The young people — most of them around 18 years old — have worked from 10 am to 10 pm for six days straight. It’s tedious work — unloading trays of bread loaves, sorting them, roaming from floor to floor of a tall, run-down, abandoned hospital building to pass out food to 1800 frightened, hungry people — and then moving on to the next shelter.
Not the Summer They Were Expecting
Or the teenagers are registering families who fled their homes, or packing hundreds of bags full of soap, toothpaste, toilet paper, and other hygiene supplies.
It probably wasn’t the summer fun most teens anticipate.
But Caritas volunteers in the war-torn nation of Georgia keep going.
And the staff — bakers, cooks, drivers, psychologists, social workers, a doctor — are working round the clock to reach as many displaced people as possible.
Estimates now say that 150,000 people fled their homes; 128,000 of them are scattered throughout Georgia proper, many going to the capital city of Tbilisi.” For the tens of thousands without relatives to stay with, government-appointed shelters in old buildings are the only option.
“The government left us here, and hasn’t brought us any food,” said one person at the Isani shelter, a former military hospital without electricity or running water; it’s now home to 1500 people who left their homes to escape bombings over a week ago. “But Caritas came.” In Tbilisi and the western city of Kutaisi, Caritas is now feeding 2660 people a day, up from about 500 the day after the worst violence subsided.
The Apostolic Nuncio for the region, Monsignor Claudio Gugerotti, is at the Isani shelter too, meeting with the residents and asking them what they need. They’re grateful for the food, but eating bakery items (like bread rolls with bean or kielbasa paste) for a week can be hard on the stomach. Getting the displaced people a greater variety of food is key.
Wiring the large building for electricity is happening slowly, floor by floor, but the people still have no water.
The nuncio managed to enter the bombed city of Gori. So did and Father Witold, Secretary General of Caritas Georgia, who brought bread to people unable to flee the shelling. Many people who fled Gori are worried that their homes are being looted by roving gangs. “They tried to steal a local priest’s car when we were in Gori,” says the Nuncio.
Back in Tbilisi, Caritas volunteers stir enormous pots of macaroni and cheese, load mattresses into vans, and assemble hygiene packs. The teenagers put detergent, towels, sheets, soap and more into bags for each shelter resident. The sharp corners of the toothpaste tube cut the plastic bags, so they find an ingenious solution: put the toothpaste inside a toilet paper roll.
While they work, they talk about what they’ve seen in the shelters.
Many of the shelter residents are from the country and ran from farms when the bombs started: one woman was milking a cow, and ran with the milk still on her hands.
Many displaced people need shoes, underwear, and other clothes. “They’re in shock,” says a 23-year-old volunteer named Irma. “Some fled barefoot, in their pajamas.” The children are frightened, says another volunteer. “They’re afraid to go outside,” says 17-year-old volunteer Albina. “If they hear a loud sound, they’re scared.” Volunteers have gathered not just essential items, but also toys for the shelters.
And there is some happy news: a shelter resident just recently went into labour, and was brought to a Tbilisi hospital to give birth. Mother and baby are doing well.
Georgi, 17, loves fishing. Ordinarily in the summer he might be in Georgia’s picturesque mountains, standing near a stream. Instead, he is moving heavy supplies in the hot sun from a cargo container. A few days ago it was mattresses and pillows. Today it’s boxes of shampoo bottles and soap. Caritas has worked here for years, so it knows all the warehouses, how to work out shipping details, and how to get the best discounts on large supplies of humanitarian aid.
The aid workers are weary but aren’t stopping. Rapidly sorting bread loaves, a 21-year-old volunteer named Timuri says the reason is simple. “These are our people.”
Fleeing for Their Lives
“We heard some sounds like shelling. We thought, ‘This is strange.’ But no one told us, ‘Leave!'” Lena, a blond woman from a breakaway region in Georgia, gestures frantically as she recalls the events of a few days ago. “Then the tanks came — that was stranger — but still we didn’t understand what was going on.”
“Then the bombs started falling from the planes, and we ran.”
It was the middle of the night, and many people from villages surrounding the city of Tskhinvali had no time to gather their possessions. As fast as they could run out the door or cram their families into cars, their homes were destroyed.
As fighting raged between Russian and Georgian forces in and around South Ossetia, thousands of innocent civilians who escaped death found themselves instantly homeless. Of the nearly 150,000 people who fled their homes, those from the city of Gori, where the fighting was heavy, poured into Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.
Now they wait in temporary shelters set up in schools and similar places — often with little food and no extra clothes, not to mention mattresses, sheets, or hygiene supplies like toothpaste. CRS is focusing on the health of the displaced people, threatened by living in crowded, unsanitary buildings without adequate bathrooms. CRS is providing them with hygiene items like soap, detergent, toilet paper and sheets — items desperately needed by people who fled the conflict with just the clothes on their backs.
A construction worker whose large extended family lives in one room of a hastily –converted hostel tugs on his worn white shirt. “This is what I was able to bring with me. Nothing else.” Nearby, his relative holds her 6-week-old baby, who needs diapers. Early in the crisis, some reported that the refugees are washing and reusing disposable Pampers because they have no other options.
Many people are sleeping on the schools’ floors or putting wooden desks together to sleep on them. In one case, refugees sleeping in a kindergarten weren’t receiving enough food. “We sat hungry for two days,” says Lena. “Then Caritas came and found us.”
Because it already had a soup kitchen and bakery, Caritas Georgia was able to swing into action early in the crisis and now is feeding 300 people three meals a day at one shelter alone. Caritas also brought bread, tomatoes, large pots of stew, and more to other shelters in the city. In the first days after the bombing, residents desperate for clothes picked through donated clothing dropped off by Caritas.
