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Update 16/04/2022
Tomorrow is our Easter Day, in a week’ time Orthodox Easter, for both churches our thoughts and payers are with the people of Ukraine who are suffering a brutal and atrocious war not of their making, have lost family and friends, the millions who have been made homeless and the five million who have fled the country. My family reports that refugees make up 5% of the Czech population and in my home city of Brno and the area around there are 100,000 refugees. Now our tiny village of Pastwiska in Poland the percentage of the population is 7%. Many of those that leave their country have left with nothing except what they stand up in. Many are too proud to accept charity but have no choice and in one way or another we are able to help them. Thank you for supporting this tiny proportion of refugees we have around here.
You will have read that many in Poland have already started to return to Ukraine in particular to Kyiv however that certainly is not reflected in our area where there are many more people arriving from particularly the east of Ukraine. As for returning when we spoke to Tanya who has three children she said that she had no intention of going back as when she came she spent four days waiting to cross the border and then several more nights moving from one place to another before finally settling here and she certainly doesn’ want to experience that situation again. Her children are either learning online from their Ukrainian school or are in school here and she herself has a job that gives enough to feed and clothe the family with the accommodated being provided by a kind family. She is working in a small food company making cakes and in fact whilst we were visiting the home in which she stays she bought us a cake!
We had a lengthy meeting with Pastor Michał and have agreed to help Pastor Vitaly in Lviv with a contribution in replacing the destroyed vehicle in order to continue the weekly food runs from Lviv to Kharkiv. These are dedicated men, dedicated to the work of the church and to help people. We further have contributed to another food delivery from here to Lviv next week. I cannot tell you how dangerous it is on the 1000 kilometre drive from Lviv to Kharkiv – see the map attached, they are trying to do the run once a week but having already lost one of their number and actually two vehicles destroyed by gun fire, the bravery to help the poor inhabitants of Kharkiv is outstanding. We are in contact by phone and mail directly with Lviv and their gratitude is overwhelming.
We know that you can see these scenes on the television but in the photographs attached is the food that your donations have bought and in the video it being handed out to the people of Kharkiv. The food is equally divided up into bags in Lviv by church volunteers to allow a uniform distribution. Kharkiv has been under heavy bombardment since the war started, parts of the city are completely destroyed and generally there is very little food in the shops that remain open so these supplies from us and many others who are doing the same are vital.
As I write we have a mother, her daughter and the daughter’ two young children travelling from the south east of Ukraine to be accommodated in our tourist accommodation, all being well they should arrive on Monday and we shall assist at the border crossing if it is necessary though our border guard neighbour here will help them through. There will be thousands more from the east like these four.
Just because the news is dimming in the UK and elsewhere, it is neither the end nor the end of the beginning and in the words of Volodymyr Zelensky
"They can destroy us, but we will answer; they can kill but they will also die, I can't understand for what -
Update 20/04/2022
On Monday morning five missiles hit Lviv and our new ‘guests’on the way to us were overnighting it in the city having come from Kherson originally but with that city being overrun by Russians escaped to friends in Vinnytsia a week or so ago and thence to us as Vinnytsia is now in danger, being hit by regular airstrikes. On leaving Lviv on Monday on the road to here they witnessed the missiles going overhead and saw the explosions, as if they haven’ had enough to contend with. Their route is highlighted in the attached map together with the photographs they took in Lviv on Monday morning. For as long as they want to stay Rimma, her mother, Halyna and Rimma’ two children 5 and 3 years old Leva (Leo) and Alisa are in our tourist accommodation. Unlike our previous ‘guests’ they have no Polish or English at all, simple conversation can be made between Polish and Ukrainian but for avoiding misunderstandings Google translate is a necessity.
This was the BBC view of Kherson on the 16th March www.bbc.com/news/world-
The Pentecostal fellowship in Wisłoczek have made the food delivery and were back before Easter They joined up with other transport in Stare Selo on the Belarusian border and then to south central Ukraine, they achieved their aim of the special food deliveries successfully and without incident on route. There are special thanks for the contributions that were made towards the food.
