“We just want to get back to a normal life.”
At 4:30 in the morning we “coffeed-up” and met at the Centrum Credit Union parking lot in Bitom. We had two ambulances to deliver. The credit union was proud that they were part of the credit union effort to deliver two ambulances to Ukraine while their town had earlier donated just one ambulance. We set out for Lviv. Rafal and Robert drove while Frank and I rode shotgun respectively.
We set out on the wide smooth highways across the Polish farm fields and forests. It was 3 1/2 hours to the border, 2 hours of puzzling paperwork and clerks at the border and then 2 hours through narrow village roads through the hills to Lviv.
In Lviv we met the delegation of volunteers that had come over 800 miles from two cities in Nikopol: Marganets and Pokrow. Androv and Andri received the keys for their 24 hour drive to deliver the ambulances to their cities.
Nikopol district sits in the center of the Southeastern Ukraine conflict. Missiles fall on the city every day. Their homes are three and four miles from the nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. Russian occupiers fire artillery and missiles from the power plant. Tthe Ukrainians do not fire back for fear of damaging the nuclear reactors. Still, there are frequent scares about radioactivity from the power plant. “After the Russians blew up the Kakhovka dam, they lack water for cooling of the nuclear plant”, we were told.
The destruction of the dam eliminated the fresh water source for the region and led to the sinking of the underground water level so local wells stopped producing water as well. Towns bring water in tanks on 20 ton trucks. People line up for water. The towns struggle with how to find a more permanent solution to the problem.
A hundred and sixty thousand people continue to live in the conflict zone, most without water and many without electricity. Most children and many mothers have been sent to Western Ukraine or Poland. It is largely the older people and the volunteers like Andri and Androv who stay. The volunteers tell us, “It is Hell. It is difficult to live under these conditions in our region without volunteers. We just want to get back to a normal life.”
Safe Travels
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