. Her decision: “I’m not going anywhere.” So many difficult decisions that people have to make not knowing what the future could bring, that change the course of their life…
Adventures and Mishaps on the Journey
The trip to Zaporizhzhia was not without challenges and surprises, but even with all of the issues, humour and morale remain in tact.
The following videos show the team’s pre-trip breakfast, the cargo they are transporting, the car troubles they have to deal with, and more food to keep them going.
(The captions are posted below the videos. I know it isn’t ideal, sorry. :/ Still on the hunt for a free captioning-subtitles app to translate and caption these videos.)
Arrival in Zaporizhzhia
After the long drive to Zaporizhzhia, they arrived at Grace Church, the church they are partnering with to support local Ukrainians. They unloaded their vans full of food items which will be distributed to locals and displaced people, and used to make meals for those currently being housed in the church.
Andriy gives an update in the following video taken the morning after they arrived.
As Andriy said in the video earlier, the number of internally displaced people in Zaporizhzhia from surrounding cities and villages represents a lot of additional support. These 120,000 newly displaced people all need their basic needs met, including a place to stay. And with increased attacks in the Zaporizhzhia oblast itself, local residents also need assistance.
The church opens their doors to distribute resource people at 11am, but people begin queueing up as early as 5:30am. The staff and volunteers at the church collect the personal information of each family (with permission) as part of the process of recording who has come through and accessed their services.
In the following pictures you can see some of the process and some families who’ve been helped.
This is an example of the request form completed by people requiring humanitarian aid. They can select which items they are in need of: clothing, medicine, adult or children’s hygiene items, food package, or baby food.
Andriy also sent me a picture of some of the kinds of medical supplies that are urgently needed by the Ukrainian army. Bandages and high quality tourniquets are in short supply, he said. These are some of the items that were donated for the army that he was given in Lviv to transport to Zaporizhzhia, including blood-clotting medication.
As always, so much gratitude for everyone who has donated to this project. So many people have been helped by these donations in such a critical time.