Pastor Michał went to Lviv yesterday, this was the shopping he made with the donations
Pastor Vitaly was on the road to Kharkiv last week and he intends another delivery to the east this week but with the intensification of the missile strikes, the ground attacks on the city and the battle for Donbas getting underway it is becoming even more dangerous to go anywhere in the east. The replacing of one of his written off vehicles has become a challenge as the availability of larger people carriers in Ukraine has dried up. In Poland also there is huge demand for good second hand ones and so they have turned for help to their church in Germany. In the next update we shall have written thanks for the donations.
We continue with financial assistance to the hotel in the spa town and the ski lift restaurant in Puławy, there is little change with the number of people they are feeding for the main meal of the day, 60 and 40 respectively. Additionally we have bought food to be sent to Ukraine organised by a teenager in our village joining together with other friends elsewhere, this food will be delivered to a central collection point about 30 kilometres inside Ukraine with the final destination of Mykolaiv in the south east.
Overall the refugee situation in our area remains stable, as with our original ‘uests’some are returning to Ukraine and they are replaced by new arrivals but as yet there is no massive influx as in those first few weeks of the war though we are prepared for another wave.
Update 23/04/2022
The food delivery to Lviv was made mid week and Pastor Vitaly has sent the attached message of thanks and an appeal. There is also a video of the sorting and packing of the food by his students. In addition to the food delivery by Pastor Michał here we sent a contribution to Lviv towards a replacement vehicle.
Rimma and her family have settled in well, they have a small car that gives them some independence and rather relieves us from a lot of running around which we had been doing with Irina and her daughter. Nevertheless there is call for us to help at any time. Their stay is likely to be protracted and maybe in the long run we shall have to find them more permanent accommodation than our tourist bungalow. They come from Kherson which fell to the Russians some weeks ago and which the invaders now intend to call the Kherson People's Republic.
The children, Leo and Alicja are full of life and with the large garden there is plenty of room to let off steam. Also they are using the village children’ play area with climbing frame, walkway and slide which is 100m from the accommodation and with Orthodox Easter Day tomorrow we have prepared an egg extravaganza for them, a sad happy time.
This is our tourist accommodation www.pastwiska.pl/nocleg/letting.html the house at the front includes the village shop with the accommodation there for the moment being used by family members as interim accommodation.
Really the situation of those leaving Ukraine is unlike most refugee exoduses in so far as it is the men who remain behind pushing their women folk and children across the borders. This is yet another sad aspect of this whole terrible situation that has been created. The female parliamentary presidents of Poland and Ukraine met in Kyiv this week and made this statement:
Women are the face of this cruel war in Ukraine. On the one hand, we see women fighting with weapons in their hands. On the other hand, we see extremely heroic women who have to take care of their children, go to an unknown country, to strangers, leave behind all their belongings and lose everything. But these are also women who give birth on concrete in cold cellars, these are women who watch their children die.
We can only hope and pray for an end to all this.
Update 27/04/2022
On wishing Pastor Vitaly in Lviv Easter greetings part of his reply was “ere in Ukraine we celebrate Easter, but as we were going to sleep last night [Saturday night], my kids were telling me about air raid sirens that were loudly alerting of the danger..”
He has sent two videos, the first with these words addressed to all of us:-
“Our missionaries have prepared Easter desert for our soldiers. This is the first batch, after this we prepared Easter Paska bread for the people in the Kharkiv bomb shelters....”
The second video is the preparation of the humanitarian aid in Lviv and then the journey to Kharkiv and the handing out of the food on the streets, the basements and in the metro.
“We have to share love and hope in these difficult times. I am touched people we didn’ know before have so much love and compassion. Thank you to everyone for your support.”
