Carpenter

Prof. Charli Carpenter (UMass-Amherst), updates from Poland-Ukraine border
Follow at Twitter @charlicarpenter

I am cutting and pasting from her GoFundMe campaign (I am NOT providing the direct link and am NOT encouraging students to contribute.)

I provide this as one person’s perspective that allow you to see the war from a different viewpoint than you have in the news. Read these and think of questions to ask Prof. Carpenter when she visits our class. Intro from Charli: “For Spring Break this year, I’ll be traveling to the Polish border to assist in the grassroots effort to shelter, feed and transport Ukrainian refugee families in dire need of help. … I understand through colleauges in Europe that volunteers are needed to transport refugees who crossed the border on foot to reception centres being set up further into Poland. I look forward to sending updates from my trip.”

Updates in reverse chronological order

March 22, 2022 by Charli Carpenter, Organizer
Hi, everyone! Wow, we raised $1,000 yesterday for that refugee family with the baby. “Veronika” now has three meals a day delivered from the Red Cross and they are looking into better housing for her. She’s been visited by a midwife who suggested a bunch of baby supplies she needs so my daughter and I went shopping yesterday and brought her a big suitcase full of stuff (see below!) She also needs a crib and heating pad, but we will handle that over Amazon. After that, I’ll give the balance of what we raised yesterday to her family in cash. Heartbreakingly, she and her husband have decided to divorce – it’s the only way he can safely and legally leave the country to join her, if he is technically a single father. If anyone knows attorneys who can assist them, please reach out to me.

Meanwhile, I’m writing from 30,000 feet over the Atlantic on my way back from Europe. I’ll continue to contribute by putting people together, sharing contacts, coordinating supply runs remotely, starting a Facebook page to help coordinate fundraising, but I’m mostly done with traveling for right now.

The balance sheet for this trip so far looks roughly like this:

~$8500 donated
$1500 – rental van / gas (two extra days)
$2000 – misc medical supplies in Warsaw
$1000 – 100 sleeping bags
$1000 – 30 suitcases
$500 – 7 refugee hotel rooms
$1000 Veronika’s family (mother/baby supplies, cash)
$1500 – 200 tourniquets (on order, still need to be delivered so if you want to help, ping me on Twitter!)

I will leave this fundraiser another week. Whatever I can collect by then will be divided equally between two Polish NGOs who are doing amazing work for refugees there in Warsaw: KIK and HUMANOSH. Feel free to help me keep fundraising a little longer if the spirit moves you! And when I finally close this out, I’ll send an update letting you know how you can stay additionally invovled in Ukraine’s Dunkirk Moment if you wish.

March 20, 2022 by Charli Carpenter, Organizer
Friends, I hope you will share this update in a special push for funds… this money will go to a specific refugee family.

On my journey, I met a woman (I will call her Veronika) who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant and traveling alone. I won’t share her photo to protect her privacy but she is young, brave, resilient, humble, a little shy and very scared.

She can’t speak much English but from what I understand of her story, she left Ukraine to give birth in safety, and she is traveling without her family because her husband can’t leave due to the martial law. They made the agonizing choice to leave her four-year-old son with him in the hopes that, if the father is alone with the child, the father won’t be conscripted into the army and killed.

While the father continues to try to find ways to get out, this mother travels on alone all the way to Amsterdam, where a friend of has also fled. The Red Cross helped them upon arrival get into temporary lodging, but the houseboat they’re staying on has no kitchen so now she is looking to move again as meals out in Amsterdam are very expensive.

I am hoping to raise enough money to put her in an AirBNB with a kitchen until she can find something suitable. Whatever I can raise in the next 24 hours will go directly to help this family!

Thanks for your help!
March 20, 2022 by Charli Carpenter, Organizer
Hi Everybody.

I spent my last day in Warsaw connecting new volunteers to folks I’d met who could use them, following up on obtaining tourniquets, welding machines and other supplies, and filling up a huge van with suitcases – yes, suitcases (too many refugees are bringing their belongings over in plastic bags) and trading my van to another volunteer so I could head home.

I’m now in Amsterdam, where I’m taking a short quasi-breather before heading home – and checking on this pregnant refugee I put on the train in Warsaw – she has arrived, checked in with the Red Cross and is settled in on a houseboat temporarily, but she doesn’t have a way to cook so I’ll go with her tomorrow back to the Red Cross and see if we can get her better accommodations. If nothing else, I’ll pay for a room for her for a week or so.

Meanwhile, her husband and children are still stuck in Ukraine. I’m working with contacts in Ukraine to find a legal way for them to get out (fathers are not allowed by law to leave, sadly!) Fortunately a colleague at Harvard’s Belfer Center put me in touch with a friend in Lviv who has some ideas. We’ll see.

Something I’m learning about is how much humanitarian supply can get siphoned off to black markets in contexts like this. Over the past few days, I’ve worked to identify a safe route into Lviv (e.g. one where supplies will not be siphoned off to black market networks) to shuttle medical and other supplies. This gives me more confidence that anything we donate will get to the people who need it most.

When I leave Amsterdam on Tuesday, I will take stock of what I’ve been able to do this week, close out this GoFundMe for nwo, pay off the credit card charges I’ve racked up supporting civilians and refugees through rides, hotels, medical aid and suitcases and donate the remainder to the Polish NGOs KIK and HUMANOSH.

After that I’ll be following up in the next weeks with AirBNB (to try to get them to change the structure of their app to make it easier to donate rooms to refugees); write some articles about grassroots humanitarianism to make it work smoother; and create a FB page to try to better coordinate foreign volunteers.

