Things have changed … But they remain the same.
A moma and sub woofers.
Feeding and evacuation of the animals has never stopped, even since the first 2 months of the war - it’s just how, why and where that has changed.
The first 2 months of the war we were based in Poland in a town called Przemysl no one knew at that time what the Russians were going to do or how well they might do, so we did what we could with small forays into Ukraine as far as Lviv.
It was an upsetting time, finding animals (pets if you will) chained to lampposts, fences and the gates of shelters, where the owners had to leave them behind because the trains of busses would not take them.
Upsetting. Looking into the eyes of a dog or a cat that one day had a home and was loved only to find the next day their hearts had been ripped out. Upsetting.
But we did what we could, we got out as many as we could and left food for the rest.
May time 2022, when the Russians had left Kyiv, we were allowed into the reaches of Ukraine and came across the extent of the problem - the shelters were at filling and fast.
There were ones that had been bombed and ones that had disease, but never did we find any that didn’t have people that would not help. Help was there, but the food wasn’t. So the message went out and the donations poured in.
We have the privilege of handing it out, but without you donating we could never have done it.
So the year/s came and went. We ended up being lent a house in Kharkiv and from there we ‘wandered’ the front lines in the Donbass from the city of Vovchansk in Kharkiv oblast through Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar, Avdiivka, Zaporizhia and Kherson (not to mention the villages and cities within the mainland of Ukraine).
But at this time (2023) it started to change.
The shelters were beyond bursting. Now we had a network of small ‘foster homes’ appearing in apartment buildings.
You can imagine it, Soviet style apartments with 30 odd cats in them and half a dozen dogs!
I can’t tell you haw heart warming it is to see so many people care so much about animals that they gave over their homes to them - the love will never be bombed out of them.
My friend Tommy has a ‘little black book’ of these people, so the mission now was to make sure we get the supplies to them. The larger shelter were (to a level) being helped by larger NGO’s than us, so we took it upon ourselves to make sure the smaller ones got help too.
Rebecca has not stopped since the beginning of the war taking in donations and getting the food sent out to Ukraine. We have a warehouse now near Kyiv and from there we portion what we can when we can.
But it’s never enough, there are just so many.
This is where we would like to invite you to help - please.
What we need are people that can help as donations points - in other words can you go to your community and ask for food donations for the animals - every bit will help. The more people we have the more we can give out.
Please have a look here and join us.
So you can see, things have changed, but they remain the same.