Dafna Rachok is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. She is a Ukrainian-born anthropologist with interests in medical and political anthropology. Her research seeks to understand how vulnerable groups in Ukraine respond to existing HIV prevention and treatment programs and how their attitudes to the state shape their desire or reluctance to seek those programs. February 24th caught her doing fieldwork in Ukraine, so since then Dafna has been combining her research with volunteering efforts: fundraising, buying, and delivering protective gear and medical supplies.
A lot has already been said about the importance of volunteering to help alleviate the humanitarian burden and to help Ukraine’s war effort after Ukraine was brutally attacked (once again) by Russia on February 24th. For many of my fellow Ukrainians, the war started eight years ago in 2014, when Russia occupied the Crimean Peninsula and parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. And yet, February 24th was an important date in that it changed the scope and the scale of the events.
The time that elapsed since that grim February day was, at least for me, a continuous learning experience. As John Vsetecka aptly notes in his piece, “war makes one a quick learner.” I cannot agree more. On February 24th, I knew almost nothing about the bulletproof vests. On March 17th, when talking to the protective gear manufacturers, I was already asking about the bullet caliber that they use to test the plates in the bulletproof vests they produce.
In this short piece, though, I want to talk about the volunteering efforts of you and me. I want to talk about how much ordinary people did in order to make sure that Ukraine’s victory is imminent and to bring this victory closer. And to offer an explanation as to why this on-the-ground coordination was successful and efficient. As an anthropologist and an ethnographer, I will talk about this with the help of stories. So let me tell you two stories first.
Here is story number one. My friends and research interlocutors from Zaporizhzhia asked me to help them with medicine and personal hygiene products for a few dozen displaced people with HIV in the region. Almost 70% of the region was then occupied by the Russian forces, so a lot of people were fleeing the occupation and settling either in the city of Zaporizhzhia that was controlled by the Ukrainian government or in the nearby Ukrainian-controlled regions. My friends sent me a tentative list of the things that were needed. I quickly Googled the prices of various medicines they needed and calculated an approximate sum of money that I needed to cover all those needs. I started fundraising – through my social media networks – and already in three hours I had the necessary sum. It was unbelievable! To be honest, the amount of money I aimed for was not very high, just 15,000 UAH (around 450 USD at the time), but the fact that I was able to fundraise it (and even a bit more) within hours was incredibly inspiring! Needless to say, together with my friends from Kyiv, we bought the necessary hygiene products and medicine on the same day and quickly mailed it all to Zaporizhzhia, so the IDPs would have the things they need as soon as possible.
A couple of weeks before that, story number two happened. A Big-Liberal-Guy Foundation contacted a research center that my colleagues and I established a few years ago. The foundation said that it has some money right now that it can use to help the humanitarian effort in Ukraine and it can provide the money to small, locally registered organizations it had worked with before, such as our research center. We were beyond happy! Of course, we said, we would be delighted to accept the money: we have been fundraising anyway and we have a lot of requests for food, medicine, and other things. The foundation, though, asked us first to provide a tentative list of the items we would buy with the money provided to us. I was honestly surprised, as the needs and requests constantly change, but we agreed. We compiled the list the next day. And the day after that, we prepared the necessary documents for the foundation. Still, it took the foundation three weeks to transfer us the money. Needless to say, all the requests mentioned in the list for the foundation were already filled. People could not wait three weeks for the life-saving medication. Children would not hold their pee and poo for three weeks, waiting while we buy diapers with the foundation’s money. Worst of all, while we were waiting for this money to come, a few medical supplies I needed to buy for people with disabilities were already out of stock. I still cannot find them.
It goes without saying that the foundation also asked that we provide receipts for every hryvnia we spend, which was sometimes difficult. At that time, I was also contacted by people from the occupied Kherson region who urgently needed money to be able to buy medicine on the black market there. We could not use the foundation money to help these people, as they would not be able to show the receipts… We transferred them funds from our own savings. We used the foundation money to buy medicine (drugs, bandages) and hygiene products for people with disabilities in Kyiv, Poltava and Kryvyi Rih.
When there were only three foundation-provided dollars left in our account, we asked them if we could buy $27 worth of medical supplies and simply add our own $24 to the sum. The foundation told us “no.” For the sake of proper accounting and reporting, we needed to spend the exact amount of three dollars that we were left with… And to make sure we spent them by the end of this month. So I spent a few days looking for the items that would add to an exact sum of three dollars to be able to properly report to the foundation.
I felt as if I were living in a Kafka novel. There is war going on, people fleeing occupation and artillery fire. They urgently need medicine for their wounds, they need food and clothes. And here I am, stuck with this foundation and making sure that all the receipts are all right and they all amount precisely to a necessary sum (not one cent more, not one cent less) that we were given… I think I have never felt so angry and useless at the same time.
There has been a lot of anger on the part of Ukrainians aimed at the big organizations like the World Food Program or the International Committee of the Red Cross that haven’t done much to help since February. And there has been also a lot of anger aimed at the organizations that have been unwilling to change their operational rules when helping people who are fleeing the war.
Humanitarian response demands flexibility and adaptability. But it also requires swiftness and expediency. Not changing your operational rules and demanding that things are “reported as usual” often undermines the very effort to help (and sometimes puts people in harm’s way). Some people would probably rejoinder that transparency and proper reporting are important. I would retort that transparency comes in where trust and confidence cease to exist. We were able to respond to people’s needs in Zaporizhzhia promptly and efficiently because the whole operation was based on trust. I trusted those who asked for help. All those who donated to us trusted that we would use the money properly.
We often think of wars and the humanitarian catastrophes they engender as extraordinary events where the usual rules are and/or should be suspended. Yet, I insist, there is also a lot that we can learn from how we operate at these extraordinary times. For instance, we may want to rethink and reevaluate what transparency, efficiency, and trust mean to all of us.
Donate to the European AIDS Treatment Group to help people with HIV and co-infections affected by the war in Ukraine.