Please read this if you want to continue receiving our blog - or not...

The Ukrainian flag was flying in the sunrise in Khmelnytskyi as we headed home. We heard 2 air raid alerts on our 4-hour drive back to Lviv and, later, became aware that Russia had fired scores of missiles into Ukraine, targeting Kyiv, Lviv and Odesa in the west, and cities elsewhere, including Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, in one of its largest aerial bombardments.

The United Nations high commissioner for human rights has released a count of the number of civilian casualties in Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine, so far, saying that 6,884 people are known to have died, including 429 children, between 24 February 2022 to 26 December 2022, although the actual figure is likely to be “considerably higher.”

So we don't feel that we can do anything else now, or into next year, other than keep on doing what we're doing: sourcing and delivering aid to where it's most needed, and raising money to buy essential items, including wood burning stoves, calor gas stoves, building materials and anything else that people tell us they need.

We have been keeping a blog almost daily, since we travelled from Trawden to Krakow on 20 March. We would never have imagined that we would have moved to live in Ukraine in June, and that we would still be here at the end of 2022. I certainly would not, in my wildest imaginings, have thought that I (not a lover of driving at the best of times!) would have been driving an aid van in a country at war. But now, I also couldn't imagine doing anything else.

We are so grateful for all the support from people at home, in Canada (my other home) and our friends in Poland. The support has come in donations, an aid van! (Paszki dla Ukrainy) - and also comments and feedback to our posts. We tend to send the posts out to a lot of people because we're aware that not everyone can access the blog site that easily, and also we want to keep the situation in Ukraine alive. However, after 10 months, we feel that not everyone will want to keep receiving our posts.

So this is your opportunity to let us know! We're planning to send this blog post out to everyone we can think of - if you don't want to keep receiving it, just say so. Or you may access the blog site independently at trawden4ukraine.blogspot.com. If we don't hear from you, we might keep sending it in any case. 🙂

On our way home we stopped off at the same still frozen lake (which we now know is a river dam in a village called Ozerna) that we visited on our outward journey. People were still fishing through holes that we saw are hacked into the ice with an axe. Bob said that he has never walked on a frozen lake before and wanted to do so. I didn't want him to but he did anyway, tentatively at first, and then full of confidence.

And he came back! So we can go on another aid run in a few days.

If you can help, please donate in the usual way:

1. Open PayPal and, when asked for name of payee or email, enter trawden4ukraine@hotmail.com. 

2. Use the collection box in Trawden community shop. 

Thank you.