Pictured is a family from Chernivtsi, Ukraine. From left are Tatyana, father, son, mother with infant, Nancy Bailey, Doug Bailey, Tim Bailey and Olia Manuik.

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series exploring Webster City and Webster City Rotary’s connection to Ukraine. As you will read, the writer, Doug Bailey, is working from an intensely personal perspective.

By DOUG BAILEY

Within days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, a group of Webster City Rotarians began an informal discussion on how the club might be able to help the Ukrainian people.

Our son, Tim Bailey, who along with his spouse, Caroline, have been missionaries in Romania for 12 years, was already working with a group of local ministers, church members and other missionaries in Sighisoara, Romania, to take food, medicine, generators and other supplies into Ukraine, and bring civilian Ukrainians escaping the areas of fighting, back to Sighisoara.

Romania has the longest border with Ukraine of all the Eastern European countries. The match was made quickly with Tim’s group and over the next few months the Webster City Rotary Club was able to raise more than $60,000 from club members, the community, other Rotary Clubs in Iowa and individuals from within Iowa and out of state.

Those funds were used to aid the group in Sighisoara with their efforts in Ukraine and with the refugees who had come to live in Sighisoara. Last September, after the original funds had been exhausted, the Rotary Club agreed to fund $1,200 a month for a year for refugee food. To this point in time the club has been able to meet that pledge with contributions from individual club members and donations from the public.

Along with my wife, Nancy, we spent this March in Sighisoara with Tim and his family. What follows is an update on the refugee relief efforts in Sighisoara and the continued supply missions to Ukraine, which the Webster City Rotary Club and their donors have supported.

Our first refugee meeting was with the project manager and communications specialist of the Light of the World — a non-governmental relief organization — Tatyana Brunevich and Olia Manuik. Both women are from Chernivtsi, Ukraine. After brief parking lot introductions utilizing English, Romanian and Ukrainian, we boarded a van loaded with full grocery bags of Rotary-purchased food and goods to begin a delivery route to Ukrainian refugees in Sighisoara.

Sighisoara has a population of around 26,000. This currently includes 73 Ukrainian refugee families, comprising a little over 200 individuals; this number is down from a high of around 500 individuals a year ago.

Enroute to our first delivery we learned that Light of the World had taken over the food pantry duties of the refugee committee about a year ago when it was formed. Olia and Tatyana were recruited to run it. Both women have extensive background in social services.

Refugee families can place an online order every two weeks using a phone app. While the food staples — along with certain paper and baby products — are free, each family has a set monetary budget based on the number of family members that they use to place their order. For example, for a family of two that budget is the equivalent of $35 United States dollars. For each additional family member, $3.50 USD is added.

While the food and other products are either donated or purchased with donations, this system of assigning a monetary value and allowing the families to order what they need seems to instill a sense of responsibility and dignity in the families, and it reduces waste. The delivery of the food also allows for checking in on the family and their housing.

Our first delivery was to an apartment in the newer part of town where an elderly man met us at the door with our three grocery bags. The household included grandparents, a daughter and her husband who were at work, and three children who were at school and preschool. They were all from Zaporizhzhya where fighting destroyed their homes and active fighting has continued.

The Zaporizhzhya region is also the location of one of the largest nuclear power plants in Europe.

The family we visited has been in Sighisoara for a year and a half. The grandfather was a retired truck driver and now volunteers driving the Ukraine church van. He was very welcoming and happy to see us and made it very clear, through translation, that they were so thankful for the food.

It was explained that Nancy and I were from the Rotary Club. We asked about his wife and he didn’t think she would want to talk with us, but he went to the bedroom and came back with her. While hesitant and very apprehensive with us being there, when asked what she had done in Ukraine she was beaming and announced that she was a dumpling maker and still is.

She opened the refrigerator and pulled bowls of dumplings in process and showed us freezer bags full of her creations. It was explained to us that these dumplings are a popular staple in Eastern Europe and contain a large variety of stuffings, including cabbage and other vegetables, assorted meats and fruits for the dessert dumplings. She had made them for family, friends and neighbors and sold them to others for extra income at home in Ukraine. She told us she would like to be able to make a little dumpling business in Sighisoara, but that has not happened yet.

It was time for us to move on to the next delivery. As we moved to the door she stopped us and said, through interpretation, “We have always helped everyone, our family, at church, our neighbors and now we need help.” Then, with tears running down her cheeks, she said, “Thank you, thank you.”

The tone for the rest of the day was set.

On the way to the next delivery, Olia explained that each household that receives food is monitored as to the number of individuals in the household, their income, children in school, rent and utilities. Some refugee families are able to get by on their own, but that is a minority. Language and single adults with young children stop many adult refugees from being able to be employed. Efforts to find child care are underway and Tim is searching for a Youth With A Mission missionary who would be able to teach English to adult refugees. Since Sigishora’s local economy is tourist-driven, English is more valuable than Romanian for job seekers.

Soon we pulled up in front of an older apartment building dating from the time that Romania was communist and under Russian control. There was no elevator, so we walked up four flights of stairs. A middle-aged woman came to the door with a 2-year-old in her arms and invited us in. She explained, again via translation, that the apartment belonged to a good friend and that she and her three children lived there with her friend’s family. Her other two children were at school — a 16-year-old and a 6-year-old. Her husband was a heavy truck driver in the Ukrainian Army. She did not know exactly where he was, but was able to talk to him often — when he had a cell signal. They had been in Sighisoara for six months, living with her friend.

She had been a shop clerk in Odessa, which was home. Their home had been damaged multiple times by a variety of Russian munitions. There are no building materials available to make repairs. She and her husband decided it would be best to move her and the kids to safety. She would very much like to find an apartment for her and the children, but she is unable to work without child care — so there isn’t the money to move. The housing subsidy which the Romanian government had been providing to refugees ended nearly a year ago and there is not any assistance from other entities to replace it at the present time. Her 16-year-old has been doing very well in school and will be able to start online university classes in the summer. That made her smile and that is clearly what she is hanging on to.

We continued on with the food deliveries and the stories kept coming.

While the individual situations of the refugees were often very different, there was one very raw common thread — the Russian invasion had turned their lives upside down and nothing was ever going to be the same.

Next in the series: The Baptist Minister and the Light of the World village preschool, Joy Center and teenagers’ thoughts on the war.