Father Witold Szulczynski, the director of Caritas Georgia, has become a hero to some shelter residents. “Padre Witold” and other Caritas workers kept their ears to the ground, following leads to find pockets of displaced people living in non-official shelters.
After fighting broke out a CRS assessment team was immediately dispatched to Georgia to join CRS staff already on the ground. Arriving in Tbilisi via Yerevan, the team visited makeshift shelters and assessed the most immediate needs, including food, clothes, cookware, mattresses, bedding and hygiene supplies. CRS’ partner, Caritas Georgia, began feeding hundreds of people from its existing soup kitchens and bakeries on August 10th.
“CRS partners on the ground were able to swing into action immediately,” says LeAnn Hager, Acting Head of Office for CRS Georgia. “In the first days of the crisis, they fed thousands of people who would otherwise have gone hungry.”
Do Not Forget Kutaisi
“Don’t let me die without you,” 87-year-old Zina Kvanchiani pleaded to her family when violence broke out in the Kodori Valley, a region of northwest Georgia. Paper-thin from illness and unable to walk, Zina was in no condition to flee the area unassisted.
Her two daughters and a friend had no other choice: they sat her in a bag and carried her on foot — for miles — to safety.
Now Zina and four other people from her family live in a tiny room on the third floor of a crumbling school that was unused for years. The building has water only every other day — and it’s not drinkable. There is no bathroom on her floor, and she is far too frail to move.
Zina is in a makeshift shelter in Georgia’s second-largest city, Kutaisi, where over 14,000 people fled to the city and its surrounding towns.
As international attention has centered around Russian-Georgian politics and the capital city of Tbilisi, thousands of displaced people in the west of Georgia are at risk of being cut off from aid or forgotten. Kutaisi is only about three hours west of Tbilisi — on a good road. Kutaisi is closer to the Black Sea than Tbilisi, which helps in terms of port shipments. But with the railroad bombed and the main road between east and west Georgia shut down by the military, few resources from the east — where the airport is –are able to get through.
Caritas team members from CRS (a Caritas member in the USA) arrived in Kutaisi by taking a winding, unpaved back road that few 4×4s can handle, much less trucks carrying humanitarian aid. They were the first non-Georgian aid workers to arrive. Going from shelter to shelter, the team met with people who had lost everything and whose most basic needs — for water, bathrooms, and a way to cook donated food like rice and potatoes — were not yet met.
One mother displayed a prescription for her three-year-old son, wondering how to contact a doctor. Another needed adult diapers. An elderly lady had fled her house so quickly that she was without her false teeth, and could not chew.
“We know we can’t ask for what we had at home,” said a woman whose family lives with five other families in a 20×20 foot schoolroom. “But we need soap, medicine…” A longstanding partner of CRS in the area, AbkhazInterCont (AIC), is run by formerly displaced people who fled similar violence in the early 1990s. Their current programs provide vocational training and small loans to displaced people who had to start new careers.
Having rebuilt their lives over the course of many years, the staff of AIC is now gearing up to help the new victims of the conflict. “We understand exactly what they’re going through, because we went through it ourselves,” says Archil Elbakidze, who heads AIC’s board.
Another partner is also working to help Kutaisi’s displaced: local authorities have asked Caritas Georgia to provide bread from its bakery. There is enough food available to last a few weeks until aid shipments arrive, say city officials, and the hot summer temperatures mean that heating is not an issue
But winter comes quickly in the region, and authorities are worried about what will happen then. Tens of thousands of people may need heaters for the winter, blankets, and kerosene.
Suddenly Homeless, Georgia’s Displaced Fear for the Future
“I bought that new house last October, borrowing money from friends to do it. It could be destroyed when I go back, or everything in it could be gone,” says Georgy, a man from the bombed Georgian city of Gori. “What will happen now? I can’t be a refugee twice.”
Sitting in a church rectory in the capital city of Tbilisi, Georgy has tears in his eyes as he talks about getting his wife and two young children out of his town during last week’s bombing. His plight reflects that of many people who escaped Gori; several had already been pushed out of parts of Ossetia, farther to the north, years ago — and had started life over. Now, twice-displaced people are wondering if they can ever go back to Gori — and what will be left of their homes and possessions after a week of turmoil.
Georgy and his family stayed one night at a Catholic retreat house, and are now with his wife’s relatives near Tbilisi. He is more fortunate that the thousands of abruptly-homeless people from bombed areas who now are in makeshift shelters in the capital, often sleeping on the floor in crumbling old buildings.
While the majority of the shelter residents should be able to return home eventually, tens of thousands may not be able to. At one shelter, a man from a village near the disputed city of Tskhinvali mourns his home and farm. “I lived in that house my whole life-50 years. I had nine cows, an apple orchard…it was so good,” he says. With continuing tensions between Russia and Georgia, he fears he will never go back. “What can I do now?”
“While we hope that the majority of Georgians displaced by this conflict will be able to return home very soon, some may never be able to,” says Mark Schnellbaecher, CRS’ Regional Director for Europe and the Middle East. “We are responding to their immediate needs and also looking to see how we can most effectively help them in the coming weeks and months. The money that CRS has committed will help thousands of suffering people in the difficult weeks ahead.”
And if they are not allowed to return to their homes, they will need financial help to get housing and perhaps to learn new livelihoods. CRS and partners like Caritas are focusing on immediate needs like food and hygiene, but are also planning for the long road ahead.
[If your heart is touched by the plight of these poor people, please click here to help CRS provide for them.]