On kindness. My thank you letter to the world
“I’m mind-blown by the humanity and love I’ve seen. People around the world have knitted this interconnected web of kindness to help us. It’s miraculous: how much selflessness I’ve witnessed in the past week,” — my mum’s message came after a video-chat with her pilates group. Her instructor, now a refugee in Poland, organized an “afternoon tea” online, with the pilates ladies telling their stories.
2,155,271 refugees in two weeks. My number-crunching mind can’t properly comprehend the figure. So I turn to individual stories instead.
Our family friends from Poland, Krzysztof and Grażyna, offer transit housing. Every day, they host another half a dozen Ukrainian refugees who are heading to northern Poland. They skype-call my parents almost daily. “Just to say a few smiling words.” My parents, now in Ukraine, share the reports from Poland. “Everything is like clock-work,” — my mum tells me. “Polish volunteers meet people at train stations, give them warm food, provide directions. For those Ukrainians heading north, there are drivers offering rides, then families like Krzysztof’s host people along the way. The city council provides the refugees with food packs to take with them after they leave.”
“You know, Grażyna asked me for a recipe of Ukrainian borshch! She’s worried some of the Ukrainian guests were not eating the tomato soup she’d usually cook”, — my mum told me the other day. “I’ll be translating my version into Polish. They also have borshch, you know, but it’s a bit different. And Krzysztof doesn’t like cabbage in his.”
“Tania, do you know anyone with housing available in Warsaw?”- my message reaches a Wroclaw-based Moldovan friend some time around her midnight. She responds immediately, — since Ukrainian refugees started coming, Tania has connected many to housing across Poland and Moldova. In the first days of war, my FB feed looked like a set of advertisements for Moldovan vacations, except Moldovan wineries were offering to take Ukrainian people to live there for free. I also received messages from Hungarian, Romanian and Czech friends asking if anyone from my family or friends needs housing. In the Baltic states and across Europe, web-sites sprang up connecting refugees to housing.
Sometimes, it takes three days and three nights. Sometimes — a whole week. Invariably, the journey across the border feels like a lifetime. Or a “teleport” of sorts. Teleport is a better word, as it focuses not on the clichés of fleeing your country as a refugee, but on the magic that helps you stay alive, helps you find food and a warm place to change diapers for your baby when it’s -12C outside.
It’s the magic of human kindness. I thank every soul in the world — thank you for keeping the magic alive.