The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach)

A few days ago, while volunteering as part of All Hands and Hearts, we were supporting a Polish organization we’ve partnered with, called Dobro Zawsze Wraca (Good Always Returns) that collects and transports aid to Ukrainians in Ukraine, while also distributing locally to Ukrainians in need in Krakow. I’ve worked on this site many times- it’s one of my favorites where I get to meet our Polish partners, and the Ukrainian workers at the NGO. I wouldn’t say I’ve gotten used to the sights I experience there- but I have seen more and had to process more than a new person has.

(Before reading the rest of this post, I just want to put here a link to support the All Hands Krakow mission via my donation portal, or to support Dobro Zawsze Wraca’s upcoming convoy to Ukraine via PayPal, at this link.)

So, it was a challenging day for one of our newbie volunteers. A young ish woman, not much younger than me, was tasked with sorting kid’s clothing. Taking large bags of mixed donated clothes…some already sorted to child only, and electing what to put on hangers and what to put in bins, according to what needed to go on display and get selected by Ukrainian folks in need in Krakow. The site operates as a free thrift shop and we were helping in the back end to get new stock ready to go out to the right racks.

By lunchtime, the new volunteer had narrowly avoided breaking down a couple times, and asked to be reassigned.

The two of us who’d been there often knew exactly the feeling and we agreed to switch roles around for the new person. She was taken off sorting baby clothes and put on taking huge bags of laundry powder and making family sized bags. Anything to help folks on fixed incomes weather their time in Krakow.

I can’t tell you how taxing it can be to hold up a donated knit sweater, suitable for a two or three year old, and realize it was going on the young body of an innocent child living hundreds of miles from home, in exile with their mom or grandmother, due to the choices of vladimir putin and the retinue of the dumb, the cowardly, or the greedy, who enable him.

I’ve nearly broken down several times at that site. It can be an unexpected trigger. A car seat for an infant. A set of crutches that you recognize as most often used for someone with cerebral palsy. A set of adult diapers. You come often enough to this site to see this donated aid come in- you might help unload it, actually – and to see it go out. Requested by some isolated community in Ukraine in dire straits, or by someone in forced exile in Krakow.

I’d seen a pile of strollers in the bottom of a stairwell in a refugee shelter in Radymno once, and had to leave the building to compose myself.

I’ve seen enough disabled equipment, baby strollers, car seats, getting piled and shipped out, to suit me for the rest of my life. It should anger you, it should make you seek the source of that like a moth seeking light for navigation. It should drive you a bit mad. It should make you feel like you need a midday break from it. I won’t judge someone who needed to step away, but it also should spurn you to “lean in,” to do the positional work with your feet and hands to be where a difference can be had. That sweater can’t be on that rack, to be brought “home” by that mom or grandma, until you get it hung on the hanger and staged to go out. Someone, somewhere, must hang that sweater.

So, that day, I told my fellow volunteer, the new person, that I understood her feelings completely. I told her there’s also a room full of rotating inventories of diapers, soaps, wheelchairs, cribs. This site, and its images, shouldn’t be easy, and you’re more than right to be upset by it. It shouldn’t need to even exist and yet does.

It really doesn’t get any better the more you think of it. A nation had to disgorge millions of its own people, its most vulnerable, due to the choices and inaction of its failed-state neighbor. It can and should trigger a visceral feeling, to look at a toddler’s sweater and realize all the implications woven within it.