Help keep the Ukrainian refugee center safe.

Last week we had a briefing with Vladimir, a manager of the shelter for Ukraine refugees. He informed us about the situation in shelter and the Ukraine, that we would like to share with you.

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Hello,

My name is Vladimir Rijkov. I am a manager of ‘Patria Lukoil’ refugee shelter which is also a distribution center for Ukraine refugees. It's a facility rented by the municipality. The place was actually abandoned for eight years. So a lot of work was done to upgrade this place to be a shelter. We could managed to arrange everything for the refugees like installed beds, electricity, water and heating.

Today we're hosting 100 refugees, 69 of them are adults and 31 are children. The youngest one is Amina, she was born in the shelter. And the oldest one is 15 years old. And most of the kids actually go to schools and kindergartens. Some of them who prefer to have the ukrainian education system, they study online. They received laptops to be able to do that. We just need to connect it to a better internet connection, so they can have their zoom and Google meetings, because now the connection is quite poor and they cannot see each other. The children here, I mean we are, already eight months in the shelter. We do different activities with them like do the homework together or just have some funny games. The conditions of living is pretty fine. They have three meals per day plus snacks during all day, shower room, hot water, landry and playground available for kids. Maximum was done to make them feel comfortable here. Of course it's not their own house, but it's still a good conditions for a living.

I've seen some kids talk with the psychiatrist. I even remember we had this case, where some child was adopted by some relatives because she lost her parents during the war. And once they arrived in the shelter she didn't spoke with anybody, she would not say even high not, nothing. And once we had a dancing team came to perform in the shelter for them like to try to cheer them up. And they were dancing. We had traditional dance like which called 'lisginka'. And once these dancers started dancing, she joined them. And it literally was the first time I saw this girl smile. It was kind of like the ice was broken. That dance was an icebreaker. And then little by little she started talking to her family and even yo the staff of shelter which was pretty good.

Before in the shelter used to be mostly only woman and children, but now the Ukrainian government allow men also leave but usually only sailors. So if you deposite 5,000 dollars in the account of the government and give a guarantee that you will return to Ukraine, you can leave, but you won’t return, you lose this money. So now we can see even families like father also joins the family in the shelter. One of them can stay with the kids and the other one can find a job. Most of the people try to get implicated and integrated into society and find a job. Recently three of the ladies that live in the shelter were hired for Child support. It is a social assistance and I am really happy for them.

But besides the shelter we also provide help for all Ukraine refugees that live in the city. And 80 percent of these people are families with little kids. And they all go to school and they all need school supplies. And also there is very young kids and these kids need activities. They need something to do during the day. And we never had enough toys or activities to distribute to these families. Because the most important priority was to give food and hygiene products to the families. But it was never a priority to give school supplies and toys. New families keep coming especially I don't know if you followed the situation in Ukraine but like now a lot of drones are flying into the cities and destroying infrastructure. So big wave of refugees keep coming. I mean people continue leaving Ukraine and finding a better place. Like until last week we had 10 six refugees. Six of them got their visas accepted and some of them went further, to Germany, Switzerland Norway and Canada.

I'm all worried about all the families that are hosted in the city, because not all of them can afford to buy all these things for the kids in schools. Because now there are going to be bigger problems than schooling, is that our basically power supplies to Moldova comes from Ukraine such as gas and electricity. And because Russia‘s priority targets now are this infrastructure. Now we're having difficulties with supplying Moldova with gas and electricity. And we have to buy these things from different countries which is three four or five times more expensive. So basically heating bills during winter are going to be crazy and not everybody will be able to pay this bills.
It means that not everybody will be able to provide their children with everything they need in school. Instead of buying a toy for a kid for Christmas or for New year, they'll have to spend this money on the heating, or to pay for the gas or for electricity. I want you to understand that in Ukraine everything was almost two times cheaper than in Moldova. And now for them it's like three or four times more expensive considering the exchange rate. So not all the ukrainian families will be able to afford to pay for all of this things. We have around one to eight hundred families that weekly come to our shelter for packages with food and hygiene products. But we don't provide anything for kids. I mean , we provide diapers and baby shampoo and baby food. But we don't provide school supplies, toys and activities for kids from three years to ten years. We don‘t have even notebooks, something to paint, to draw and nothing.

And it would be a good idea to provide kids with all the school supplies and game activities. They will like it. Because I have a daughter, she's two and a half years old. Whatever I give her it's like for three or four days maximum, sometimes five minutes. So I know how kids are. They'll play, they get bored very fast. You need to keep them occupied. And parents cannot focus on their work or something else because they have to look over their kids. Because they'll constantly look for trouble if they will not be destructive of something to play with or draw or some other activities.

During the whole summer the kids were constantly being taken to the zoos, theater. Different activities, even like special creative rooms organized in the municipality in different theaters for different ages. So kids could have some fun during the day. Like the four hours a day they could go there and do different creative stuff, which was good. Now it's too cold to go outside. It's winter. You cannot take kids outside. You cannot do basically anything with them. You cannot even take them to a winter camp because we don't have winter camps.
You can take them for different tours. But then again it might cost problems. I mean whenever we would take kids for tours for different excursions we had to get the agreements from all the parents to write it down to make sure that there's going to be somebody with them. Something to support the kids to make them happy. That's the only thing.

'Patria Lukoil' shelter and distribution center, Moldova

Vladimir Rijkov