The United Nations estimates that nearly 6.5 million Ukrainians - out of a population of 43.7 million - are internally displaced. "UNHCR is planning to disburse unconditional cash grants to at least 360,000 internally displaced persons," Billing says. refugee agency and a coalition of aid groups are ramping up a program to instead give cash directly to displaced Ukrainians. After sorting them, she says, the center is able to provide staple food baskets and clothes to roughly 500 families per day.īut such physical donations can be cumbersome and time-intensive to deliver, says the Ukraine representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Karolina Lindholm Billing. Junk aside, Kostorna is grateful for the many donations she says are useful. "Respect the people who lost everything." "I understand you want to help, but you have to respect us," Kostorna says. Some of the donations are junk, she says, that volunteers must throw away or send to a dog shelter to be used as bedding. The coordinator of the aid distribution center, Tetyana Kostorna, says many people have been incredibly generous to Ukraine, but other people are just getting rid of their worn-out clothes. She also says they get very little that they can forward to soldiers on the front lines.
Joking that Ukraine has become the secondhand clothing bazaar for all of Europe, Stefanovich says they receive lots of children's clothes but not enough shoes and sneakers for adults. "This is all clothes for children ages zero to 1," she says, pointing to one of the various mounds of donations.īut there is an imbalance in what's arriving at the bazaar and exactly what's needed. Nastia Stefanovich, a volunteer at the distribution center, stands in front of a pile of white grain bags reaching to the ceiling. It's not that the clothing donations have no role in such aid efforts. An art gallery on the second floor bursts with thousands of bags of donated clothes.īut there's a problem with these donated goods - and there's a different way to help the displaced Ukrainians that aid groups are planning to try: cash handouts. Elsewhere, volunteers parcel out pallets of dry food into small bundles of groceries for displaced families. In the basement, nursing students divvy up medicines. In the theater, women sort boxes of socks, with each box resting atop a plush velvet seat. In downtown Lviv, a massive arts complex is now an aid distribution hub. Listen Nastia Stefanovich, a volunteer at the distribution center in Lviv for goods donated for Ukrainians in need, points out the piles of clothes that have been arriving.
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