The Calls Home. NYT Russian Troops cell Phone Calls in Ukraine

It is a cancer within me. I cant un-see it, un-want it, or banish it. I made it mine and so it is. 

Droog Shelter Alexandria Ukraine late April 2022

I suppose it is a cancer of a conscious that won't let rest. Dismiss it as too far away, and not mine to feel parental guidance for. It's another place, other people and even that isn't a clear enough choice to eradicate it. Preserve the self for the necrotic within.

Triggers. Todays was a full two page list of the collected phone calls tapped by Ukraine as Russian soldiers called home. Will America read them? Will they share my disgust and dismay? Can a cancer have a community of witnesses to grieve as one? Isn't humanity supposed to have kicked in by now. Like sometime in the tweens after AD occurred? 

A street dog in Ukraine. A small act of kindness within a country at war.

How are we still so tolerant of such aggression and egregious acts? I'm going to assume that these phone calls are legit, and I am going to say that I, from the little I saw when I was there, believe them. I just cannot feel much more than shame and empathy. Shame that madmen still walk among us and no one will step up and take down that plane before it hits its target and annihilates another thousand innocent civilians, and empathy that two countries children have to fight, die and witness what war turns people into for that same madman's ego.

Where are you going to fall in the course of history that marks our species? What cancer eats at you?

For more on this see Uproxx

For The New York Times article go here.

For more on my trip to Ukraine please see these previous articles;

The best recap I have on my experience is the podcast with Brendan Howard, The Veterinary Business Success Show. 

Recognition, Resolution and Restitution blog

Better Left Undone

Purgatory

Walking Away

The Faces and The Ghosts, Coming Back from Ukraine

The Compound

My personal note,, to those I left behind,, two and four legged,, I think about you everyday. My heart still beats within Ukraine. I will be back.. there is too much left undone.

Recognition, Resolution, and Restitution

 

One of the few rescues who got out. We brought her to Romania.
She has since found a home.

I had hoped I would be at a different place then here. And yet I am not. I am still stuck. Mucking and muddling through the aftermath of a trip I was so compelled to journey upon. I was hoping to make a difference. Assist a place so fraught with injustice. Throw a fist in the air to provide a whisper of defiance to a place I have never been before, for a people I do not know.

The Ukraine story, my story within theirs, still nags and gnaws on inside of me.

Here’s where I am, and here’s what I didn’t know I needed to start to try get away from it all.

Sandbags and steel barricades. They are everywhere.

Validation. I needed this. It might be shameful to admit. (Heck, if it is I am ok with that). I needed to not feel so alone. It came from two voices today. One, Dr. Sarah, who felt as desperate to go and help as I did. And two, Dr. David who arrived at the group I was with a week after I left, and described it, his experience with them, (not even the Ukraine war debacle) as; “the worst experience of my life.” He has been a veterinarian for 37 years. I found myself apologizing to him. Sorry for what he had been through. Sorry that I couldn’t have helped discourage him from being there. I can feel his weighty regret. He, like me, wanted to go more than our due diligence in trusting commandos with nothing to lose brought us. He, just like I, was content to clean the kennels of the dogs that the egomaniacs who had retrieved them would not do. Silly how we were so easily and eagerly recruited to came care for the animals because there was no one with any veterinary training there to help, only to be trusted with kennel duty. For me, I was more intent on being useful than being disposed. It seemed from day one of my arrival in Ukraine that my two options for being a part of the ramshackle team was clean cages/walk dogs/try to lay low, or, be headed with the engine crew to drive all over Ukraine on a rescue mission. He, like me, feels misappropriated, cheated, and deceived to have come so far to clean kennels, while watching them die of disease and isolation in dark cramped cages. I feel most closely connected to the animals I was so intent upon helping because of the solitary time I spent with them. Regardless of my medical prowess my contentment, despair, and painful burdened heart lies most solely upon walking away from those animals. I am bitter, burdened and speaking out for them. I will not be able to find my answers to the nagging puzzle still in pieces around me, but, now I can share my story with the others who passed through after me. Revenge for the eyes of those needful, displaced souls I can no longer be walking near.

Jeffery. One of the few to get out.

Resolve. There is none of that here. So, I fall back into recognition. I keep finding myself chewing on the days, the quiet with a dog on a leash, walking, walking, walking. And the faces I will never see again. The eyes of those faces that I dream of. Want for, and beckon to.

