When officials turned helpless in the face of a freak snowfall that hit Kyiv on March 22, hundreds of city residents stepped in as volunteers to help their unlucky peers, saving them from traffic jams, cleaning the streets or simply offering hot tea and snacks.
On the morning of March
23, Kostiantyn Zelensky, a 35-year-old family doctor, traveled across
the city to see his patient and realized that his crossover was one
of few vehicles able to move through snowdrifts. So he called traffic
police to find out where help was needed the most.
A group of people got
stuck by Nyvky Metro station the previous night. So, Zelensky packed
up his young son, some towing gear and headed to the spot. By the
afternoon he pulled about 20 cars out of various ordeals, acting on
tips from the road police.
“I drove to both seek
adventures and help people,” Zelensky explained.
A whole community of
drivers of cross over vehicles volunteered to help, posting their
contacts on specially designed sites like http://helpkyiv.org/
or existing community websites like http://offroadmaster.com.
Others picked up shovels and helped remove snow in front of entrances
to hospitals and maternity houses, dig out cars buried in snow, and
clean steps going to underground passageways.
Those who found themselves
in need of help, and those ready to lend a helping hand, hooked up
through Yandex map online, marking spots on the map to ask for help
or tell others they were available to help. By noon on March 25, the
map had more than 100 marks from Kyivans with short messages like
“Tea at Dorohozhychi” or “Shovel, Shulyavka” and phone
numbers.
“Hi, my name is Lasha. I
have my own restaurant on Podil. If you got frozen or stuck in snow
in Podil district after 22:00, don’t worry,” read one of the
offerings shared on Internet, whose author promised to welcome all in
need with free tea and cookies.
WOG, a company that owns a
network of 400 fueling stations across Ukraine, opened up a hotline
early on March 22, and offered hot food, free fuel and cell phone
topups to anyone in need. By March 25, the company reported that some
15,000 people reached out for help, a third of them in Kyiv and
region.
But volunteer help was not
always appreciated.
Olga Khudetska, a
journalist who volunteered to spend her weekend on the phone
gathering and reporting information about people in need and hooking
them up with those ready to help, said that a group of five
volunteers had a conflict with emergency service officers who
objected to them digging out stranded cars on Zhytomyr highway.
Khudetska said that one of
the volunteers, a 19-year-old medical student, said that the rescue
officers were asking for Hr 100 to pull out cars, and had a fight
with volunteers who did it for free. “The emergency officers came
and said – you are just sissies, get out of here,” Khudetska
said.
A brawl between the two
groups ended when police arrived. They filled a protocol, recording
that it was the volunteers who started the conflict, Khudetska said.
The Emergencies Ministry
denied both the conflict and allegation of bribes in its service as
baseless. “We care about our reputation,” Oleksandr Khorunzhy,
the ministry’s spokesman, told the Kyiv Post.
On Monday, the medical
student – who refused to be identified out of fear of retribution
— was still patrolling the streets. He said he continued to
volunteer because the memories are still alive of being stuck in a
horrible traffic jam on Friday night. “I saw all the hell that was
going on and decided I couldn’t just stay aside,” he said.
On March 24, the young man
saved a woman who was suffering from a heart attack in a trolleybus
that got stuck in a traffic jam, and drove her to the hospital.
Later on the same day, he took another woman to the hospital who was
about to give birth in the middle of a highway, Khudetska said.
There were certainly
people who appreciated help of volunteers very much.
Harry Lovatt, an
Australian reader of the Kyiv Post, wrote a letter to the newsroom
thanking a young volunteer who gave him and his fiancée a free lift
to the nearest Metro station on Friday night, when they believed
their chances to fly from Kyiv were equal to zero.
“His act of kindness will always be
the way I think of Kyiv,” Lovatt wrote.
“It is people who make a city, not parks or buildings, however
splendid they may be.”
Kyiv Post staff
writers Oksana Grytsenko and Olda Rudenko can be reached at
grytsenko@kyivpost.com
and rudenko@kyivpost.com
