Are you a medic? Then the army will take on you on the spot (well, not quite, but not far off either). Are you a driver? Obviously useful skill, yes please. Are you a Brad from Texas with no prior knowledge or specialist skills but an annual vacation to devote to the cause? Sign up on the online form for two weeks of structured activity in the west of the country, making nets, cooking or helping with a kids’ camp.
Me, with in-country experience, knowledge of the language(s), contacts in the east and a relevant academic background? It’s actually trickier. The thing about the ability to speak russian - let alone Ukrainian, which I’m starting to get a handle on - is that it’s so embarrassingly rare amongst Westerners that no one even looks for it. People use hand gestures, even if they’re trying to ask ‘Has the building which we are about to enter been de-mined?’
Part of the issue is of course that wartime situations are somewhat changeable. Last year I had a role lined up doing backroom stuff and the people doing the frontline part of the operation got themselves killed. I once started with another organisation where the manager was so patronising to the Ukrainian staff that I told him what I thought about that and had to leave. This time around the work that was originally lined up for all April and May by a Ukrainian friend for the pair of us seems to have evaporated too.
Experienced volunteers know about this problem, and say that you bounce around until you find a place to settle. But not always. I even heard of a doctor who gave up and went home after a month.
Fortunately this is not a terminal problem, given that I do have that knowledge and contacts. I can even sit in a coffee shop working as if I was in London, and as well as earning money the things I do as part of socialising still make for awareness- and fund-raising posts: I can guarantee some interesting content coming up.
And occasionally friends/readers declare that I inspire them, which makes me laugh a bit, but also hope that I’m having a ripple effect beyond what I may ever see. If I find myself doing something apparently low impact like kitchen work, then they use my writeups for PR; if I’m painting a wall at a new volunteer centre then representatives from a more influential body come round inspecting the new place and I find myself educating an eager audience on the situation in parts of Ukraine I’ve been to but few other Westerners have. I have zero prestige, zero standing of any kind. And sometimes I don’t like that; other times I think it’s valuable in itself. I see things. I listen to Ukrainians on their own terms, or try to. Most of the time, I’m outside the Western bubble.
What I would like to do, is make that work for Ukraine in some way. If Westerners won’t listen to Ukrainians about the simultaneously humdrum and mind-melting daily experiences of war, maybe they’ll listen to me. I have yet to find that audience, but I will keep looking.
In the opening photo: walking on the exposed riverbed of the Dnipro river with my friend Masha after the ecocide caused by the russians’ destruction of the Nova Kakhova dam. You don’t see this in the media. In the photo below: more conventional volunteering. I make a disconcertingly convincing babusya/babushka.
In 10 days’ time, I’m off again. I won’t in fact find myself sitting in Zaporizhzhia Aroma Kava on day one, as I have a fallback option; I just won’t say what or I’ll jinx it.
This is now my main journal. I’ll be posting longer interviews on the Wordpress blog and linking them here. And a big shoutout to Richard Shindell fans now subscribing. ‘My favourite singer-songwriter comes out of retirement and recommends my war journal’ was not a life development I would have anticipated a couple of years ago, but here we are.
The fundraiser is live. The bag will shortly be packed. In-country posts to follow soon.