“Recently we had ten air raid alarms here in one day, so we couldn’t think of work anymore,” says Marta Pyvovarenko, who coordinates first aid for the internally displaced persons in Lviv, near the Polish border. Otherwise, the co-founder of the Ukrainian NGO Development Foundation works around the clock and hardly gets to eat or sleep. Since the Russian attack on Ukraine, three tasks have been in the foreground for their organization, which is financed from donations: supplying the population in the contested areas with medicines, the fight against disinformation and acute medical and psychological help for the masses of refugees who arrive in their thousands every day at the train station in arrive in Lviv.
The work is grueling, there are setbacks. In Rubishne in the Luhansk region and in Mariupol, two employees have disappeared without a trace for a week, reports Pyvovarenko. Just recently, a whole transport with expensive surgical supplies was destroyed in a bombing of a hospital in Kharkiv two hours after its arrival. The masses of refugees are looked after by volunteers who often push themselves to the limit. What to do when a mother and her child just won’t stop crying despite being provided with everything they need? When refugees suddenly become aggressive under nervous pressure? The volunteers are afraid of failure and need psychological help themselves. “Almost everyone gets sick. I’ve also been ill,” says Pyvovarenko.
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