Weekly Update #3
July 28-August 2nd, 2022
Medical Supplies
In Ukraine…
GDRT Coordinator Masha Smirnov finished delivering supplies to our partners in Kiev. This week Masha offloaded the last of her supplies to our partners in Kiev and made it back to Lviv. Tomorrow, two more GDRT team members will join her to make a visit to an orphanage in Ivano Frankovsk and deliver supplies for them as well.
Meanwhile in Medway, MA…
Julia sent six boxes to Lviv’s “Volunteers Without Borders” — the parcels weighed 150 lbs and were stocked to the brim with donated urological supplies, surgical supplies, tracheal tubes, oxygen masks, and syringes. Included in the boxes were medical gear specifically for pediatric patients. Thank you Boston’s Children Hospital!
Evacuations
Zharov and Ruslan continue to be hard at work helping evacuate people to further in Western Ukraine.
They week, they picked up a family of 5 (3 adults and 2 kids) and helped them flee from Enerhodar. Read Ruslan’s story here. The team is still waiting for paperwork to clear on the new ambulance before they can resume medical evacuations.
Deployments
In Poland…
Tesco, the famous mall-turned-shelter where GDRT once had its clinic, is under the new jurisdiction of the Polish Red Cross. Mishka reports from her deployment on the ground of what that means for the volunteers and organizations still active there.
She reports that the Red Cross have stopped all refugee registration at Tesco as of August 1st. Refugees who were staying at the shelter have been bussed out, and the center is being cleared out for at least one week while the Red Cross reorganizes and cleans. “The Tesco today is very different from the Tesco I met back in May. 3 days ago, Tesco was full of people. Today, Tesco is almost entirely empty.” Read the rest of Mishka’s story here.
Coming up….
GDRT is in partnership with another NPO and will soon announce a new deployment program for medics to work in Western Ukraine. Stay tuned for that news early next week.
In Ukraine… Happy Birthday Alex Smirnov!
On Friday we celebrated our director’s birthday. He’s out in the field right now working alongside good people, doing medical first aid from within Ukraine. They had just enough time to snap a photo of the cake, but not enough time to eat it. Alas... duty called.