Our ‘guests’celebrated Orthodox Easter Sunday in our tourist accommodation which we have given to them for as long as they need, we shared their home made Paska bread with them and a lovely morning some laughter but also tears. Mother Halyna, her daughter Rimma and Rimma’ two children Leo and Alisa still have their home in Kherson but at the start of the war they survived the shells going overhead and the bombs exploding everywhere, they spent weeks in the cellar without coming up until the Russians seized control of the city. They are strongly Ukrainian, though Russian speaking also, and if the invaders turn the city and the province into the People’ Republic of Kherson there is no way they are going back even though Halyna’ husband who is a farmer is still there at the moment. Meanwhile Rimma’ husband has been working on a contract in the Middle East and at this moment it is not certain what will happen when the contact is completed, she hope of course that he will not have to go back to Ukraine or indeed Russia.
Orthodox Easter Sunday –note the blue and yellow eggs
Alisa and Leo. Barbara and I are seated with Rimma holding Alisa and with Halyna standing.
We are involved in the purchase of a suitable humanitarian vehicle for Vitaly for use on the Lviv to Kharkiv/east run, it will be a ten year old low mileage VW Transporter which is on its way from Germany and then onward to Lviv. It has some cosmetic damage which is expensive to repair in Germany but much less in Ukraine which means we get it at a good price, otherwise in excellent running order according to our mechanic who checked it over. We shall be contributing additional funds to the cost of the vehicle and involved with its movement to Lviv once the necessary documentation for export from the EU is completed.
Back to this brutal, sadistic, terrible war.
Another intercepted conversation of Russian military personnel on Facebook on Monday. In the video, the reconnaissance battalion commander gives the soldier an order to shoot a group of children returning from school. "Be brave," says the Russian officer.
And there we were celebrating two Easters.
Update 30/04/2022
Over the past couple of days we have visited all of the places where we have been helping financially and for the moment there is stabilization, settled to a sort of calmness. Financial assistance continues but there is less outflow than initially though of course we are well aware that the situation could change at any time.
We received the VW Transporter from Germany on Wednesday evening and Thursday was spent sorting the documentation and filling the vehicle with food for Lviv. The day started with breakfast in an hotel where I met with Pastor Vitaly who had travelled from Lviv to collect the vehicle, we also spent much of the day talking about his circumstances and ideas for the future. He runs an Evangelical mission just outside Lviv –you can read about him here http://gcommission.org/ukraine/about/ (use Google translate). He is a profound man who needs a great deal of assistance to give onward help to the poor people in the east of Ukraine.
The photograph is of the two Evangelical Pastors with the vehicle –Michał who lives close by to us and Vitaly.
We believe that a change of track at least for the moment and turn the attention to individuals in the east of Ukraine working alongside Vitaly and his people. We will of course maintain the relationships that we have in this area and continue the funding. The aim of Vitaly is to supply individuals with food unlike other organisations with large food trucks often just leaving trailer with the food for people to help themselves, Vitaly is focused with the idea of these food bags filled to suit one individual and physically to give that bag to the person with some comforting and encouraging words. He was telling me how when he has maybe 80 food bags on one transport there is no point when in a city in going to a metro station where people are sheltering as there maybe two or three hundred people it is better to go to peoples homes and enter the cellars where most are and supply ten or twenty people at a time, or even a village when three vehicles are together. His new aim is to send three vehicles at one time in a week to the Kharkiv region always using these smaller vehicles that attract less attention from Russian observers than a large truck and therefore relatively safer.
However he related another incident to me from the first few days of the war, one of his drivers, a father of six, came under small arms fire and was hit but managed to escape in the vehicle for a short distance away from the Russians. He was able to get help and an ambulance took him to a hospital in Kyiv where they removed four bullets. After release he returned home but soon felt unwell and died, the post mortem finding he had one bullet remaining in him close to the heart. Vitaly is doing what he can to support his wife and the children. All his drivers are volunteers and with two deaths he now only wants to use drivers who have no children.
