Civil Society Activists

26 May 2022

By Victoria Ivleva

Source: Facebook

An ordinary sort of day. Lots of Ukrainian mothers are having one exactly like it.

In the morning I looked to see how much money blasted in from my call for help for Sievierodonetsk. More than 30,000!

I raced with my friend Lena, who lived through the Mariupol’ hell, to the pharmacy on Lviv Square. Before, the exact address where a Russian warship could go had been written on the pharmacy, in big letters right on the door. Now the address had become more literary: the ship was supposed to go TO RASHA, and the wonderful manager gave us the maximum possible discount on Corvalols and Valerians and Enalaprils and other things like that. We discussed with him the taste qualities of hawthorn liqueur (positive), whereas camphor alcohol, on the contrary, is incredibly negative, if only because it stinks, and we decided we’d definitely meet up after the victory.

Then we raced to Humana, the favorite boutique for every woman like us who isn’t rich, it’s secondhand, and picked up 40 men’s tee-shirts, but since we weren’t sure we weren’t definitely going to find them somewhere else cheaper, we set them aside for a couple of hours. We took the box of medicines home, went to withdraw the money you donated, and caught the metro to the Lesnaya station to the Konfiskat store. We were looking for mesh summer trainers, just like the soldiers were asking for, and at 340.99 apiece we bought 80 pairs, all because you, my priceless ants, had collected the money for it. We loaded the mesh trainers into a taxi, took them home, called back Humana, and put off buying the 40 tee-shirts to tomorrow.

All this time different people were calling and writing me with different offers of help. As a result we got four more boxes of tee-shirts, socks and briefs from the Promin company, and 700 pairs of socks from the Yaroslav store, which we have to pick up early tomorrow morning and also collect 300 pairs of socks somewhere else—and all this for the soldiers. 

Our wonderful Dasha sorted the rest of the humanitarian aid collected yesterday and took it to the deployment spot.

Tomorrow morning it’s on its way, to the Dnipr.

I’m terribly grateful for this volunteer day, which occupied me totally. If it hadn’t, I would probably have spent the whole day crying because just this morning I had a call from Sievierodonetsk saying the car my older son, volunteer Filipp, was riding in was fired on, and Filipp had been wounded in the arm and taken to Lysychansk.

And all day I’d had no contact with him, and I kept remembering how, years ago, in Afghanistan, I’d had a Kalash pointed at my belly when I was pregnant with Filipp, and I’d prayed to heaven that if he fired then it be instantaneous, so the baby wouldn’t suffer. But he didn’t, providence gave us life, and that life can’t end this way in Sievierodonetsk. Wait, I kept stopping myself, it was in the arm, which means he’s definitely alive and going to live. This back-and-forth thinking with myself went on all day until Filipp called at five-thirty, from Bakhmut, and said the wound was minor, the bullet had gone straight through.

Oh my volunteer luck!

31,379 hryvnias received.

Spent:

5064.10 — the pharmacy with the Russian ship 

27,279.15 — trainers at Konfiskat. 

Tomorrow morning I have to do this as well:

pay for petrol to the Dnipr – 4000

buy the 700 pairs of socks set aside at Yaroslav – 5060

buy 300 pairs of slightly better-quality socks set aside at the market – 5800

buy the tee-shirts set aside at Humana – 2964

TOTAL NEEDED 17,824

Ant army, will you help?

Card: OShchAD 5167803206928439 Olena Anat. E.

Card repeated in the first comment.

In the photo, today’s volunteer take. Thanks to everyone!

Translated by Marian Schwartz