RINJ Women in Ukraine close 17 shelters, relocating 11 in a week

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From around the world RINJ Foundation workers were pulled together the first week of July to respond to a growing Ukraine catastrophe. Events are not unfolding as rosy as the West’s preprogrammed media is reporting. Ukraine is an unmitigated disaster slamming over three million families. Working crews from around the world spent a week in Ukraine supporting 1,043 local and foreign workers evacuating both staff and sheltered families who had a place to go. Most families will start a new life with temporary lodgings with a family outside Ukraine, a feat that took several months to arrange and fund.

New horizons—rainbows—were shared with smiles and a recipe for hope to hundreds of families in a leviathan task that changed the course of humanitarianism across a distant and massive breach in the human condition.

Floods, fires, missiles, shells, hunger and injuries.

Rainbows in Ukraine join humanitarians to lift some souls from the rubble.

“Floods, fires, missiles, shells, hunger and injuries—some families had to be moved. How do you move 700 children in the midst of a war? With rainbows and gallons of donated Ice Cream,” explained Alona Adamovich, the woman who leads the RINJ Foundation’s humanitarian response to the spreading war zones of eastern Europe.   Photo credit: The RINJ Foundation. Photo is cropped. Art / Cropping / Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine

Kids relocated, “With rainbows and gallons of donated Ice Cream,” says Ukrainian humanitarian leader from the RINJ Women group.

Seventeen women’s shelters in Ukraine were closed because they were too overcrowded; too underused; too structurally compromised; or unsupportable. Instead of spending more money on those facilities that had no future, the people in charge decided the folks under care in six facilities were to be given the money, support, manpower, and goods to start a new life elsewhere. Then the people in charge arrived in-country to help do the heavy lifting.

Out of 17 locations shut down, 11 were created anew elsewhere in donated physical plants. Some are in basements; and some are donated buildings that needed structural repairs which were recently completed by volunteers since the frost left the ground in spring. This was not an emergency evacuation like Bakhmut, it was a planned change to a part of the overall landscape that called on even the clerks and accountants around the world to get here and to lend a hand doing heavy lifting.

Rainbows

Workers were feeling the rainbows as single-mom families relocated to safer places, still close to their roots, while others left the country with hearts filled with hope.

“We learned what a rainbow feels like, as we helped Ukrainian families relocate to safer places,” explained Lana, a medivac nurse and EMS driver. Photo credit: Johannes Bahrdt, Berlin, 30th of April, 2020; Panasonic DC-G9, H-HSA12035E Lumix G Vario 12-35 mm; 35mm, 1/250s, F4.0, ISO800; derived from raw data utilizing Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6.14. Johannes Bahrdt has licensed this remarkable work under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Art / Cropping: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine

 

The plight of women and children in war zones is as ever, only an afterthought and never a thing of action, with rare exception.

The RINJ Foundation has been addressing a shortfall in cash for supporting women’s shelters, birthing clinics, and emergency services for women and children among the millions of displaced persons across the land, especially in rural regions and small towns and villages.

The greatest concentration of outside humanitarian orgs in Ukraine is 1,200 km. away from the war zone. That’s a lot like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. Adaptation of a work by Mapbox and unocha.org. Art / Cropping / Enhancement: Rosa Yamamoto / Feminine-Perspective-Magazine and RINJ data by Geraldine Frisque of The RINJ Foundation

Feminine-Perspective

Author’s note. I started writing this article surrounded by people having some cheese, bread, tea or coffee. They have all gone on their way home or back to their duties. Thus, there was a rainbow before the sun went down. That’s how I felt about these amazing women who have risen from their own smashed homes and families to help each other and to help people they have never met. That may be the biggest rainbow, I have ever seen.

Melissa