Naturally Vitaly would like to see the size of our support increase with an idea of much larger quantities of food being received by his organisation in the mission in Lviv then to be offloaded and divided into bags before the onward transport. A local transport company here in Poland with ten trucks going backwards and forwards to the UK has offered to carry up to a 24 tonne load.
Two days ago we had an incident that rather panicked Halyna and Rimma, two US army Chinooks overflew and circled the village at very low level, my sister-
Oh, in the meadow the red viburnum drooped
Our glorious Ukraine is upset about something
And we will raise that red viburnum
And we will cheer up our glorious Ukraine
Hurray Hurray!
Let us hope for this upright red viburnum and let us hope that it is soon.
Update 04/05/2022
Perhaps on the 70th day of the war in Ukraine it is no longer at the fore in some minds the further away from it you are but in our part of the world it is very real; last night more missile attacks not so far from here in Lviv; all day all night the rolling drone of aircraft overflying us –tankers, surveillance, fighter jets, heavy transport. Yes, giving us a sense of security but a permanent reminder of war. The village volunteer fire station sirens go off and the reaction of the refugees is to look for cover thinking that it is an air raid, the fear in their eyes, the cries of the children. But then there are some uplifting moments –the Ukrainian National Anthem in a Finnish shopping centre www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ge6o2K02kis
In the last update I spoke of a small shift of emphasis to support of those in the east of Ukraine particularly Kharkiv who have had their homes, their lives destroyed by the war. At the same time we shall continue with exactly the same support that we have been giving to the refugees in our immediate area.
I am in telephone and email contact with Pastor Vitaly in Lviv who is keeping us informed of his work. The last delivery as in those videos went well with two of the vehicles returning on Monday and the third one yesterday, there were no untoward incidents. The plan is to mount another operation later this week with the local purchasing of food, we have transferred funds as a contribution to the cost. The VW Transporter is currently in a customs compound in Lviv whilst duties payable are being assessed and it being registered as a humanitarian transport.
Leo, Rimma’ 5 year old son started in school today which takes me to these excerpts from a diary which was found in the rubble written by an eight-
"I have a wound on my back and torn skin. My sister has a head injury. My mother has a torn arm and a hole in the leg" the boy wrote. He added that his mother needed bandages and that his grandfather had died.
Despite the horrors that are happening around, the boy does not lose his optimism. He wrote that he dreams of celebrating his birthday and he drew a festive table with a cake and guests who were to celebrate together. In one of the other entries, the eight-
"my two dogs died, grandmother Halia and my favourite city".
The fate of the eight-
We also wish to thank those who have sent donations whom we do not have a contact address to thank personally and also to those of you who have wished to remain anonymous. Thank you.
Update 07/05/2022
Spring happens quickly and is very short in this part of the world from lying snow in April to a blazing May normally accompanied by heavy thunderstorms, it also brings a surge in tourists to the beautiful scenery of the mountain foothills and rivers. For our refugees this is good news bringing seasonal work in hotels, restaurants and cafes. Employment even low paid gives them a certain feeling of independence, we see this in many families around, there is pride that they can afford basic food and some summer clothing albeit that their accommodation must still be subsidised.
In the case of Aleksander and family all the younger adults have some employment working on maintenance in the grounds of the holiday cottage complex and in the kitchen of the restaurant there. Main meals continue to be provided free for them and we continue to contribute. Similarly in the ski resort of Pułwy where there are over forty refugees in a similar situation to Aleksander and family having come from the north-
Meanwhile Rimma, her mother Halyna and the children are happy in our tourist accommodation though of course very homesick, as well as Leo at school his sister Alisa has started kindergarten. As with all the refugees we see they are totally unassuming and so very grateful for the help that is given to them, it is so easy to form a very good relationship with them, Today we had a BBQ for them, they know how both of us follow the news all the time from Ukraine and we try to avoid the subject of the war but you cannot help it, some small item comes to mind and tears flow. I introduced Leo to my 50 year old metal Corgi Toys Centurion tank, my reminder of the first tank I commanded, it has a firing mechanism and gave him hours of fun shooting match sticks at everyone.
