Zaporizhzhia Radio Club
Getting back to business after a drone debris strike
The news this week has been consistently bad, but Ukrainians frequently carry on as if nothing has changed. This is because in a way little does change, if you’re dealing in daily life, not headlines. The reality is the fight, in whatever form that takes.
Zaporizhzhia Radio Club lost its windows to one of the nightly drone attacks… and got down to fixing them. “A mobile air defence group was chasing a drone and it just happened to be shot down over the workshop. It’s not news,” said Myk, the chairman. Just another day for a Ukrainian volunteer workshop, with a few extra tasks rebuilding place after military attack.
As the name suggests, the club, which has a few dozen members, was founded for ham (amateur) radio enthusiasts in Zaporizhzhia city and oblast. They teach young people to design and assemble various electronic devices, broadcast and communicate digitally and in Morse code.
As well as colleagues in radio, they also help those in need. Of course that includes IDPs, but also people on low incomes. They source second-hand equipment - mobile phones, tablets and laptops - and recondition it. Sometimes the devices can be repaired with parts the club have in their workshop, and sometimes they have to buy them in.
So far they’ve reconditioned and passed on hundreds of items, but unsurprisingly they can’t keep up with demand.
Top left, winter 2022: Natalia, whose family fled to west Ukraine in the early days of the war. She lives in a two-room flat with her family and continues her education online.
Top right, summer 2023: The Radio Club gave a laptop to two sisters who were professional embroidery artists in Mariupol. Their work was destroyed when their house burned down and pictures of it lost when Russian soldiers at a checkpoint confiscated their phones.
Bottom left, spring 2024: Drakonchik with a bumper crop of donations gathered in the UK for the Radio Club.
Top right, spring 2023: This little boy in the devastated village of Arhanhelske, Kherson region, clutched this reconditioned tablet as if it was the most precious thing he’d ever received.
I sent Myk £100 from private donations to help buy repair equipment. Once he and his colleagues have finished fixing the windows, they’ll be back to work reconditioning and sending out whatever donations they receive. If anyone has second-hand laptops, mobile phones or tablets (please with passwords, or factory reset, if at all possible) to donate and can send them to me in London, I can get them to Ukraine. We also have friends in Berlin and Rotterdam and Bratislava, if it’s possible for you to send devices there. Contact me at annabowleseditor @ gmail . com.
Don't worry about the plant: it is a Sanseveria, a tough and resourceful guy-- just like the Ukrainians...
Can anyone help by sending unwanted equipment to them ?