Excerpts from the conversation:
– Last year in Estonia, due to a corruption scandal with a volunteer center helping Ukraine, donations fell several times. In some cases, Estonians’ trust in volunteers disappeared to zero. Valery, how do you fight the problem of trust, and in general: what is the situation with donations in Latvia?
– Well, first of all, the war has dragged on. If a year ago people still believed that the war would end soon, now the situation is a little different. People see that the war is dragging on for a long time. We are talking to Latvians here, and we see that soon they themselves will need help. Because they really gave their last.
– Valery, recently your volunteer center hosted the wedding of a Ukrainian soldier who is currently undergoing treatment in Latvia. He was given a jeep so that he might return to his unit in it. Am I right in understanding, and I have heard this from many volunteers, that cars are now a great rarity? Do you feel a shortage of jeeps for the front?
– Yes, it is a rare case. A Latvian called us and said that he wanted to donate his jeep for the needs of the Ukrainian military. I told him that I even knew who I would give it to.
– I know that you are from Severodonetsk. How did you end up in Latvia?
– Our family moved to Jurmala in 2013, where we bought part of an abandoned paper mill. We started restoring it. We held Russian-language stand-up comedy nights at the factory, when the New Wave was still going on. But when the war started in 2014, we created a volunteer center. In those days, Volodymyr Zelensky, who was not yet president, came to the Dzintari Hall with a big concert, and I helped them organize the festival.
– How do you maintain the tone of your donors, how do you stimulate them?
– Together with our chef Yuriy Kovrizhenko, we bought a field kitchen where we make Victory borscht. We go to festivals and present ourselves in this way. That is, through Ukrainian borscht we promote our volunteer activities, through borscht that is salted with salt from Bakhmut. We go and sell this borscht for donations.
We hope that we will have sponsors who will help us buy food, fuel, to transport it all. We are trying to somehow get by in order to earn money. We are planning charity evenings, dinners. We will invite businessmen, our military, we have a singer Nastya from Kharkov, a former participant of the project “X-factor”. She has already given more than sixty charity concerts for the military.
But overall the situation with donations is very difficult. A post on the Internet can hang for a long time, and it is also unpleasant for us to endlessly ask for money for cars.
– Volunteers with jeeps physically cleared out almost everything in the Baltic countries, as far as I understand…
– Actually, yes, the problem now is not even regarding money. People from Ukraine are constantly writing, they need a good car, but now the main thing is to find a good car, so that it does not just get there. In principle, you can buy a car. Yes, it will get to Ukraine without problems. And then? And then there will be a load on it, and it will fall apart. Even if you start to restore it, this will not fix the situation. The car should initially be in good condition.
– I remember you had a project called “Trench Candles”, these candles warmed the soldiers on the front lines. And in light of the energy collapse, in which Ukraine has been living for the second year, such a project is relevant not only for the military, but also for civilians. Am I right?
– Yes, we have been working on this project for a long time. And now we are also making trench candles. But the soldiers from the front say that now it is unclear where the candles come from, and some of the cans contain cartridges. Can you imagine what the heating temperature is there? It is very dangerous.
We make our candles in such a way that you can take it out of the jar and check it with a detector to make sure it is of good quality and there are no “surprises”. If we have paraffin, we can melt up to a ton of paraffin per day to make regarding four thousand candles. We have set up production of these candles, and we close one hundred percent of all orders.
– How can the situation with Europeans’ trust in volunteer organizations be improved? Maybe Ukraine should launch some kind of big PR campaign?
– I don’t know. Recently, Ukrainian singer Irina Fedyshyn brought 60 cars to Ukraine from a tour of the USA. The thing is that at the beginning of the full-scale war, people didn’t know who to help, so they called embassies. And now almost everyone has someone fighting, so people help specifically.
#Latvians #giving
2024-07-09 18:17:35