Mischa, the compound kitty. I loved her, she needed us. I needed her.
I spent much of my days just holding her. 

Today I found a community. It was the first time I could talk about my trip and have it resonate with someone else. I can say that I needed them, and feel great comfort in them also needing me. A community of more than a singular being who still tries to settle for the dust that won’t fall. I have found three other people, (maybe four? Or, even five?) who went just to be helpful. Just like me. They put their lives into a precarious place for the pure humanitarian effort that is so desperately needed. Just like me. Three other people who went because we were silly enough to believe that we were needed just because we were told so. We all asked for references, a call from the one before us to help settle the voices within that we were doing the right thing with the people who shared our view on this preposterous invasion and had the gumption to not only say so, but to do. All of us received the same response. None of us were given each other’s contact info beforehand. We found each other afterwards. After we left. Came home. All of us struggling to come to terms with our time there. All still reeling from the experiences we had. All ostracized by the group we put our lives in the hands of. I can’t express how consoling having this community is. There is something inexplicably horrible about loneliness. Loneliness with a secret no one can digest. A rumination of fear-based failures from a faraway place that isn’t relatable, nor comparable. War is the most atrocious act of mankind. War upon fellow humans just because you believe your might is more than their spines can withstand is unforgivable. The weak, poor and defenseless who get caught in between, that, well that is enough to motivate foreigners to your shores. And yet there is this survivors remorse, this silent pain of abandonment, and the futility that seemed to have come from risking so much.

My husband doesn’t understand. I can’t share this with him. It is still too raw, and my actions too selfish for him to make room for empathy on what that trip cost me, never mind him. He thought it foolish from the start. Empathy with a fool is permission to repeat. He wants me to see the experience in valuations from the economist’s eye. The weight of one life and the cost it requires. “Is one dog from Ukraine worth the thousands of dollars it cost you to care for them? Is it worth it when they still cannot get out? When 25 out of the 30 puppies that were brought to the compound died of parvo simply because they were rounded up, caged together and never vaccinated?” No, the answer is no. I wasn’t brought there to practice 30 years of medicine that I was armed with. I was brought there to be a pawn in a delusionist's collection. I was pled to so that I could be a talking point for more social media fuel. The lives can’t be counted as not valuable, not risk-worthy, not my problem to solve.

The first euthanasia I had in Ukraine. Heart failure.

If grief is part of this recovery I am past the heartbreak of not being able to bring the dogs and cats I helped smuggle into Romania. I am in anger. Anger that I wasted my time, watched those dogs die from sheltering, caging, and followers. Angry that this is the only place I have left to put the pieces. It’s not good enough that the wolf and the grizzly bear are safe and out of Ukraine. It’s not good enough that I came home safely. There is not a place I can shelve this and go on.

Can I continue to carry the stories of the faces I left behind? Can I find the will to put the pieces back into some assemblage of peaceful acceptance, or, am I at the place where restitution is the only resolution?  

Coughing all night. He just coughed all night. Antibiotics, sedation and a full grooming shave down. He was brought to Romania. In a shelter now.

I said once to a fellow, equally fried veterinary colleague, "yeah, I get it. I am so exhausted by the sheer volume of need, and the frustration of my inability to meet the demand that I went off to a war to try to feel better about myself, and my current place within vetmed." Maybe the muck is my own to own, and accept? Maybe there isn't such a thing as a peaceful recognition, nor resolve. And, then again, maybe the restitution only exists within?

Better Left Undone. When Action Breeds Contrition

 

Everyone else guessed it, I had dismissed it as foolishly foreshadowing. A ruse. A game with no clear odds favoring one or the other. When at face value it was so commonplace, that I should have seen myself as the typical ‘subject’ and counted myself as a loss before leaving the gate. Or, to put it literally, crossing the border out of Ukraine.

