For a year or so I’ve been blogging over at Wordpress. However, Wordpress is becoming a bit of a dinosaur, and frankly my blog is lacking in readers. So it may be that operations are moving over here. I will possibly use some of those long older posts as the basis for new substack posts. I will try to get matters clear and tidy before I next return to Ukraine, which I hopefully will in spring.
The Wordpress site follows my travels in Ukraine in spring and autumn 2023, much of which time was spent with my friends the Freefilmers, indie-filmmakers-collective-turned-humanitarian-NGO. The associated JustGiving raises money for women in the areas I visited with them.
£600 (plus £4.22 from the very first paid subscriber to this substack, thank you, Claire!) has come in during the last three months and we’ve used it to purchase medications for several women mostly in the Zaporizhzhia area. They need help for diabetes, glaucoma, eczema, depression and heart disease. Here are a few of them, though of course we have to blur faces.
The women who are registered at the Zaporizhzhia clinic are relatively fortunate. We’ve also provided £200 to Olena from the village of Myrne, in Kherson. Myrne was on the front line for eight months so every house is badly damaged, and state compensation is only 50 euros in total. Olena’s husband, Mykola, is living with his cats in a storage room where he’s installed a portable oven to keep warm. Olena is only 45 but she has cervical cancer, and while the state pays for basic treatment, she can’t afford to travel back and forth to the hospital, or alternatively to rent a place nearby. We are paying for her driver, and supplementary brachiotherapy and other medicines to bolster her weak immune system.