Daria Savchenko is a PhD Candidate in Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, focusing on the anthropology of artificial intelligence. Daria started working with Helping to Leave in May 2022, inspired by a post shared by her friend. The impressive atmosphere of support from other volunteers and the first message, “We are safe,” from Ukrainian evacuees showed her that volunteering in a nonprofit organization like this can have a real impact, despite her physical distance from the war.
I wake up at 3 am to check my phone. I’m in Boston, but it’s 10 am in Kyiv and I’m waiting for a message from a Ukrainian woman who, together with her mother and a small dog, should be crossing the border into Latvia. My job is to make sure they have crossed safely, one of many stages I will help them navigate on their long and circuitous evacuation to safety from a basement in Mariupol. Some may ask, what is it that I can do from so far away? If they get into trouble, how can I help? But it’s not just me: I am only one of 450 volunteers from around the world and different walks of life who make up the nonprofit organization Helping to Leave, a lifeline for Ukrainians fleeing the war.
Helping to Leave spontaneously came into being on February 24, 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine. As a couple of friends in Georgia witnessed the massive outpour of requests for information on leaving the war zone, they got the idea to create a channel on Telegram (a social media platform widely used in the region), where they would publish escape routes, driver contacts, plane and train schedules, breaking news, and information on European countries that can host Ukrainians. Within 24 hours, 10,000 people joined the channel, and people started sending requests for evacuation and asking for financial aid.
Since then, Helping to Leave has grown into one of the largest assistance projects for Ukrainians to date. Since the project was launched, over 92,000 people have received various kinds of help – from informational, financial, psychological to evacuation. Over 16,000 of them have been guided by our operators throughout the entire evacuation process, from planning to arrival. And it’s all been done by volunteers. With the collective on-the-ground expertise of its members, Helping to Leave is able to tailor its assistance to the specific needs of those escaping the war – needs that big nonprofits like the Red Cross struggle to identify and meet.
Now legally registered as a nonprofit in the Czech Republic, Helping to Leave is made up of volunteers from countries like Ukraine, Israel, Georgia, USA, and countries in the EU that work in multiple departments (legal support, medical counseling, fundraising, etc), but the largest subdivisions are the evacuation and humanitarian aid departments. They help with family evacuation from war zones in Ukraine, they buy and deliver humanitarian aid to the territories in Ukraine including those that are occupied by the Russian army, and they evacuate and transport cancer patients to European clinics. The evacuation department is divided into groups that focus on different regions of Ukraine, like Kharkiv, whose corresponding group managed to evacuate over 6,000 women, children, and elderly from the occupation in June. After it became clear that the occupying forces were deporting some Ukrainians to Russia, Helping to Leave formed one more special group that helps Ukrainian refugees leave Russia.
Helping to Leave covers expenses during the evacuation process, like chartering buses and hiring drivers, paying for train tickets, and finding accommodation along the way. To date, we have received more than 50,000 applications for funding. This massive influx of requests are initially processed by a chat bot, which collects key information and sorts applications into the appropriate channels, where more than 220 volunteers communicate with evacuees 24/7 in Ukrainian and Russian. Messaging through chat is the most efficient way of communicating when there is an unstable Internet and information needs to be transferred quickly and safely. Sometimes people just need some informational support, while others are accompanied by operators right up to the border to safety.
The circumstances of the people who write to the chat vary: “Our documents were lost in fire in Mariupol”; “We have a grandma who is paralyzed and stuck in a small village in the Kharkiv region”; “I have three children and a cat, can you help us leave?” All of these requests demand tailored solutions and personalized approaches.
From the moment an operator is assigned a case through the chat, they are the main point of contact for the evacuee, answering whatever questions they might have. If we don’t know something, we find out from somebody who does and relay the information back. As an operator, I’m connected to a complex infrastructure of human volunteers and technology across multiple time zones. My colleagues are located all over the world. Some of them have recently left the war zone themselves. Once in safety (like in Ireland, Estonia, or Germany), they joined Helping to Leave as volunteers to help others using their own expertise.
Although almost all of my interaction with the people I help and my fellow volunteers is virtual, I still feel an intense experience of real human connection. One message at a time, volunteers are creating safe new routes for refugees, often thousands of miles away from where they are.
As an operator, I do my job through maps, routes, itineraries, safety guidelines and scripts, as well as the stories people tell me of their journeys. Everything is always changing, so right after I’ve passed on information, I accumulate more, and pass that on. I assume there is pain and loss on the other side of the chat. Sometimes they tell me their pain and loss. I’m a channel for both information and emotion.
The best moments are, of course, when I get their messages that they have reached safety. Though their messages are full of relief and joy, they can also make your heart sink, as they are so grateful to have the basic necessities of human life. My most recent case was a mother and daughter who had spent weeks starving in a Mariupol basement. After weeks of planning and a circuitous journey through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Germany, we got them safely to a host family in France. They sent me a video showing where they were staying, the voice behind the camera cheerfully narrating as if giving a home tour: “Look, it’s so nice here, this is where we are going to sleep. Look, there is a nice small courtyard here. But—wait for it—look, we have sanitary pads! And also so much food! We can eat as much as we want here, can you imagine that?”
It’s the sixth month of the war. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is receiving less attention in the media. But our hands are still as full as they were at the beginning, as many Ukrainians are only now getting a chance to flee the war. And since the forced evacuations (through “filtration camps” where they are processed and interrogated) to Russia began, including those who spent weeks under siege in Mariupol without drinking water or medicine, we now have the added task of getting them out of the aggressor country that caused them so much pain.
It takes on average $100 dollars to evacuate one person.
Please donate And then you and I, we are helping to leave.
If you want to volunteer with Helping to Leave, please apply here (application forms are available in Ukrainian and Russian). If you know someone who is now in the war zone in Ukraine or has been deported to Russia, please share the Helping to Leave chat bot link: https://t.me/helpingtoleave_bot.