Life goes on...

We've had some feedback about what happened to us yesterday - bemusement, anger, disgust...It should be said that the Polish government and people, in general, are very supportive of refugees, e.g. ordinary families who are hosting refugee families in Krakow. However, the tent area is run by a charitable organisation called Caritas that is attached to the church, which is very powerful in Poland. There have been issues with people trafficking and Caritas doesn't like anything else but the serving of food in the tent. We knew this, but we had been doing a combination of food serving and information giving for the past few weeks without any problem and maybe got a bit complacent. We did have permission to volunteer in the tents, but not to do what we were doing, and we unfortunately ran up against the rigid application of rules and some power-crazed, bullying individuals.

Anyway, all is well. We managed not to get arrested today and a friend is helping us to get reinstated in the tent - by becoming official volunteers for Caritas, ironically. And we have managed to get unofficially linked to another UK organisation, which will give us permission to do our work, linking families with sponsors, in another refugee centre in the city. So we will actually end up in a better position to help refugees.

That work has continued, regardless of bureaucratic interference. Bob found a volunteer driver and accompanied a woman very ill with cancer and her daughter to a Visa Application Centre (VAC) in Rzesov, back towards the Ukranian border. The daughter didn't have an international passport so had to have her biometrics completed. This was a straightforward process, British officials were friendly, there were drinks and snacks, etc. But it was a 7 hours round car journey and the daughter has to make yet another journey to collect a biometric certificate in Warsaw, in the other direction and even further away.

We  continue to help families to complete visa applications and have become much speedier with the help of Polina, interpreter. We completed 2 applications for a mother and daughter in a record 1 hour 40 minutes yesterday.

Our second family, mother and 16 year old son, moved to Blacko, Pendle area, yesterday and are reported to be happy. A single young woman is moving to Burnley on 1 May, and a daughter and her father, who suffers from Parkinson's, are moving to Dorset on 2 May. I noticed, from his passport, that the father's birthday is on 1 May; he will be 80. So he was born in the second world war and he spends his 80th birthday fleeing another war...

This is the last night in our hostel, and so the last time we took the journey across the lovely Viswa River. We should have been going home tomorrow but we feel we have to stay whilst we're doing some good. 

If anyone hasn't seen it, it's worth watching, on YouTube, Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms," Ukraine Krieg, for a visual reminder of the senseless destruction and the ordinary people caught up in this war. I was reminded of a young woman who described how she and her daughter sheltered in the bath during shelling. She felt that this was the safest place in the flat and that they stood a better chance, being on the 4th floor, as the top floors were more likely to be hit and those in the basement risked being trapped by rubble.