It has become my form of PTSD. I can’t leave it, them, or most of what I encountered, behind. It’s become a haunting. It’s been a month since I got back home. Twice as long as I was there, and, still,, I can’t let them go. I can’t let almost any of it go. Worst, most painful of all, the animals. Not their medical stuff. The stuff so routine I dismiss it as collateral damage to pet ownership, domestication of the species. The medical needs of the animals struggling to survive in a war, all look like the medical needs of animals the globe over. No, it’s not those. It has become my lack of belief that they were better off after our acts of intervention. Our pulling them from the home they knew, whether it still stands any longer, or not. I am not sure if my efforts, my time, the efforts of those who are there has helped the pets we intervened upon made a better difference for them. They are now caged, full time, and stuck in purgatory limbo inside Ukraine. There is little hope they can be moved out. Little hope they can be adopted once moved. The numbers of pets in need is so great that the ocean just swallows them and grows a little bigger with each soul it consumes. With that burden, on top of the rest of the burdens, I have given them all names. The names they never had the time to be troubled with before. The designation of belonging when the concept of that left permanence and citizenship. I was a visitor. An overnight guest. They, the animals I was brought over to care for, they were residents. If their parents hadn’t deemed them worthy enough for a collar, a name tag, or even a bus ticket out, why would I give them names? Who was I to claim them? Baggage leads to expectations and I had no plans to stay longer than the pre-purchased round-trip ticket date designated. Ukraine was set up/expected to be, just a brief stay. A substitute teacher venue. Arrive, deliver a little vet-med grub hub style, meet/greet-guh-bye. I’m an expert vacationer, world-traveler, veterinarian on the fly. Surely this wasn’t going to be a big challenge. Nope, not for me. Indoctrination at the Academy lasted two weeks. Those were the longest two weeks of my life. That set the bar. I didn’t quit then. Why would I quit now? Sea year lasted (you got it) a year. Alone on a big cold, ocean for weeks on end. Nope that didn’t wash me away. The Academy, vet school both 4 years. Hard work, lots of grit and very little mercy for weakness and meekness. I know what serving a sentence voluntarily feels like. I can do it, bide my time, count the days, survive a great unknown. I can even make it memorable, dare I say, enjoyable. Ukraine from the outside, at the beginning was an adventure in serving a people whose country was so inconceivably violated. I was going to have my protests heard by volunteering to help their plight, vet-med style.

Four weeks later they have names. Five thousand miles away from me, and I give them names. It's madness. I have slipped in, gone all Rosemary’s Baby and become consumed with faces I will probably never see again.

I’m stuck. I now understand why/how it happens. Being here and feeling you should be there. The people who are there, willingly, volunteering, surrendering their life, the lives of those who love them from their home countries, they don’t get it. They don’t understand the compulsion to go there and the stickiness of wanting to stay. There is no allure to being there. No magical beauty that ties you to Ukraine. No amazing food, culture, architecture, luxurious accommodations, attractions, music, art, visitors Bucket List items for natural, manmade or otherwise wonders of the world. There are indisputably familial ties. Ancestral influences, but for those of us lacking that it is inconceivable anyone would go there wanting/willingly, and even more unfathomable that you would go back.

But, disaster, plight, travesty of any kind serves a void. A place of emptiness that can be filled of one’s own accord. You can become the answer to your own prayers, and fill a need not challenged by candidates en mass. There is a motley crew, and I use that term appropriately of volunteers cycling in and out of Ukraine. A small collective of die-hards who cross in and out with such frequency that the obvious realities of Ukraine have been dissolutioned/diluted away. There is a missing reality to their opinions and observations of living inside Ukraine while it is at war and the rest of our impressions of how that might feel. They have consciously, or, subconsciously decided to overlook it. They are able to let the air raid sirens come and go without pause. They work, live, fulfill purposes inside a country that I think has swallowed their self-preservation skepticism. I say that not as a point of judgement or contention, I say that as a character trait I now understand, identify with and consider re-succumbing to. I am debating what ‘going back” might look like. I am talking, tip-toeing, back into getting closer to that war, again.

There is unfinished work there. Nagging, gnawing, imprisoned memories of stories merely witnessed and not truly improved upon. There is need. That yearning, compulsion, despair in knowing, need is like its own addiction. The secret-shameful kind you cannot rationally explain away to those not bitten by it. The one insane thing that keeps that core group of crew, all running from something unmet at home, into a place full of so much stress and chaos. It is the explanation to too much of the fuels they consume in rabid proportions; Coka-Cola in liter jugs, chocolate, cigarettes, adrenaline. The diet of no sleep, no real meals, no real time off, no slowing in the tidal waves of need/requests/cruelty/neglect/abuse/injuries/devastation is a recipe for suicidal decisions. Why would any of us want to go there? Want to go back there? And not be able to explain it to others? I’m going back someday. Maybe not this month, next month, or (good Lord not while Russkies still traipse about pillaging and plundering), but I now understand the affliction, and the quiet shame in admitting there is a problem with that.

