For more than three months, volunteers from the Caritas foundation in De Rijp have been working extra hard to send medicines, food and beds to Ukraine. “Where they were busy on average one day a week before the Russian invasion, they now regularly spend the whole week,” Jan Pilkes (74) of Caritas tells NH Nieuws.
The foundation has been collecting relief items for years for the dire situations in which many people live in Ukraine, but now an extra appeal is being made to Caritas. “The volunteers love to do it, but it’s hard work,” Pilkes says. “When we load a transport, between 13,000 and 15,000 kilos of stuff goes through their hands.”
To forget
Where the foundation worked with forty to fifty volunteers at the beginning of the war, there are now about twenty-five. According to Pilkes, this is partly because ‘it is already being forgotten’.
“People are still reading about it, but it seems to have less impact.” In Ukraine, too, normal life continues in many places, Pilkes says. “But hundreds of people are still killed every day. Help is desperately needed.”
NH Nieuws previously saw how volunteers were loading cargo. Text continues below the video:
From De Rijp to Hensbroek: Goods donated en masse to the Caritas foundation for Ukraine – NH Nieuws
The foundation collects items with the help of good contacts: Caritas received ‘pallets full’ of bread from a bread factory in Wormer, pallets with shoes came from Limburg and Bergman Clinics already donated a lot of medical material.
“But schools are also committed to us,” says Pilkes. “Last week a donation of 10,000 euros was collected from a school in De Rijp. You also notice that the children are very well spoken about and that they are happy to offer help to other children who are having a hard time because of the war.”
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The foundation currently also offers this help to areas that were briefly in Russian hands and have since been recaptured. “Those are more difficult journeys. Not only is it very expensive because petrol is rationed there and so we have to take more than enough from here, not everyone wants to go there.”
Last week Pilkes himself was near Odessa, where the Russians wreaked havoc. “By God’s grace, I was able to fill up with 15 liters of petrol there after I gave a Ukrainian phone number.
“People with a mental disability have it bad: they sit all day in a wheelchair with a bucket underneath for their stools”
In the coming period, the foundation will collect goods for people with a mental disability. “It looks so bad in there,” Pilkes says, horrified. “The people there sit in wheelchairs all day and often even have a bucket under their chair; that’s where the faeces go in. Some also have a kind of side exit for urine. It can’t be filmed!”
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That is not because of the war, says Pilkes: “That is normally the case.” In the beginning, the foundation was not allowed to look inside such boarding schools. “They would rather not want us to know how things are going,” said Pilkes. The foundation can still use stuff, especially mattresses are desired. “There’s a crying shortage of that.”
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