1,000 bandages, 500 syringes, 2 leg braces and a squashed pill packet
The glamorous world of grassroots medical aid...
Ukraine’s two most urgent needs at the moment are weapons and medication – both are means of keeping the population alive and intact.
A lot of foreign medical aid of one kind or another makes it into the country. Presumably international agencies do this, though I’ve never actually encountered it happening. But grassroots Ukrainian-run NGOs are sometimes able to source quite large donations from equally grassroots origins abroad. These can be a mixed bag - literally.
Our friends at Garne Mistse refugee centre (who don’t have a website, but do have Facebook) recently received about 100 boxes of aid from their supporters in the Netherlands. These contained whatever was gathered during a community drive or cleared out of a clinic storeroom. Leg braces, catheter bags, plasters, diabetes medication, even glasses – it’s all in together. So one of the Garne Mistse guys brought 15 large boxes of it to our flat to sort out. Which made Sashko’s room look like this:
Our grand task:
Stage 1: Identify everything that is past its expiration date. Did you know syringes and bandages have an expiration date? They do. Squashed prescription pill packets with half the blisters already popped definitely do.
Stage 2: Sort everything by type. Basically this means a) pills, b) poky things, 3) squishy/wrappy things, 4) tubey things, 5) sloshy things, and 6) mysterious unidentifiable things. These then go into boxes.
Stage 3: Inventory named medicines, so these can be distributed to individuals who need them, e.g. diabetes pills.
Stage 4: Seal the sorted material into boxes for pickup by Garne Mistse.
Stage 5: Tackle the ‘rubbish’. While hospitals have to observe rules, combat medics can be more pragmatic. The usual rule at stabilisation points where wounded soldiers are taken after being retrieved from the front line is that bandages and syringes of any age are acceptable, gels and creams are acceptable up to 12 months past their expiration date, and anything that is swallowed or goes into the bloodstream is acceptable up to 6 months past expiration.
Stage 6: After applying those criteria, seal the useable material into boxes and dispatch them by post to my medic friend in Kharkiv, the indefatigable Jack Bon Holly of Project Konstantin.
Stage 7: Proceed to Garne Mistse in person to manage the distribution of pills and other condition-specific medication to people who have made themselves known as being in need of them, including some hard-to-find prescription items. Each person is given a number, and then comes to collect the bag of that number.
Below is Sashko, hard at work… well, OK, in a lull. On the wall behind him, some of Garne Mistse’s rather individual decoration. An interesting feature of this wall art is that the faces of the bunnies are at about human head height. So if a person inadvertently stands right in front of them with his skull exactly between their ears… Yes, there is a photograph that could be captioned ‘Sashko the Love Rabbit and his Boyfriend’ but it had better be kept under wraps.
Oh, and what’s this (below)? A pile of computers, for a change. These full sized PCs and monitors were donated by some of our friends in Germany, and a company in Kyiv. A couple of the destined recipients of these items picked them up too, including a woman who has five kids, three of whom are of school age and will now have one computer to share for schooling - well, it’s better than no computers. Another woman collected a computer for her neighbour. Her own living situation: herself, her husband and two kids sharing two beds in a single room in a hostel. They can’t have a PC because there is physically no space (they asked the hotel for an extra room, if only for the kids to study in, but were refused). The kids are taking lessons one on a phone and one on a laptop (which we provided earlier) and of course the noise makes it hard for anyone to get anything done.
Sometimes you can help upgrade people’s lives from extremely difficult to just very difficult, and that has to be enough for now.
The ability of people to organise as a group has always amazed me. I would be worse than useless, unless given one task with instructions... Off topic, example of "mysterious unidentifiable things"?