07 Sep Mothers Helping Mothers
One Saturday, after spending a week with her eyes glued to the news about the war, Adriana Șerban told her husband it was time for her to go to the train station. There they began a choreography of sorts, coordinating from a distance with mothers on a Facebook group who were also trying to help, but couldn’t come there because they were looking after small children: “I can take two people”, “I can take one”, “who else has a free room?” Buses and trains kept arriving, bringing Ukrainian refugees, and Romanians tried to provide whatever support they could, by paying for plane and bus tickets to different destinations or by providing temporary shelter. Adriana also took people in and experienced the difficulty of expressing your emotions when you don’t have a common language. The things that overcame the language barer were the brightness and pride with which people spoke of their homes.
“We couldn’t keep coordinating things from the train station,” says Adriana, who manages a Montessori kindergarten and is a facilitator in a parenting programme based on attachment theory. They were constantly connected, at any hour of the night, searching for places to put people up. They had their alarms set for 4 a.m. to order taxis to the airport.
Starting the 11th of March, Greenpeace Romania offered the volunteering women an office space they weren’t using because thy were still working from home after the pandemic. The organisation decided to extend the work from home by three more months and turn its headquarters into a shelter for families fleeing the war.
Adriana and several mother friends of hers made lists of necessary items, bought beds and set up a playground. They prepared four rooms with a capacity for 25 people, a kitchen with utensils and a small laundry room. Then they started to provide around-the-clock assistance at the centre, taking turns. Olena was the first mother to find a shelter there, on the 11th of March – she had two children aged 17 and 12 and one small dog.
At the train station, Adriana reconnected with a highschool friend from Măcin. She and her husband were interpreting for refugees. With them, she went from room to room, visiting each family, writing down things they needed. “There was a mad rush for resources, you couldn’t think about everyone’s needs ahead of time. They changed from day to day. It also took a while to figure out what foodstuffs we needed. We had a couple who came and cooked Ukrainian dishes twice a week – soups, stuffed buns, a lot of beetroot. It brought so much joy. During the three months we hosted refugees there, we also had over 1,400 portions donated by Bucate pe Roate.”
A lot of the luggage was left behind, and the volunteers of Mothers Helping Mothers later sent it to the refugees who were far too loaded down when they left Romania for other destinations. They sent a Tunisian woman who had been studying Pharmacy in Kharkiv – and who volunteered at the train station in Bucharest – a trolley case full of books for university. She was close to graduation.
Pianist Tatiana Shabayeva reached the Filaret bus station at 2 a.m. one night, with her six-month-old daughter, 13-year-old nephew, 71-year-old mother and a tower of suitcases filled with her stage outfits. They were coming from Odessa and planning to go to France. They had only asked for two beds at the centre, thinking there were others who needed them and they shouldn’t take up too much space.
Tatiana held a recital for charity and wanted all the funds to go to the Mothers Helping Mothers centre, so that other families could also experience the warmth she enjoyed there. Since Adriana’s passion and field of work is child education, she noted how, in this crisis situation, children’s games show their wealth of inner resources for overcoming difficult times.
“We know reality has changed since the war started. We know normality is gone.”
“But games and play remain unchanged,” wrote Adriana in her guide about the requirements of a playground in a refugee centre: it should be secure, gentle, as uncluttered as possible, without garish colours or loud noises – definitely no balloons or other toys that can make frightening noises. The group set up different areas for different ages in the playground, furnishing it with a lot of wooden objects – a toy kitchen, train tracks, a swing, a toy work bench, a reading corner.
Adriana was deeply impressed when mothers told her “I had something just like this back home for my child” and when she could see their joy and reassurance at finding toys and accessories similar to the ones they had in the homes they left behind. Other than “home”, a word Adriana often heard was “normal”. She saw women in a state of shock, overwhelmed by their circumstances, who lacked energy to go outside the centre and try to look around. She noticed the change when she managed to convince them to try on a few of the clothes they had at the centre. As they put them on, they asked, in English, „Do I look normal?” – an attempt to dissimulate their refugee status and dissociate from it.
That was where Adriana found the key to forging a connection with all those people who had been forced to pack up and look for a safe haven: “They used to have lives just like ours. They had just finished renovating an apartment, they had just managed to build a house in the old village where they were planning to enjoy their retirement. Suddenly, they had nothing. There are no more plans, what you left behind doesn’t matter.”
It’s hard to remember who you are and what gives you joy when, suddenly, you have nothing. Gradually, though, Adriana noticed women regain their strength. She felt it when Olena, the first mother who found shelter at the centre, noticed that the steps in the courtyard needed repairs and asked if she could get some concrete and whitewash. “Back home, my husband and I worked in renovation,” she said. Then Adriana invited her to decorate the kindergarten she manages. Olena used part of the money she earned for the project to buy her daughter a skateboard. Bit by bit, she was starting to find herself again.
That was why it was important that, out of the donations and emergency sponsorships they applied for, Mothers Through Mothers managed to also hire a few of the people they were sheltering as employees of the centre, thus giving them a temporary goal.
Others of the over 170 people who came to the centre refused to accept that the war would last. Every day, they kept waiting for word that they could go back. They made plans to visit family in Europe, then changed their mind because they wanted to stay as close as possible to the border.
During those three months, Adriana made many friends. A retired couple, former railway engineers, who used to have a home in a village and found it hard to get used to life in Bucharest, took care of her house while she was on holiday. The volunteers and Ukrainian community at the centre prepared a surprise party for her birthday. She keeps in touch with the refugees still living in Bucharest and the people who lodge them, and together they try to make sure they have all they need.
“They appreciate any chance at socialising that brings them a bit of normality: the first dinner at a restaurant since the war started, a day trip to the seaside by train, friends they connect to because they go through the same hardships. We will never have the exact same experience of the things they are living through, but we can make this time as easily bearable as possible for them,” Adriana says.
After three months of serving as a full-time shelter, it was time for the centre to become office space again. The Mothers Helping Mothers volunteers took apart the playground and donated it to the Casa Bună Association. They found long-term lodging and sometimes jobs for those who wanted them. Single mothers try to adapt to life in Romania, but for those whose partners have stayed behind in Ukraine things are very difficult. “As you would expect,” Adriana says. “We can’t talk about integrating refugees when most of them have families back there – spouses, parents, siblings in Ukraine. Integration involves putting down roots of some sort, being willing to say your life there is over. You can’t rebuild your life with part of your family missing. So we have to assist them the way they need us to.”
Testimony collected by Ana-Maria Ciobanu for the Museum of Abandonment for the Abandonment Baggage campaign. This project is financed by CARE through the Sera Foundation, Care France, and FONPC.
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