“I want to go home to dad.” It is a phrase that Olesia Vinnik He has been listening to his son’s mouth Oscar since March 10, when they fled the war in Ukraine together. They have passed through crowded train stations, slept in frigid makeshift enclosures and endured endless bus rides. This Thursday, mother and son have come to Barcelona. The boy rolls a plastic stroller in what less than a month ago was the auditorium of the Red Cross in Catalonia. Oskar laughs and calls his mother to show her the toy. “He has finally stopped crying. And so have I”the mother sighs. Like them, the humanitarian entity has already cared for 4,393 refugees from the war in Catalonia, 7,700 throughout Spain. Half of them are children.
Before becoming a war refugee, Olesia Vinnik was a Event organizer in Dnieper, a town north of kyiv very close to the border with Belarus. “We were a young family, with a small baby… my life was perfect, I had total happiness,” the 35-year-old mother recalls with the help of a Red Cross volunteer translator. “Now I’m just looking for peace of mind. we are so scaredWe have lost the most important things: family, home, work… our life is there”, he continues.
He explains it after a seven day trip from Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean coast. “I don’t remember when was the last time I was able to take a shower,” her mother is honest. Until she has not arrived in Barcelona she has not been able to change her clothes. She was stained. “I can hardly sleep, he was vomiting all night on the bus today,” she continues. “It’s that without my husband, and being alone, I only care that he is fine, that he doesn’t lack anything. If I left Ukraine it was because I don’t want his life to stop, I want him to continue developing,” she says.
Seven days after chaining trains, buses and very cold, the two-year-old boy plays in the makeshift shelter of the Red Cross in Barcelona
emotional care
The Red Cross volunteers have given him a coffee and a banana. Beside her, a mother is nursing a newborn. Behind her, another woman sips juice from a paralyzed girl who, in a wheelchair, can barely move her eyes. They are in the auditorium of the Red Cross, where conferences and press conferences are usually given, exceptionally converted into refuge. It also happened in 2018, when dozens of sub-Saharan migrants spent the night at the premises. “More than 1,000 people have passed through here, but in Catalonia there are already more than 4,300 refugees that we have attended”, explains Enric Morist, coordinator of the Red Cross in Catalonia. “Most of them are mothers with children who arrive very emotionally touched, they come down crying, with anxiety… and the play space for children is vital. As soon as the children laugh, the mothers calm down,” she describes.
The arrival of refugees is constant. “A family has just come that has no clothes,” warns Kateryna Honcharova, a Ukrainian settled in Catalonia who has volunteered as a translator. She works for a Russian airline, she has been furloughed for months and her company has already told her that next month she will be fired from her. “I saw an ad that the Red Cross needed volunteers and I decided to go where they needed me,” she says. “As soon as I talk to them, my hair stands on end. But I try not to overdo it, otherwise I wouldn’t hold out,” says Honcharova.
In hotels or pensions
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Many of the refugees who have passed through the reception spaces of the Red Cross, especially at the beginning of the exodus, have ended up in the homes of relatives, friends or acquaintances. But Olesia knows no one. “We came here because in Warsaw we were sleeping in a congress hall where it was terribly cold, children were crying... we saw a bus to Barcelona and we got on,” she explains. Like her, 2,800 refugees are housed in hotels or pensions of Catalonia. A number that grows exponentially. If three weeks ago only 10% of refugees needed this service, now it is 50%. “We have an agreement with the Ministry of Migration and there will be no problem expanding these places,” reassures Morist.
However, the NGO does not want these families to stay forever in these hotels. “At some point they will have to start their new life, integrate into society,” she warns. A decision, that of settling in Catalonia, that Olesia does not want to make. “As soon as the war is over I will return to my countryI have nothing here and I have everything there.” She hopes to hug her husband again in a month. “I can’t imagine another life that isn’t in the Ukraine.”