For all of the haunting, the nagging, the pulling apart the insides in silence I thought my one last act to gain some closure might be to get the animals I could back to a place where I could provide a happy ending from the perpetual purgatory. Even that has been met with resistance to the place of impossibility. The CDC won’t have it without lying. The adrenaline junky with the ego so fierce his temper is the only fuel he can’t medicate away, and the vet who wants to work for a paying client at the cost of a caged pet still in purgatory and I am here ruminating. Still. Compartmentalizing to the point of justification in some small, albeit unsuccessful, attempt to quiet the faces and break the bonds of the chains I cannot excuse away as kindness.

I need to stop... although I am not sure that it's not just contrition.. find another task to throw my heart into.. see if I can resurrect a soul I am not sure I left behind in Ukraine. 

For more information on the people and pets of Ukraine please see my previous blogs. To all of those struggling to find answers within the challenges of the places their heart strings lie I hope you find peace there, even if the world around you cannot.

purgatory

Purgatory is that place between places. The place where bad outweighs otherness. "The place of temporary suffering," as Webster notes. It is the word I used in Ukraine when the group asked me what my thoughts on being there were? I said "purgatory." When I did I got back puzzled faces? I had to define it for them. They were Romanian, Ukrainian, or long time UK military. It wasn't a word any of them used, knew, or could place in the reference I had given. I had used it because it was the best word my mind could find to express my deep concerns for the plight of the animals I saw there. The animals we were all taking care of.  The animals we were all risking our lives for. But now that I am home I think it defined the whole mass of the entire experience.

I was reading the New York Times, (one of my bucket list items from COVID), and in it I saw that there is a new series by Stanley Tucci (something about food? I think? and Italy?). It caught my eye as I have developed a serious crush on him. On the 10 hour plane ride home from Bucharest to Dulles I watched Supernova. It is an intimate love story between Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth, who are quite possibly the sexiest over 50 duo to land on the big screen. Their story, their ability to capture their characters, draw you within them, and keep you suspended within hopeful curiosity to a story that can't possibly have a "happily ever after" captivates. Watching that film in the dark, seated in 23D, (middle row, who booked this seat for me??!!), was one of the few escapes from purgatory that trip permitted me. It's a story that pits dying within the despair imbued within trying to live through the saying goodbye. It is two men destined for one another and dealing with the end to their love story on their own terms. I got lost in it. I cried. I cried buckets for them and to purge my purgatory sentence. It was the beginning of my onboard movie marathon. The "jump in and drown yourself in tear-jerkers" to see if you can just purge yourself of the ocean you are drowning within. Next up with 2 hours down and 8 to go, was, Land. Robin Wright putting herself in the middle of the harsh, brutal, winter woods of northern Colorado to be mercilessly faced with dying alone at the unmerciful hand of nature she was excessively ill equipped to face solo. It almost appears as if she has a death wish she dares to claim her. It is a bit of a love story with forgiving herself for the life changing, heartbreaking series of horrible losses she has faced. It is also a bit of a finding yourself as you cannot permit suicide based on a promise she made with her only remaining close relative, her sister. It is about accepting loss as you find out who you are and what you are made of. An intervention based on facing survival alone. My favorite quote, "only a person who has never known hunger would chose to die of starvation." Can one outwill themselves from their own purgatory? Robin did. Why can't the rest of us? Specifically at this moment, why can't I?

   

Hour 6 was yet another chick flick meant to wet your face. I rode that horse into running the tear well dry. I had hoped I could cry it all out before I got home. Last move, "Eat, Pray, Love." 'Cause why not watch a movie about another woman with a lost purpose who dumps, runs, journeys far away and tries to find herself within the muddling, meandering, and muck? (Why didn't I just have a Minions marathon? Laugh that crap out? I always feign to my feelings. Do I always choose cry over laugh? Glutton). 

I was shocked to hear an NPR news interview driving to work about how it is believed crossing a large pool of water cleans all your woos. I swear it was true for me to. Something about crossing the Atlantic, crying through three movies, 6 plus hours of tear-jerkers and I felt better. Here's my entry from my journal as we trekked along at 30,000 feet above the great big blue..