Between now and then, I want to make sure this pregnant woman is safe and secure to bring her baby into the world, organize a way to get these tourniquets from London to Lviv, and get a wee bit of sleep.

March 18, 2022 by Charli Carpenter, Organizer
Today was spent in Warsaw, following up on seeds planted three days ago. Made progress on three fronts:

a) trying to identify a more secure route across the border for a shipment of tourniquets which are badly needed – this involves finding a network of social ties between someone i know personally outside poland and someone one of them knows personally inside ukraine. one of the things i’ve concluded is that something outsiders can bring to a situation like this is connections.

b) researching options for helping evacuate the remaining members of the family of the pregnant refugee i helped yesterday. it’s complicated.

c) trying to establish a way to crowdfund hotel rooms for refugee families stuck overnight at train stations in warsaw. there was an inspiring conversation between myself, a polish woman who has become an icon at the local train station befriending families, and two energetic portugeuese volunteers fresh off the plane who contacted me through twitter, plus two volunteers from the US who are helping build a web interface, are hatching a plan to ensure more families can be housed and fed… but we’re not sure how to make the logistics work yet. our ‘test drive’ this evening had some hiccups, though we did get two families a roof over their head who otherwise would not have had one… and we’re hoping if we can figure this out we can scale it up. i’ll leave you with that happy note as am awfully tired.

March 17, 2022

everybody, what a day! we are now a team of four – bogdan from massachusetts, meredith from providence, and Ksawery (who we call Xavier) from Poland, a brilliant philosophy student who came home from college at Oxford to help support Ukraine and has not only been our guide last two days but our history guide, classics guide and all around nerd humor wizard.

bogdan had gone ahead of us when he first landed and was already in Przemysl and Hala Kijowa shuttling refugees yesterday while meredith Xavier and me were driving out delivering medicine. but he joined us for breakfast and to fill us in on how things work at the centres at the border.

we had got some sleep at an amazing little hotel that we found because meredith made friends with the Irish world central kitchen guys at the refugee camp, and they hooked us up. we made a deal with the hotel owner, sweetest little old man ever, that we would pay for rooms for refugees if he would rent to them. he agreed.

if you ever come to eastern poland, stay at his hotel! Pensjonat Hetman – cutest little Polish getaway town you ever saw and topnotch service, and best mushroom-eggs ever

after breakfast bogdan went back to hala kijowa, meredith went to Herbenne to look for families to fill up the hotel rooms with, and managed to bring four families (a total of 13 people and two dogs) back from the reception centre to stay at the hotel for a night or two until she could get them on buses. it meant so much to these families who would otherwise have been sleeping on the floor of the reception centre!!

meanwhile i was unable to extend my hotel room in warsaw (though i did push my flight back) so javier and i decided to head back to the city and went looking for refugees who needed a ride to warsaw. the minute we mentioned warsaw at the reception centre check in a huge crowd of refugees swelled up to us with their hands raised. We were able to fit only seven in our van, but we took one huge big family with two really sweet children, plus one eight-months old pregnant woman who spoke slight English enough to tell us that her family is from Kyiv, she had left her husband and four-year-old son in Lviv and travleed alone to be sure she could give brith in a safe hospital. she’s going to amsterdam, which is where i’ll be in three days, so we made friends and i put her in touch with people there. she had planned to get on a train tonight, but instead i put her in a hotel by the train station and she will take the morning train. here is the thank you note she gave me attached

your dollars are doing so much good! please keep sharing, i will be here two more days, have two leads on a big shipment of tourniquets for the front, a russian/ukrainian speaker i met on twitter flying in to join our team tomorrow for the next refugee run, plus a scheme underway to enable people like you to donate rooms to specific refugees around the warsaw central train station… stay posted!

March 16, 2022

Yesterday my team and I drove from Warsaw east to the border, stopping off to pick up more supplies along the way, dropping some of them at an NGO further west, then making our way to a border crossing where some relief workers had asked us to assist in getting supplies across the border.
While driving I multi-tasked feverishly, coordinating additional volunteers who wanted to fly in to make sure they had contacts / didn’t waste time head-scratching; working to coordinate AirBNB rooms for refugees at the station in warsaw through my Central Station contacts; and fielding calls from the border asking for supplies.
At the border crossing we visited, the whole place is semi-organized chaos. No major NGOs in sight, just a single UN tent with basically nothing in it. The busier reception centre is a bit farther away. Our Ukranian-speaking colleague had been there all day volunteering and shuttling. But we ended up at a fairly remote checkpoint. We got there late in the day, few refugees were passing over at that point.
The folks we have been in touch with who are shuttling supplies across the border have some complicated arrangements with couriers and are busy negotiating w/ border guards. It’s a little unclear whether it’s technically legal to move medical supplies across without licenses, or whether they are doing this undercover – because the big NGOs that would normally do this under proper regulations are completely absent three weeks into this crisis as they are still working their way through red tape. But we dropped off our medical supplies and wished them luck. By the time we offloaded (a process which involved considerably tricky logistics) it was getting dark and cold. Our AirBNB was a good drive back the way we came, but luckily we made friends with the World Central Kitchen folks there at the border and they organized us some rooms for the night at a local hotel where we managed to also eat the day’s first square meal.
We’re waiting here now for our Ukranian speaker to catch up w us, figure out a plan for the day. Likely involving making my way back to Waraaw with a vanload of refugees.