BEING HUMAN

#BeingHuman. #PeopleOfTheBridge. One hundred and twenty days. June 2022… This month, for the first time, the numbers came down. That is worth pausing over. Our first report caught a scramble; the second was still climbing, and we told you we were bracing for a long war… The fourth month broke the pattern. Fewer people passed through our doors than the month before, evacuations slowed, and the food we carried out fell by more than a third. After the first great flood of flight, the water has begun, barely, to recede. But receding water is not yet dry ground…

When the rain stopped over the ark, Noah did not throw open the door and walk out. He waited. He sent out a dove, and the first time, it came back to him, having found nowhere to set its foot: the flood was lower, but the world underneath it was still drowned. That is close to where many of the people we serve now stand. The panic of the first weeks has eased, and still there is no going home, because home is occupied ground now, or rubble too dangerous to enter…

So the work has quietly changed its shape. Early on we were pulling people out of the current; now the task is to keep them through the long wait for ground that will hold, sending the dove out again, watching the horizon for a single green leaf. Here is what this fourth month held, with the running totals since the war began:

• 261 volunteers kept serving through the exhaustion that follows the first adrenaline
• 135 people were evacuated from areas the fighting still threatened (total: 9,980)
• 773 displaced people were sheltered and cared for on seminary campuses (total: 3,471)
• 1,678 people passed through our hubs in transit toward safer ground (total: 45,163)
• 57,900 food boxes and packages reached families who had lost their homes (total: 219,876)
• 296 tons of food and humanitarian supplies were delivered where the need was sharpest (total: 2,304)

We do not read the smaller numbers as a sign that the worst has passed. Not at all… They are, rather, the shape of a slower and harder stage of the same emergency: the in-between, where the drama recedes but the displacement remains… When Noah sent the dove out a second time, it returned with a fresh olive leaf in its beak. That leaf was not a landing, and not yet a way home; it was evidence that somewhere, under all that water, life had begun again. We watch for those leaves. Some mornings, we find one…

If you would keep watch with us, you can stand alongside these hubs here:

• Ukraine: Refugees Assistance (through our seminary hubs): https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/48505
• Ukraine: Bibles for refugees and military: https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/65548
• Ukraine: Mental Health and Well-Being Care: https://www.mesaglobal.co/projects/45809

Peace be with you, and keep your children away from war, Taras D (project manager in Ukraine for the “People of the Bridge”), on behalf of the Coordination Group: Roman Soloviy (Langham, EEIT), Olga Marchak (Mesa Global), Ivan Rusyn (UETS), Oleksandr Geychenko (OTS), Kseniya Trofymchuk (EEIT), Kateryna Shutko (EEIT), Scott Cunningham (Mesa Global), Evan Hunter (Scholar Leaders), Valentin Siniy (TCI)

PS. The same twelve communities carried this fourth month:

1. Chernivtsi Bible Seminary
2. Dialogue in Action (Peacebuilding group)
3. Eastern European Institute of Theology
4. Evangel Theological University (Zaporizhzhia)
5. Kremenchuk Evangelical Seminary
6. Lviv Theological Seminary
7. Odesa Theological Seminary
8. Tavriskii Christian Institute (Kherson, Ivano-Frankivsk)
9. Transcarpathian Christian Institute (Khust)
10. Ukrainian Evangelical Theological Seminary
11. University Divitia Gratia (Moldova)
12. Zaporizhzhia Bible Seminary