Hello, this is Alina — co-founder and creative producer of Kultrab; since February 25, 2022 I have been the head of the evacuation department at HELPING TO LEAVE, a volunteer initiative assisting Ukrainians with evacuation.
Writing about the war is unbearably difficult. Millions of shattered lives, destroyed families, beautiful places in Ukraine. The insurmountable pain and suffering, the resistance of Ukrainians, the guilt of Russians, hope, love for one’s neighbor, hatred for Putin.
After two sleepless weeks a team of:
⁃ 19-year-old artist Lyulya, now the editor of the HELPING TO LEAVE channel, lead supervisor of the evacuation department;
⁃ our Georgian friend Naturiko — coordinator of the chat for direct communication with Ukrainians who need help;
⁃ casting director Milena Bessonova, now a former casting director, today the head of the volunteer department;
⁃ Egor Eremeev, co-founder of Kultrab — operations director, invented a system for processing a huge number of applications from Ukrainians;
⁃ Makar Dyakonov, a developer from Prague in peacetime, and today my closest partner in training volunteers;
and I launched the evacuation department of the HELPING TO LEAVE project.
More than 100 volunteers work around the clock in shifts of 10-12 people, replacing each other every 4 hours: supervisors, operators, fact-checkers. They all help civilians online to escape from the shelling and get to the nearest border.
Supervisors are signed up to more than 300 chats, looking for the latest information about stops anywhere in Ukraine, finding driver contacts, train schedules, which may not be in the official railway station schedules.
Fact-checkers verify the information, availability of medicines, connect with volunteer organizations.
Operators provide consultations: from guidelines on how to hide from bombing” to the instructions on how to EU countries, they treat “accompanying” especially carefully — this is when they stay in touch with refugees throughout the entire journey.
Will you believe me if I tell you that a few hours ago Milena Bessonova (volunteer coordinator) was talking for an hour with a girl named Elena, who she found a maternity hospital for yesterday, and today Elena started having contractions? I would not have believed such a story just a few weeks ago.
I don’t know how to describe what I feel when I see Naturiko and our other operators, when they cry with joy because the people they’ve been accompanying have crossed the border and are safe.
A huge thank you to Nastya Zavyalova for the initiative to create a channel that really helps people.
Thanks to Lyulya, who has been running the channel from the first day, refuses to close her personal chat account, answers and helps everyone who turns to her for help in private messages. To Lasha — for helping Lyulya and all of us. Thank him for finding us a wonderful place that we call either an office or a headquarters. Before that, we worked in our apartment. All reports on the work of the HELPING TO LEAVE team with numbers can be found in the HELPING TO LEAVE Instagram page.
As of today, we are a large team: evacuation, financial aid department, fundraising department, PR and SMM, a team of developers, and a very large number of cool specialists who join us every day. We are all volunteers. And it seems we are almost a family.
Yesterday I stood with a friend in McDonald’s for the first time in all this time, waiting for an order to feed myself and the team, we looked out the window at people. People were drinking beer, smoking, and laughing. I thought, is this the real world? Or is the real world there, where we are now, in Ukraine, where boys and men from 18 to 60 become soldiers, where girls and women save their own and others’ children, stand at the station for days to get on a train, where people flee from war, having no idea what awaits them and their families in the future.
I apologize for such a sentimental post, it’s just that I don’t know any other way right now. Thank you all so much for your support and for helping us help people. From the first day, the project has been collecting donations. Every day, the financial aid department sends money to Ukrainians for food, transportation, and medicine. Please, if you have the opportunity, support the project.
Thank you. Glory to Ukraine!
*This post is dated on March 14, 2022
Kultrab is no longer involved in HELPING TO LEAVE operations*