"Maybe it is this wretched ocean? The Atlantic Ocean. (I spent a decade sailing this ocean, it's a legitimate adjective in my hands). Where so many years were spent washing away the time. Suspended life while the world still turns and others live theirs. A parallel existence with the same measure of time, and yet, mine was stuck. Away at sea is stuck. A purgatory of its own, with the exception of being so busy with the work at hand you are too tired, too focused on catching rest while you can, that you cannot see the purgatory for the absence of self. Going to sea is an endless cycle of home, push play and begin to live, to pause-pack a seabag and head offshore. Play-pause-play-pause-repeat. The continuum you cannot fit your life into off season. Big gaps of time passing with the currents and tidal changes of the oceans you cross. And now I cross it again, this time headed home, and as I do I just feel better. washed clean. Absolved. Christened. Baptised. Home calls and the ocean absorbs the tears of loss, abandonment of those faces I cannot suppress, nor bury, nor leave behind. Maybe we are square now? You the ocean, and me the lost soul bobbing back to dry land.

Even if I don't feel like I am wearing that cape of despair the Ukraine trip brought me to the same degree, bending under the weight of the pain, suffering, despair and dismal chance of any of that changing anytime soon, that cloak isn't so weighty any longer. The ocean crossing with the movies of other misplaced/lost souls seeking validation/acceptance and inner forgiveness seemed to bring some resolve. But the perception of purgatory now having a place on the map, a feeling of tangible faces with names and unknown, unsettling possible futures, the sights, the smells, the sounds, that kind of purgatory still lives on Ukraine. Defining it is only a matter of finding your place within its borders. Crying your way home to buy your way back into heaven is the cost of a plane ticket without sleep. 

For more on the trip to the Ukraine to help animals displaced by the Russian invasion please see my previous blogs.

If you would like to help the animals of Ukraine please consider adopting a pet in need in your back yard. Or, donate to these amazing organizations;

Sache Foundation in Romania

Big Dog Ranch Rescue

The faces of Ukraine;

Walking Away. Can Empty Handed Be More Painful Than Heavy Hearted?

Walking away. 

For those of us who choose to travel abroad with the hope of helping, do something meaningful, and, influence an unjust reality, it is deeply painful to have to walk away empty handed. 

I wanted, upon my return home, to feel as if I had done more. Make a more meaningful impact.  I quite honestly want to take them ALL away. Pack up every little face I saw, all of those fearful eyes, bowed defeated heads, and hungry souls, and stuff them into my carry-on luggage and just head west. Cross the landscapes of the safe Nato countries skirting the western borders. Hop that big pond with our own 747 and fly the coop Big-time-America style. Just bust outta Ukraine and be done. Dust on our heels, blue skies ahead. It’s the only real tangible hope for them. The only way I can stop the suffering and save their lives. And I can’t. I don’t accept inability nor denial. It is not in my vocabulary. I didn’t go so far away to just bear witness. I went to change fates. Move trajectories make happy endings from a war. It didn’t happen. I feel defeated and guilty for departing. For leaving them behind. Abandoned and in the same predicament I found them. 

I hadn't traveled this far, 5,000 miles from home, with three days of traveling into Ukraine to see Droog shelters massively overcrowded 500 head count, and just witness the problems there. No, I came to influence them. Surely I couldn't solve many, maybe a tiny pet on a tiny scale, but, I wanted to try. Me and my ever present operative word, TRY. It just doesn't feel like enough right now. Isn't always enough,, but, it is sometimes all you have.

Two Ukrainian rescued dogs out for the evening walk.
I miss them every single day.

For more on the Ukraine trip please see my previous blogs.

The Little Things, Part One, Passport Paranoia.

Everyone is asking for snippets. Little pieces of the far away trip to share. The stocking stuffers to add flavor and texture to a place you have to live to begin to digest. Ukraine is just like that. Something you have to live, but no place anyone should want to go, at least for right now. 

kept in my passport keeper

There is the omnipresent pervasive black cloud over Ukraine. It exists, or so it seemed to me, over the entire country from the first to my last minute there. True the skies grow darker and the cloud cover closer the closer you move East, but it manifests from the clear skies at the border of Romania you leave from and arrives as you cross into Ukraine. (The borders are oddly like that,, that snippet I will share at another time). I asked myself for a long while whether this was just placebo effect. Maybe I was just imagining it? But, on the way home to Romania my carmate admitted, in fact she asked me, if I had noticed it too?

