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Evacuations go differently. Sometimes everything goes smoothly, according to plan. Sometimes it is difficult, with unexpected and unpleasant problems. It happened more than once that only the REB saved the crew and the people we were evacuating from the inevitable.
However, sometimes volunteers face situations that are both funny and sinful.
On the evening of January 07, 2024, Russians attacked the center of the village of Velykyi Burluk with S-300 missile systems. As a result, among other things, the building of the district psychiatric hospital was damaged.
So the next morning, three evacuation crews of the Volunteer-68 NGO together with two crews of the Proliska Humanitarian Mission went almost two hundred kilometers away to rescue the hospital's patients.
Burluk means “swamp” or “mud” in Tatar, and the Velykyi Burluk community includes Malyi, Nyzhnyi, Novyi, Serednyi (formerly Bolshyi) Burluks in addition to Velykyi Burluk. However, it was not the mud or mud that initially made this difficult task difficult, but the twenty-degree frost and broken roads, or rather the lack of them. In addition, several vehicles had broken down heaters, so staying in them was more like a not entirely voluntary test of survival.
The second complication, and one might say a bit phantasmagorical, was that after the Russians attacked the village, the patients somehow miraculously got so much alcohol that they had to carry not only the lying down in the evacuation vehicles.
Another challenge for the crews was to deal with the various and extremely demanding manifestations of delirium in the patients already on the way to Kharkiv.
This was compounded by the difficult problem of sailing into the wind (in particular, in the sense that the wind was really gale force). This need reminded us of itself about every fifteen to twenty minutes and generated another challenge for the volunteers, namely the difficult task of escorting our hyperactive passengers back to their cars. The latter were trying to combine the delivery of their needs with various activities not necessarily inherent in this act, among which jogging in complete darkness and unpredictable directions was the most troublesome.
Our flight will certainly remain in the memory of its participants. It was as wintery as possible, dangerously slow due to the possibility of air attacks, and quite nerve-wracking given the characteristics and condition of the evacuees.
The evacuation lasted thirteen hours, of which we spent three hours getting to Velykyi Burluk, two hours placing the evacuees in the crews, and the rest of the time slowly, with stops, moving to our destination. However, we managed to evacuate all twenty patients of the psychiatric hospital, including two bedridden patients, who had suffered from the Russian strike.
Despite its dramatic nature, this adventure highlighted one of the most valuable traits of volunteerism: the more insurmountable the obstacles to accomplishing a task, the further the horizons of what is possible for a volunteer are pushed back.
