Valentine's Day

We started the day early with an unplanned meeting of volunteers at our flat - Staszek had brought the aid van over from Poland, Mo was there to help with the heavy lifting and packing, and Franklyn turned up with cakes that he had baked, for us to take and share on the aid trip. All was going really well, until the air raid siren went off. This meant that when we got to the warehouse to load the plastic sheeting, we had to wait for over an hour in the van for the air raid alert to finish.

The nicely packed van had to be partiallly unpacked to make room for 25 rolls of plastic sheeting - fortunately, a forklift truck was on hand to load it, as each roll weighs 27kg. The plastic will be used to make 4 ply, better-insulated, temporary windows in homes that have been damaged due to Russian shelling in the Kharkiv area.
We're spending our first night in Brovary, Kyiv, with a young couple who distribute aid to previously occupied villages in the Chernihiv area. Because we left home later than planned we arrived in Kyiv well after dark. We were happy to see that most of the city lights seemed to be on. Despite Putin's repeated attempts to destroy the electricity infrastructure in Ukraine, it keeps being repaired and somehow keeps going.

Tomorrow morning we'll leave on the next leg of our journey.

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