- Envera cooperates with leading Ukrainian NGO for intellectual disabilities
Madrid | April 1, 2022. Updated: January 17, 2023
"The luck is being the same whether you leave the country or stay in Ukraine. Treatments have come to a standstill and we can't work. The economic situation of many families is unsustainable and it affects our children."
With these words, Marina Grigorieva, the coordinator of Vinnitsya Down Syndrometells Envera about the desperate situation that many families with people with intellectual disabilities have been enduring since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began more than a month ago.
Various organizations such as the European Disability Forum have already warned about insufficient support for the evacuation of people with disabilities, noting that "even those who manage to reach shelters, both inside and outside the country, continue to face obstacles: from simple steps to information that is completely inaccessible to them".
Precisely in the interior of the Slavic country practically all organizations, associations and public centers whose aim is to improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities, have been forced to cease their activities due to the inability to ensure the safety of the people for whom they worked and whose situation is increasingly vulnerable.
According to the VGO Coalition, the Ukrainian network of more than 100 social organizations dedicated to protecting the rights of people with disabilities, with which Envera is in constant contact, thousands of people with disabilities living in institutions are already isolated from their communities and are at risk of being abandoned and forgotten. In addition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain the medications these people need to survive.
THE FORGOTTEN AMONG THE FORGOTTEN
Yuliia Klepets, coordinator of VGO Coalition, with whom Envera was able to talk last Wednesday to initiate a collaboration between the two entities, explains the reality that people with intellectual disabilities are living during this war. It is the life of the forgotten among the forgotten whose situation, without help, can reach a point of no return.
Yuliia tells Envera that she stays in Kyiv with her two daughters, her mother and sister. Her eldest daughter, Marina, has an intellectual disability and her elderly mother has mobility problems.
"Those who have been able to leave are families with their own transportation or whose children are young. Our organization chartered vans to evacuate the families, but only two responded to the call. Most of us remain in our homes because starting from scratch in another country or in another city is often an even bigger problem and leaving by train is not even an option," Klepets explains.
Those like Yuliia and her family who remain in the cities live each day from alarm to alarm, going to and from bomb shelters. However, paralysis, stress and disability itself can often make getting to the shelters an impossible task for people with intellectual disabilities and their families, who are forced to hide in the corridors of buildings or seek makeshift shelter, for example, inside a bathtub.
The difficulty in getting psychological treatment and rehabilitation is immense, affecting many people with intellectual disabilities who have seen their habits completely altered. Yuliia gives as an example the case of a 9-year-old boy from one of the families VGO works with who, after a week of incessant bombing, is now unable to eat anywhere but the bomb shelter.
As the daily reality of war-torn Ukraine transforms, Europe is facing a humanitarian crisis unprecedented in recent decades in which the forgotten of the forgotten, people with intellectual disabilities, are left to fend for themselves in the absence of targeted efforts to identify their needs and give them the support they require as war continues to transform their lives that will never return to what they once were.
HOPE IN THE FACE OF THE HORROR OF WAR
This transformation occurs, however, in two directions: the one experienced by those who suffer first-hand from the atrocities of war and the one that individuals and organizations have decided to take to help those who are suffering the worst.
With a western part of the country continuing to assimilate the huge number of displaced people forced to flee by the attacks of Russian troops, cooperation, solidarity and mutual support prove to be an important engine helping Ukrainians resist the siege at this tough time.
This is the case of the bakery Good Bread for Good People bakery in Kiev. Before the war, this establishment employed sixteen people with intellectual disabilities and now remains open, with the ovens working, to feed hospital patients, residents of psychiatric hospitals, soldiers of the armed forces, the elderly and families with children who remained in the city free of charge.
"Thousands of people need food. Now we bake bread and muffins that we distribute for free", is the new slogan of this bakery that, to this day, continues to work thanks to the donations it receives. Aid that allows them to continue this work, in addition to continuing to be a fundamental economic support for all people with intellectual disabilities who work there and now remain in their homes while the war lasts.
In the same way, various entities have changed their framework to focus on meeting the most pressing needs. Faced with the isolation in which thousands of people with disabilities live, as VGO told Envera, groups of volunteers are going around the cities to collect medicines and deliver them where they are most needed.
These are paths of hope in a situation where help is still needed also from outside the country. Humanitarian work must continue and support for organizations still working inside Ukraine must be total to reduce, as far as possible, the impact of the war on the victims.
COOPERATION FROM SPAIN
Since the beginning of the invasion, Envera has put all its efforts into helping Ukrainian families. First, together with other organizations such as Islazul, Nuveen Real Estate, HSI and Iberia, among others, to send more than eight tons of humanitarian material to the Ukrainian families. to send more than eight tons of humanitarian material to the Volyn region to the Volyn region in the interior of Ukraine. And now, Envera is working to ensure that people with intellectual disabilities affected by the war are not forgotten.
In collaboration and direct contact with VGO Coalition, Envera's professionals provide professional, specific and individualized support to respond to the needs of Ukrainian families through the study of specific cases of children and adults with intellectual disabilities or by facilitating video tutorials that include rehabilitation therapies, psychomotor skills and other exercises, with which Envera intends to alleviate, even slightly, the lack of psychologists and the closure of assistance centers in Ukraine.
In addition, Envera has made available to the Community of Madrid, in coordination with the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, places in its Early Attention and Occupational Center services to assist refugees with disabilities arriving in Spain.
In addition to all this, Envera has set up a fundraising campaign in its branches, which will go entirely to VGO.
The president of Envera, José Antonio Quintero, says that these actions respond to "Envera's commitment to the most vulnerable because, being an organization whose purpose is the direct care of people with intellectual disabilities, we can not look away from the situation in Ukraine", and wanted to "send all our support to those who continue to strive, even in the worst conditions, so that people with intellectual disabilities occupy their place in the world with dignity".
