On the 45th day of the war, it fell down from the top position in one of my national newspapers. Some articles over a domestic scandal was at top, but then two insignificant articles and some commercials before the news on Ukraine. On a similar note, it's getting harder to source donations for humanitarian aid. Earlier "we" would get food thrown after us for delivery to Ukraine, now ... not so much. Ukraine asks for "weapons, weapons, weapons", that's beyond what we can help with (and if the mission is "humanitarian aid", it's also beyond what we should help with), but from what JJ tells food is also desperately needed. He's focusing on one village west of Kyiv, people are queuing up and crying when they come with food donations. There will be a need for food aid for a long time to come. It's sort of ironic, since Ukraine in normal times is a big food exporter. Currently, probably more than half of the population is either displaced, serving in the army, busy with other work related to the war. Supply chains have become broken. The normal economic system breaks down under such circumstances. We can only hope that a significant amount of farmers will stay on their post and do their work - and have sufficient of supplies to do their job.
Perhaps we're also a bit exhausted. JJ and me haven't done any volunteer work during the last few days, we've been going for a small hike and been working with other projects the last days. To our defense, we can't do much as we don't have a car. We've already sent two cars to Ukraine, we don't have the budget for a third car (most of the rest of the budget has been spent on fuel and food), the guy with the BMW has left for work in Norway. From JJ's place there is an hour of hike through some very muddy trails to the nearest regular bus stop. One mission came up on the radar - one Ukrainian family that got a place to stay far east in Poland had a mission to go to an embassy in Warsaw, so JJ suggested to start by taking a taxi, then rent a car, drive for some hours to pick up those people, drive them all the way to the embassy (quite much of the way going parallel to the train line) and then all the way back again - totally the trip would take perhaps 15 hours. Cost efficient? Not at all! Even if we had been with a car and staying right nearby this family, I would have insisted to drive them only to the train station. Operating a free taxi service in Poland is nice, but perhaps bit outside the "humanitarian aid" mandate. The other mission was to go and buy more food (partly from "our" budget, partly from another budget) and deliver it to a storage so that other people could drive it to Ukraine - which may also be difficult when not having a car. I've applied for a new passport so that I can enter Ukraine, but it's not ready yet (and due to supply chain problems, there are delays on the passport production line).
On day 45, there was also a "Stand Up for Ukraine" conference in Warszawa. Coincidentally we also had a meeting in Warszawa that day - JJ thought it would be a "business-style" meeting (discussing how to spend aid money in the best possible way), but it actually appeared to be a party - we got a bit surprised. Well, exhausted volunteers also need to chill out sometimes, it's good for the motivation.
