July 16th, 2023

By Joseph Nichols, Organizer

When we began taking in donations for “Keeping The Kid’s Learning” it really gave us the opportunity to immediately impact the lives of young people displaced by the war. Cash donations allowed us purchase schools supplies, hygiene products, high protein foods and vitamins. It also allowed us to pay a small stipend to the local teachers that had lost their jobs but were now helping us with the kids.

We are not an official school, more a gathering place for “kids”, mostly between the ages of 8 and 17 years old. Online education is difficult when power is out, the family owns one computer, or your family is staying with friends in a two-bedroom apartment (as many IDP’s are doing). We are not a playroom. We have schedules, rules, and expect civil behavior. We offer community, and whatever we can in way of learning, art, and sometimes food. Parents and grandparents are welcome

Cash donations are used to purchase supplies in countries such as Germany, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria, as the cost of purchasing supplies (“supplies” being a generalized term) in the US and related transport costs make it impossible. Donations from Europeans to us are very important.\

Donations of physical items from the U.S. are transported to Gdansk, Poland by sea and distributed via land routes into Ukraine. These donations ship in containers that also hold refurbished medical equipment, portable solar power generators, water filtration kits, and short-wave radios for our sister program, Care4Ukraine.Org.

During the first few months of the war supply donations were transported via a few commercial airlines, with baggage fees waived. There were times we had thirty (30!) duffle bags filled and they took them all. The scene at the airport baggage claim in Warsaw was sometimes comical with all the aid groups (and sometimes soldiers-of-fortune) looking for baggage carts.

Eventually the airlines had to back-off on this generosity – the Covid slowdown was ending, and they had many more passengers moving again. Also, less than honest people were transporting “aid” that really was just inventory for resale business. It was a great way to transport high-value goods into a war zone. That is an issue that continues today, and one that impacts cross-border travel significantly.

Aid groups have official paperwork to complete prior to entering Ukraine. Border guards are known to do cursory reviews if their English is poor, or if a little currency serves as the “official paperwork”. This aspect of transporting aid is repeated at checkpoints and administrative centers throughout the country. More on this in another update.

Our most recent delivery began in Romania with three “Sprinter Class” vans that made multiple stops in Mykolaiv and Kryvyi Rih (near Kherson in southern Ukraine), both cities affected by the recent destruction of a dam. A huge number of IDP’s moving in. The next update will recall events from this excursion.

A new issue has recently surfaced…. eye wear…..glasses. Kids are not getting their usual eye exams, or the supply of prescription labs is much lower, or they just don’t have the money. Probably all of these. Teachers are telling us that it’s becoming a big problem. Aid groups we collaborate with have mentioned this in communications as well and we are putting a plan together. Updates to follow.

Thank you for reading this. Stay healthy.