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Who’s Your Uncle?
Since volunteering to work with Ukrainian refugee families in Poland, I’ve been studying as much Ukrainian as I can fit into a busy day, hoping to be able to exchange greetings and a bit of verbal goodwill. At this point, I have a vocabulary of a maybe a few dozen words (on a good day),…
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Eye of the Storm
Today is Saturday, my second day volunteering at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Przemyśl Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center. In contrast to yesterday, today is almost completely uneventful. There are very few refugee families in the center today, and we only had one refugee child visit us in the…
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Speaking Russian
Today, Sunday, my third day volunteering at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Przemyśl Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center. Today we have about half a dozen kids in the space. There are two volunteers working, Agnes and I. Agnes is from a city in the north of Poland, near the…
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Summer Camp
Today was my first day “on the job” at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Przemyśl Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center. It was everything I had expected and more.I was happily surprised to find the space is actually much larger than I expected. I had been told that it was…
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Hard Knocks
The kids we see at the at the Ocalenie Foundation safe space for children in the Ukrainian Refugee Reception Point / Humanitarian Aid Center in Przemyśl, Poland seem like one big family — on several dimensions. First, it’s not uncommon for a single nuclear family to have 4 or 5 kids. Second, these families are…
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Googleman
Today I was in transit between Warsaw and Przemyśl. Przemyśl is the town near the Ukraine border where the refugee reception center I will be working is is located.The trip from Warsaw to Przemyśl was a 6-hour train ride. The first half or the ride was an express (non-stop) train from Warsaw to Krakow. In…
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Beyond Walled Borders
Yesterday I wrote about a border wall between Poland and Belarus. For American readers, that story may evoke thoughts of the border between the U.S. and Mexico, some segments of which are also walled. Conceptually, a walled national border should work the same way as a white picket fence — the white fence keeps careless…
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Pawns
Yesterday I went to the Fundacja Ocalenie head office in Warsaw to sign paperwork. There is an “Agreement on the Performing of Volunteering Services”; an acknowledgement regarding processing of personal data by Ocalenie in accordance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”); a couple of consents for Ocalenie to use photographs in which I…
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Game Plan Przemyśl
In our training workshop yesterday, we spent time in break-out groups discussing possible activities we could organize to engage the refugee kids. The Ocalenie trainers asked each breakout group to prepare a simple plan for a hypothetical day at the “safe space for children” in Przemyśl. The plan was to include four phases: an opening…
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Russians and Bogeymen
During our training workshop yesterday, our Ocelanie trainers spent quite a bit of time at the beginning of the day talking with us about young children’s common reactions to crisis situations. They pointed out that children generally have a much narrower perspective than adults, so “little things” that a more mature person can easily see…
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