Urgent Help for Kherson Residents

Aim: I'd like to go to Kherson for ~6 weeks over Xmas & NY, to help the residents recover from occupation and the destruction of infrastructure.

I'd like to go to Kherson over the Xmas period, and I'm asking for your help again, please. Of course, I know that nearly everyone is dealing with unprecedented financial pressures, and you were all extremely generous in March/April/May for my first trip (when I drove 13,600 miles, made 48 border crossings and evacuated about 130 refugees to Poland and the UK), but I'm asking for your support again so that I can go to help the residents of Kherson to deal with the hardest part of the year.

Kherson is in a dreadful state after the bad guys destroyed the water, electricity and communal heating infrastructure before they left (pure evil). No running water means no flushing toilets. No heating means wood fires, ... if you can find, cut and carry the wood, and if you have a log burner, otherwise you can only have a fire and cook your food outdoors. The city, pre-invasion, had a population of 283,000. Of course, many have left but those that remain are in desperate need of humanitarian help.

My highest aspiration is that I can help the engineers doing the infrastructure repair work. However, there are a great many barriers to my achieving that including that the Ukrainian military will only allow access to areas that have been cleared of mines, which is of course a very slow process.

It's highly likely I'll end up doing something else, but I will try to use my engineering skills to maximum effect, repairing anything that's broken, that will benefit the most Kherson residents, or indeed those elsewhere if needed.

If nothing else becomes available, I'll get involved in this: UNHCR humanitarian aid has arrived but it needs to be distributed within the city and to surrounding villages. Food and water being the most important (and heavy). Also, some of the dedicated, hard-working volunteers in Ukraine will, very deservedly, be returning home for Xmas and I'd like to help fill the gaps they leave behind. As a lesser priority, I'll also help any animals I come across that need it.

The demand, in Ukraine, for portable generators has gone through the roof. I'm trying to negotiate with suppliers of new, reconditioned and used ones to see if I can get a few donated, or cheap. I might end up spending some of your donated funds on those.
If I can raise sufficient funds I'll go from mid December to the beginning of February. With the experience of my first trip under my belt I can make this trip "better, faster, cheaper". Firstly, I'll aim to avoid accommodation costs as much as possible. The Ukrainians are incredibly welcoming to volunteers and sofa-surfing is likely to be an option in many places. ... but I'll be taking my winter mountaineering clothes & expedition sleeping bag in case I need to sleep in the car at any point (also, the car does have a heater!). It will cost about £500 for fuel to get me there and back so, conservatively, I reckon a budget of £2000 will be ample for this entire trip, which isn't very much and could be achieved with small donations from many people. Any funds remaining on my return, I will donate to the UK's DEC Ukraine appeal.

Please donate here on Crowdfunder, or if you prefer another way of donating we can do that too. Just let me know. ... and thank you in advance. I really appreciate it, as will the residents of Kherson.

You can read about the conditions for volunteers in Lviv and for the people and animals of Kherson from my conversations and these blog excerpts written by Bob & Fiona, two retired UK social workers from Up North (somewhere!) ... who have been driving aid around Ukraine for months in their campervan, I think.

"We're still here..we have just been to Kherson oblast and Mykolayiv. It's really grim there. No heating, water or electricity. They need specific things. Bringing van would be best. Let's talk soon. We also don't have electricity or heating just now back in Lviv. It's cold....we drove back today on the snow covered roads....no gritting here. Put winter tyres on. Let's talk when we have WiFi."

"We are in a small convoy with two Polish vans, delivering aid to areas in Mykolayiv and Kherson that have recently been liberated. The Russians have left total destruction in some places. They have also left behind countless mines and trip wires, which are still causing deaths. Many places have no running water, the Russians having blown up main water pipes. In fact, we stayed in a family's home last night, with the 3 Polish van drivers, on the fifth floor of an apartment block. The whole area has not had drinking water for 5 months. Up to 1 month ago there was salt water from the nearby estuary for flushing the toilet, etc, but then the Russians mined those pipes. Now, people have no running water. We only spent one night there and experienced how difficult it was....imagine months. The destination of the aid in our van was an almost completely destroyed village, south of Mykolaiv. We were taken to the drop-off point, a 40 minutes drive down an unmade road, by yet another amazingly brave Ukrainian woman. 'S' is a volunteer, mostly supporting the army. She is usually on the road 24/7. "

"We picked the stoves up from the south east of Kyiv and then drove through a snowy landscape, halfway back the way we came yesterday, to transfer the stoves to an another aid van. These are volunteers who will take the stoves right to the new frontline in Kherson."

And here's a link to their excellent blog (quickly gets to the point). https://trawden4ukraine.blogspot.com/

p.s. these are the T&Cs of this Crowdfunder Project...

• Platform fees: 0%
• Transaction fees: 2.4% +£0.20 +VAT per transaction
• Funding type: Keep what you raise
• Target: £2,000
• Closing date: 20/01/2023