The Front-line Care Home

Explosions, evacuations, tears, journalists and chickens

For the past week I’ve been volunteering at a shelter in the suburbs of Kharkiv. This was a change to my original plan, which was to leave the city around 15 May; but a few days before that the Russians crossed the border and Kharkiv became simultaneously a (slightly) more dangerous, and more important, place for volunteers to be.

It's an awkward reality that ‘a volunteer’ is not automatically a welcome and useful being. ‘People come here wanting to be heroes’, as a fixer I know said. A dramatic event like the Russian incursion just 20 miles north of here draws those who want excitement, but turning up with a car, Google Translate and a vague idea that you are going to help with evacuations is not necessarily very useful to local police or long-term volunteers with an understanding of the area. And the local authorities do, I hear, in fact have the evacuation process well coordinated this time around.

Nevertheless, as that rare being the Russian-or-Ukrainian-speaking foreigner, I thought there must be some niche I could fill. The Through the War shelter houses 50 elderly disabled people, including three who had come in from the north just before I arrived. As there are more beds than residents (though money and staffing are stretched thin) there was an obvious possibility of an influx of refugees and also, lurking in the background, a worst-case scenario need to evacuate them all from Kharkiv.

Today’s arrival, a very elderly lady newly evacuated from Vovchansk. Misha, a resident who also helps out with practical and electrical work is keeping an eye on her. There are journalists recording them just out of shot.

In the event, the Russian advance has stalled for now, meaning no chaotic flood of new arrivals, though we did just have one more, and a returnee, yesterday; and certainly no need to evacuate the shelter. So my presence/assistance hasn’t been essential, but it’s clearly welcome, and I’m having a much better time than one might expect to have in an old people’s home in a war zone. I could, it is true, do without the daily diet of explosions, though even now they are mostly air defence. But I’m being so useful! Is there any better feeling? Although the staff here are hard-working they have no time to do more than keep the patients fed and the building functioning. Doctors visit a couple of times a week, but they are focused on physical health.

Christian, the nurse, does daily rounds, and tries to spend time with the patients as well as ask simply ask them which bit hurts and try to treat it. But there are a lot of them, and while he’s been learning Russian for a couple of years – everyone here is elderly and grew up in the east, so their daily language is Russian and they’re not about to change – it can’t be his priority.

This shelter, or care home as Christian prefers to call it, feeling that the term is friendlier, is for people who have nowhere else to go. Everyone has suffered severely in some way, whether it’s a dramatic as being evacuated from their burning house and leaving behind dead family members, or as mundanely miserable as being kicked out by adult children or becoming so ill that even loving relatives can’t cope.

A few residents do contribute to their keep by producing food… and early-morning noises even louder than most of the explosions, due to proximity.

This is an extremely well-run institution, especially in view of the immense challenges. The building is a former factory dormitory with ancient communal washing facilities and people living two or three to a room, with only a bed and a table to call their own. But everyone here dates from Soviet times and will have lived in similar or worse conditions before. One woman was in raptures to me earlier: ‘They feed you, they wash your linen, it’s warm. What more could you want?’

Me trying to party. It’s not my core talent.

Well… a party! This was Wednesday. Wine, ice cream and Ukrainian folk musicians. And journalists. Apparently we get a lot of them through here. A perk or hazard, depending on your attitude, of life near the front line.

I will do some write-ups of people’s stories myself soon…