March 6; Support Ukraine 🇺🇦🙏🏼
Finding ways to help, support, and stay positive in the wake of Russia's war on Ukraine
Dear friends,
My apologies for not sharing anything last weekend. For me, like for most people I know, time has stopped since the morning of Thursday, February 24.
There won’t be Happy Sundays here for the time being. Since the start of the unspeakable act of aggression perpetrated on Ukraine by the government of Russia, I have been scrambling to do what I can to help people in Ukraine survive this horror.
Ellie and I are lucky and privileged. We have visibility and following in Bulgaria and elsewhere, and have been to Ukraine countless dozens of times, and this has helped us launch BG4UA.com. What started as simply a list to collect names and phone numbers of people who want to leave Ukraine, has snowballed into a massive volunteering effort, with hundreds of people working around the clock to help evacuation, accommodation, and support for Ukrainian refugees in Bulgaria.
Since that fateful Thursday, days merged into nights, and we have been drinking from the firehose every minute of every day. Most of us on the BG4UA platform don’t have any emergency volunteering experience, so we’re learning fast by making lots of mistakes and being very inefficient. It comforts me that we’ve been able to facilitate the evacuation of 100+ people and offer accommodation to about 600 Ukrainians in Bulgaria. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it gives me a sense of purpose, and a sense of confidence that good will win over evil, eventually.
Being involved in helping refugees means you’re dealing with heartbreak many times each day. Part of it is seeing the faces of people you pick up from the bus station or airport, and hearing their stories. I try to be cheerful and have lighthearted, joking conversations with them when I drive them to their accommodation addresses. It helps if there are kids or dogs with them, you can always be silly and funny with a kid or a dog. Another part, much harder for me, is to say no. Some of the hardest things I had to do is to send declining emails to the dozens of students and foreign workers from India and African countries, who found themselves trapped in Ukraine after the invasion. Somehow, many of them found our website, and all I could tell them was that we can only help Ukrainian citizens, and that they need to go to the closest EU border checkpoint and contact their country’s representatives from there.
Despite the unprecedented gloom that has descended upon us, I am positive and hopeful. For one, I’m seeing a fantastic side of human resilience and kindness in those that are helping. Bulgaria in particular has never dealt with such a humanitarian challenge in its entire history, and it is heartwarming to see the massive amounts of people trying to help, offering their homes and savings to help the incoming Ukrainians. On another side, I deeply believe that this too shall pass, and that we’ll be living in a much safer and more positive world once the war is over and the regime in Russia is dismantled. It’s too early to speculate on how that will happen, and the price is already clearly tragically unacceptable, but we’ll get through this somehow, and it will leave us stronger and better.
For now, all we can do is to help those in need. In the next couple of days, we’ll be shifting BG4UA from direct humanitarian efforts to a more sustainable organization that coordinates funding and different support channels, and each one of us, wherever we are around the world will be able to help. I will e-mail you again when we launch public, online donations at BG4UA.com in the next days, and will be incredibly grateful for your support.
I wouldn’t be able to wrap up this update without a huge, heartfelt thanks to the dozens of new friends Ellie and I made over the past ten days. Our core team at BG4UA consists mostly of people we’d never met before, and now we’re like family, calling each other without second thought in the middle of the night, if someone needs help or something isn’t working.
We’ll get through this, together. Stay positive and support Ukraine 🙏🏼🇺🇦
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