There is an overarching sense of despair, of sadness, a gloominess you cannot wipe away. Sleep away, or awaken from. Even in the off moments of peaceful aloneness it is there. Every step of every minute of your life has to be thought out. That in itself is excruciating and exhausting. At minimum you have to plan an exit for every possible scenario. How fast could you run? What do you need to take? Where would you go and how would you get there? (Remember there might not be roads, or gas, or open roads). What would you do if they (Russian troops) are at your door? Knocking, Invading, Intimidating or Interrogating? What documents do you have? Are they with you at all times? (Let me talk about passport paranoia).

one of the tokens that I carried with me to Ukraine

So I will start here..

passport paranoia. I bought a travel purse before leaving. The kind that goes around your neck, hangs at the chest. Multiple pockets to hold things. A drawstring to cinch higher or lower based on the threat and quickness for access. It was never out of my sight, save for traveling. We keep the passports in the dashboard for quick passing to the checkpoint guards stationed about every 30 minutes, and at every major town, and every key place of transport, military base, communication tower, and not so inconspicuously hidden troop bunker. I don't speak the language, and I am a visitor. My USA passport is the one thing anchoring my safety in this warzone. Yes, I guarded it with my life. There is no embassy here, and no way to call out for rescue or retrieval. The group I was with had lost all sense of passport paranoia. They were far more comfortable with fate as it might fall than I. There were many times I heard one of them inquiring as to which vehicle, or when, they had misplaced theirs? 

not so sexy,, but a needed accessory...

This was a common theme for me. Trying to grow more comfortable with the war and nullify its impact by the number of sands that have passed through the hourglass. Two weeks there wasn't long enough to soothe or ease the passport paranoia. It was just one of the many I entered and left Ukraine with. The rest of the group, who had been there for months, or multiple trips back and forth, to and from had outgrown their passport paranoia. The newness, the risk, the danger, and the paranoia had been misplaced some miles/days/weeks back. Mine remained overhead, the Linus storm of grey over the neophyte clinging a cheap no brand purse close to the heart but clung to nonetheless.

Please see my other Ukraine posts.. and please remember to hope,, you can never surrender tha,, #peaceinUkraine

The Faces, and the Ghosts. Coming Back From Ukraine.

The panes keep flipping. One after another, almost every single one a snapshot of a face that haunts me like the ghost of a departed too soon relation. Those faces. The innocence, despair, fear and immense sea of need contained within their little skinny souls. 

Momma dog and Stewie.. both equally adorable.

I see them as this: tiny souls. Lost and dependent. Expecting nothing, the same as they have known their whole lives, and yet optimistic and hopeful. Some of the dogs took days to decompress when they arrived. Days of huddling, hiding and running through the fates that lay ahead quietly in their heads. I feel as I know them all. Some hidden primitive calling from an ancestry that binds us even if we have just met. These pets cause me, I want to believe, others too, to melt. They were my singular focus. My only task and the compromise that made all of the rest of the obvious, and not-so-obvious hardships worthwhile. 

Ukraine, as I will remember it, is an old soul, built on organic gatherings. Time honored traditions that don’t give way to modern amenities. People live off their land. The earth is black with rich fertile soil. So dense it cements to your shoes, holds you fast to its grip. Women, the majority of which are old, bent and bowed to the earth they pay gratitude to. They are subdued, embedded, artifacts of this place. Long layered worn long skirts. Cardigan-coated, scoliosis spines topped with home-sewn clothes. Weighty, permanent, and unwaivered inside a war they will persevere through. Their fortitude is the constant of this country. They may have to live under another mans rule, lose their flag to a neighboring bully, but, they will never lose their traditions, their ages old agrarian practices, and they will never surrender their soil which blossoms forth food, flowers, and the stories of all of the women before them. The elderly who are still here are poor. Dirt poor. They tidy up their tiny quaint unembellished homes each morning and each evening. Small handless brooms held at knee level, sweep, sweep, sweep. The dirt is pushed away for a few hours only to crawl back in with the breeze. Nothing stays clean here. Nothing shines. Nothing is made, brought, or found here that wasn’t made before 1970. 

Bunkers and Checkpoints.

The fruit trees dominate. Pruned to a twisted spine, with blunted arms, the trees for fruit are forced to reach for the sun, but never allowed to outstretch their arms in glory. And yet they flower in explosions of white and pink. The afternoon breezes blowing kisses of snowflake petals. It is this beautiful as the country gets forced to live less. Less time to read, to relax, less food, almost no available gas. Less television, internet and access to the world outside of this war living its daily life and working for a brighter future of better. Colleges are struggling to stay open. Malls, and shopping centers are trying to keep entertainment and distraction of teenage goods and meet ups, open. A go-cart center still opens at 10 am, lines up the carts, and awaits the boredom of children to convince their parents to spend cash they need to bank.