A teenager in our village along with a couple of his friends has been collecting food from villagers, and shops locally and on Friday they skipped school, loaded everything into a car and set off to the border which they passed through quickly and drove about 30kms to the village of Susidovychi where there are many people, as in the area around, displaced from towns in the south particularly Mariupol. Those boys are a very good example of the feelings of us all being so close to the war and being amongst those people most affected by it. He sent me these words on their return ...…
we would like to thank you very much for your contribution, everything you gave us was a hit with the displaced people. I met with one woman from Kherson with a small child, her house had been destroyed and the town is occupied by brutal depraved men who call themselves soldiers. I talked with many people, it is hard to describe in words all the emotions. I saw the smile on the children's faces when I handed them sweets and tears of emotion from their mothers. Many touching moments. Thank you very much again and thank you from everyone you helped.
Vitaly despatched three vehicles to Kharkiv today, this time we have contributed to the fuel costs, it is over a two thousand kilometre return trip for each vehicle, plus we contributed to one vehicle load of food bags. With your help we can continue to provide food to these runs on a regular basis. To reiterate Vitaly’ aim is to supply individuals with food unlike other organisations with large food trucks often just leaving the trailer with the food for people to help themselves, Vitaly is focused with the idea of these food bags filled to suit one individual and physically to give that bag to the person with some comforting and encouraging words by going to peoples homes and entering the cellars where most are and supply ten or twenty people at a time.
The aim now is to send three vehicles at one time every week to the Kharkiv region always using these smaller vehicles that attract less attention from Russian observers than a large truck and therefore relatively safer. We need your help to keep this going.
As an ex-
This is a conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife on intercept, he said that he was in the Kharkiv area and that the slightly injured soldiers reported on Russian social media had in fact been killed. "When I come back, I'll tell you everything you won't be able to believe it. Our commanders have never fought anywhere, they have no experience, how many people they sent here to die ... They make us carry out tasks that are beyond our capability. The officers are abnormal, there are two options in this war die or be wounded, there are no other options, so you have to get out of here by any means possible". He further said that from his 800-
May this terrible tragic war come to an end.
Update 11/05/2022
These thanks also apply to you all
https://www.instagram.com/p/CdYgm7DDdrX/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=057e680d-
With your help we continue with our efforts to support the refugees here and the displaced people of east Ukraine.
Update 14/05/2022
On the 80th day of the war the main focus of our efforts are with Pastor Vitaly in Lviv with whom we are constantly in contact. His message today is as follows:-
The overall aim is to send three vehicles every week with humanitarian aid from Lviv to the Kharkiv area and on the return journey with those displaced people who wish to go westwards. However this week we are only able to send two vehicles because there is a crisis with the supply of fuel in Ukraine, the authorities are attempting to overcome the recent losses of a refinery and multiple fuel storage depots and say this problem will be resolved in the next days. More and more petrol stations en route to Kharkiv have been the attention of Russian missiles which further leads to refuelling problems.
We are distributing aid in Kharkiv region today with five of our number from the two vehicles.
When we travel to Kharkiv we need about 200-
I'm contemplating maybe we should buy a cargo van, it may be more efficient if we had both passenger and cargo van to deliver the aid, we are not evacuating as many people as before but the need for aid is significant!
Next week we will be sending more help east, if you can help us raise money for fuel, it will be appreciated... We need to raise $1300-
Further to Vitaly’ report I have put together two videos on YouTube, they are both taken by his people on mobile phones.
https://youtu.be/xA5q85eX3mI
https://youtu.be/4LIZevcgdz4
Meanwhile this ugly barbaric war continues.
Another message intercept a conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife where he told her that the Russians killed a mother in front of her two children.
When will this tragedy end?
In thoughts for the people of Ukraine.