Artykuł
We Have Passed One Test, The Second One Is Still Ahead
We are getting used to the war, but this does not mean that we have stopped helping the Ukrainians. Animosities may be emerging but on a smaller scale than one might expect
For the first four months of the war, I had no real life. I remember that time only from photographs. In the photos, I can see how my son grew. My husband helped me build a wall around me, otherwise I would have gone crazy. I was in Poland, my mother in Odessa. One misfortune after another, me wanting to help everyone. Fires on the ruins of fires”, Inessa talks very fast. These are her memories from the beginning of the war. In her own way, she got burnt out by helping others and volunteering. Now she knows that if she had continued, it would have been a straight path to losing herself. She made a different choice: she puts money aside and makes transfers, for a specific purpose, for a specific person. It is less spectacular and less engaging, but it allows her to live.
We go back to some of the people we met after 24 February 2022. They talk about those days as if it were a long time ago. A great campaign was rolled out by the efforts of people who often had absolutely no clue what charity work is. They say that those efforts had a profound meaning. They bought the time necessary to set in motion the machinery of assistance from the government and large organisations that needed time to get off the ground. That time also gave them knowledge about themselves and showed them the importance of a sense of agency. This will come in handy in the months and years to come. While we have passed the test of helping, there is another test ahead of us: the test of living together.
Responding to Shock
“Naomi Klein published The Shock Doctrine, a book about how modern capitalism exploits the condition in which countries and nations find themselves. We were in such a shock, but that shock was amplified exponentially”, says Tomasz Misiak, co-founder of Work Service. “It was a shock overshadowed by the unpleasant feeling that the world as we know it is falling apart. It is the 21st century, there is the EU, NATO, and yet just across our border a bloody war breaks out, tanks roll in, thousands of troops march in. This made us realise anew that these people are just like us and the same could happen to us. The shock caused a positive response, and selfless actions quickly became strongly integrated, because everyone felt the need to do something”.