Deworming puppies

The banks are open when days seem bright. They shutter when the air alarms take most of the day. They just shake their heads with “no” when you inquire as to why banking hours now permit half-days and full days of closing. There are long lines at the bank ATM machines. Most, like the gas stations are merely closed. A sign indicating an absence of indefinite length. 

For me, there was a cloud that found me once I crossed into the border. It stays the whole time you are there. The rest of the group have been inside long enough to have forgotten it. It remains, like Linus, looming above, grey/black turbulent and daunting, but like an old chronic ailment, it gets ignored by the events of the day, the tripping stones and obstacles that take up every small task. Pushed back into the subconscious where it makes its den and waits for a crack in the armor to invade and metastasize.

One of the homes I stayed at. 
She lives alone with her cats and dogs and loves her garden.

My friend had organized this trip. We had been talking about how much the wars existence, and our easy lives had burdened us. When people asked why I was considering this trip I answered honestly that I felt ‘compelled’ to go. Driven to add my voice, my anger and my actions of defiance to the pleas of a country that was once part of a dynasty and the parents wanted their kids back, even if they desired to keep their independence. Wouldn’t I want someone from halfway around the world to do the same for me? Shouldn’t every other human being with means be joining the crusade? If only to protect their children’s independence somewhere down the road? Maybe the news of a country being invaded, forced to die or surrender, be so inconceivable and unacceptable that all nations and all people stand up and just say “NO!”? I will not permit it? 

Arrival Cluj Romania airport.
One personal bag and 4 large luggage suitcases of medications and preventatives.

This protest, internal proclamation has the same fervor and intensity as my deep conviction to protect the animals stuck, and injured in the cross fire. Not all who fled took their pets. Not all who could leave with them did. Somewhere left with friends, or in shelters, no doubt with the hope that the conflict would be won in days, perhaps weeks, and they could return to the life that they had led in Ukriane. The shelters are burgeoning with animals. So overcrowded that they are stacked on top of each other. The weak cower in the back, hiding and huddled into tiny shivers of fur. No face, no identity. Just hoping to get a piece of the meal at its next delivery. Competition for all basic needs is reduced to brutal will and dominate strength. Very few dogs are neutered which promulgates and perpetuates the aggression, the dominance. A few females are spayed, many are not, therefore when one, or all, go into heat the hysteria climbs even higher. The idea of adding pregnancies, puppies and even more mouths to feed, souls to assuage, and frailty to protect is the chasm of the fault line that allowed the contents of my heart to fracture. There is no attempt to slow the tide here, just a pessimistic acceptance that it will most definitively worsen before there is hope for it to improve. 

Sergei sleeps at our feet during dinner.
Likely the luckiest puppy in Ukraine.

Where many countries across the globe are making humanitarian efforts to offer passage, placement and assistance to Ukrainian refugees, most are making precautionary measures to deny animals sanctuary within. The rules, the paperwork and permits, and fear of the flood have caused the numbers within the countries few shelters to explode. To care for these animals has caused internal personnel exhaustion, desperation and corruption. The opportunities to divert dog food, supplies and medications has caused most shelters to seek food from all available options. Feeding has been leftovers, some fresh, most not. It is survival at every level and consequentially the weakest will be the last to be fed or defended. 

I called her Sunshine, the others called her Piglet,,

It brings me back to those faces. The ones who have been treated like cattle. Moved by force and packs or herds. Collected in the last minutes of an eminent invasion and sent to be housed in another place that is fraught with fear and lacking in safety from fights, food access of personal preferences or liberties. These are the ones I am drawn to. The ones so overlooked and so ignored they have surrendered. The ones who make you melt with them as they learn what affection feels like and let go of the armor that they resorted to. These are the faces I filled my time, my head and my heart with. These are the faces that are burning inside of me asking to be refueled again with. These are the faces that would compel me back into a war zone with worsening conditions and very likely a death sentence to surrender, willingly or not to. Can a face call you to your own demise? It is calling me to consider it, and consuming me to submit to it. Again. 

This girl needed more than I could give her. She was still so happy to see me...
one of the many I fear I left behind,,, and in need of rescue.

Please see my previous posts about my humanitarian efforts in Ukraine.

More faces to reminisce over.