Nina Prival had put an appeal on Facebook. On Tuesday, the Ukrainian-born would drive from Arnhem to Apeldoorn to bring things to the collection for Ukraine. Did the neighbors also want to donate something? “It turned out to be a little more than I thought,” she says with a laugh as she unloads diapers, baby food, blankets and pillows. “I had to ask a friend to drive too, because it didn’t fit in one car.”
The enthusiasm is enormous, on this Tuesday afternoon at the Zwitsalterrein on the edge of Apeldoorn, where the Werkgroep Hulptransporten Eastern Europe (WHOE) foundation is holding a large collection campaign. Volunteers in safety vests come and go to make sure everything runs smoothly. “Ronald,” a man says cheerfully, “did you expect this?”
“What time is it, 12 o’clock, and already this.”
‘Soon we will have storage problems!’
WHOE Foundation, a Christian organization, has twenty years of experience with this type of transport. ‘When you say WHOE, the whole of Apeldoorn shakes,’ says Hetty about the famous collections. She and thirty others went to Ukraine a few years ago. “I still have friends from there on Facebook. They asked us to pray for them.’
This cargo is going somewhere to a border area. The embassy has yet to determine where exactly. This mainly concerns warm clothing, medicines, mattresses and blankets. Chairman Herman Garritsen: ‘And we get 1,200 pajamas from Amsterdam.’
These are nerve-wracking times for Nina Prival and her 71-year-old mother Valentina. ‘Every morning starts with reading the news: will the people of Ukraine still last? Then we call family and friends there to ask how things are going. Then the day begins.’
The family comes from Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv that is under heavy fire. By coincidence, mother Valentina is now in the Netherlands visiting her daughter Nina who has lived here since 2007. On television she saw how the war broke out in her hometown.
‘The response from the Netherlands has been great,’ says Nina Prival. ‘That touches me very much. I want to thank everyone for their compassion.’
Charity cocktail
Spontaneous fundraising campaigns are taking place all over the country. According to professor of philanthropy Theo Schuyt (VU), the circumstances in Ukraine are the perfect cocktail for charity. Because of the many news broadcasts, many people know what is going on. Moreover, according to Schuyt, there is consensus about the frame that European freedom and democracy are at stake.
Schuyt: ‘Because the Ukrainian people have been fighting for a pro-European course, away from the Soviet direction since 2013, you get that people think: they are like us. There is group solidarity. In addition, Ukraine itself is not aggressive, but is being attacked by a war machine. It is comparable to a natural disaster, such as a tsunami: it happens to you, you can’t do anything about it. That feeling of injustice moves people.’
‘I actually thought that Ukraine had already joined the EU’, says Esther Hendriks (40), who will bring things with her daughters René (8) and Marijn (6). “It’s closer than Syria or Afghanistan.” Does she have a specific affinity with Ukraine? “No, more of an aversion to Putin. People have nothing left, that breaks my heart. So many people have lost their homes.’
‘More than a thousand!’, René says.
“Thousands,” her mother says.
Security of the Netherlands
And then there is also another factor: the safety of the Netherlands. ‘If it concerns your own group, people will show solidarity,’ says Schuyt. ‘If you want to survive as a society, it is best to display collective behaviour. That has been proven for a long time.’
‘This could be a serious turning point towards a Third World War’, says Caroline van de Kolk. She brought bed linen and towels. “That’s what makes it so scary. The West reacts en masse and unitedly. You don’t know what that reaction will provoke.’
Not only are things brought, but also picked up. Irina Mulder (40) met her husband Gert twenty years ago at a summer camp in Ukraine and last weekend she picked up her two sisters, aged 25 and 38, just across the border in Poland. Bewildered by all the niceness, they walk around the grounds.
Her sisters stood at the border for eight hours on Friday. ‘All they had with them was an emergency case, they called it a bomb case. They had prepared them at home in case the air raid sirens went off.’ Once they were on the bus, they saw rockets fall on the city they were just leaving.
‘A few weeks earlier we had just brought mattresses to Poland,’ says Mulder. “So now we had no beds left for my sisters. Luckily they were able to get them here.’
Think what you give
Not a bad word about all those spontaneous fundraising campaigns for the people of Ukraine, says Nico de Borst of the Breath Care for Kids aid organization emphatically. But before containers are filled with clothes and toys again, the donors think it would be wise to visit the site of the organization Open Door Ukraine to consult.
‘Really, I am moved by private individuals who are now taking action’, says the 64-year-old Rotterdammer, who has been committed to the care of orphans in Ukraine for seventeen years. And yet that caveat: effective aid is best provided by organizations that know their way around the country, and that have been active there for a long time. Open Door Ukraine, chaired by former minister Joris Voorhoeve, has a lot of insight into this.
With all the current images of spontaneous relief actions, the thoughts go back for a moment to the action Help the Russians Door the Winter (1995) – perhaps somewhat wryly against the current background. Also such an eruption of Dutch generosity in which a lot of relief supplies were eventually wasted in Dutch sheds.
De Borst: ‘Do you know what helps? I got a call this morning from a company from Surhuisterveen that provides a truck with a driver. We can do something with that. We are currently not sending money to our contacts in Ukraine, because banking is not secure. But we do know what is needed and what needs to be done in that direction: generators, fire extinguishers, all kinds of equipment for charging. Medicines are always good.’
Breath Care for Kids was set up by the Rotterdam pediatrician Diederik van Heemstra and accountant who is also passionate Sparta fan Nico de Borst. The link with football is not without significance in the sense that De Borst became involved in the country through former Spartan and Ukrainian Yevgeny Levchenko. He’s been there about sixty times now.
‘The name of our organization refers to how I raised funds and to the fact that we want to give children some breathing space,’ explains De Borst. He has run 52 marathons and was sponsored for charity. Breath Care for Kids has become a fully-fledged aid organization through the Sparta network and the Rotterdam business community.
‘We run four orphanages in Ukraine. We are now taking in 41 children, with financial support from the Ukrainian government. In one of the houses, in Malinivka, the children were awakened last week by the clinking glass. It is 30 kilometers from the border with Russia.’
The local manager of the organization, Sacha, received a microphone under his nose from Russian state television in that now occupied area on Monday. De Borst: ‘He didn’t say anything, he ran away. We now call him our own Zelensky.’
(Marcel van Lieshout)