During my last few days in Ukraine, we returned to the first village I visited with Freefilmers in spring 2023, Mospanove.
Back then, we saw a lot of households in desperate circumstances. The village, which spent six months on the front line changing hands, had been finally liberated from Russian occupation in September 2022, but there had been little chance for rebuilding work over the winter. We handed over gardening tools such as spades, and medicines and blood pressure monitors partly funded by readers of my Wordpress blog at the time.
Now, just over a year later, a lot of recovery work has been done, mostly by the Mospanovans under their own steam. Some houses have been rebuilt, and about half the fields have been demined and sown with crops.
Unfortunately, many urgent needs remain. Most of the public buildings and many houses are still wholly or partially ruind. The electricity supply was fixed in May 2023, two months after our previous visit, but since then there have been numerous power failures - sometimes the village has no electricity for two weeks at a time. So generators and portable electric stations are still in great demand to charge phones and also the mobile network tower, without which the village has no connection to the outside world. The village still has problems with the gas supply for heating, and even when it is available it’s become expensive, so many of Mospanove’s 217 households are trying to switch to pellets and firewood for heating.
Thanks to a generous grant from the BEARR Trust, earlier this month we brought them equipment such as angle grinders, electric screwdrivers, chainsaws and power drills for rebuilding work. At time of writing, these are being used to repair the home of a family with foster children. We also handed over a dehydrator which is used to create dried food, as well as glucose meters, blood pressure monitors, and medication for various health issues.
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BEARR’s grant also enabled us to purchase a number of bicycles to help important community workers like the local nurse get around, as the village is laid out over a large area and many residents have limited mobility.
One of the highlights for me of being in Ukraine is actually getting to see the distribution of the second-hand laptops, tablets and phones which I collect in London (please contact me on anna @ annabowles. co. uk if you have any to donate) to be reconditioned by our friends at Zaporizhzhia Radio Club and distributed to those who need them - especially children as almost all education in Ukraine is currently online.
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We also talked to some of the locals in Mospanove, and were present at a special occasion. More of that in the next post…
Great! those spades were put to work early and well!
I do hope there were no accidents while demining...