*not edited
Upon return to the SSF tent we were told M was no longer going to the Chernobyl area. There are variations about what exactly happened. The stories agree on the following: Jacob told them that they both could not go and advised that neither of them go. The head of SSF was involved and they were reminded about their commitment to the shifts in the medical tent (why they came). There was yelling. They also seem to agree on these details: A Ukrainian soldier had appeared/ been found after L had clearly in some way expressed that she preferred not to work in the tent. This soldier specifically wanted a female doctor. This mission would take anywhere from 3-5 days. The new plan was that they were leaving at 2 for the meeting with the Ukrainian army.
I met the two French doctors whose last day was today (I believe they were both neurologists) and had some delicious soup from the World Kitchen as the schedule was again being restructured. I was told that it was decided that M would come back at 4 and I would start at 8 and work until 8 am the next morning.
*Of note there are 2 medical jobs and one humanitarian job available to doctors are nurses: the medical tent at the border, the medical area at Tesco (more on this later), and helping in the Women’s and children’s tent.
We headed to the hotel to sleep for a couple of hours before the shift, which by some non-Christmas miracle I was able to do. Three-ish hours of knocked out sleep, followed by a return to the border and the tent.
When we got back to the tent we found M and L who thought they were going to be there until midnight, but had also not returned until around 6 pm. They explained the meeting with Ukrainian army had kept getting pushed back and now L was leaving the following morning.
After some “way too many people in the tent” moments, a guy, who said he worked for the US DOD but was now trying to get polish citizenship appeared in almost military wear saying he was in charge of SSF (odd bc he was not the person who had oriented us or been any of our contacts).
I figured he may just be a magical thinker who was also an avid shopped at 5-11 tactical, others dug deeper. It turned out that he had shown up at the border weeks before and helped mainly by pushing carts back and forth from the border to the buses. It remains unclear how he got to the point of assigning himself as my sponsor on my eventual badge.
He claimed we needed badges first thing tomorrow morning and then without skipping a beat proceeded to announce that the claims of chemical warfare had been verified by some part of the US government. He further underscored this by stating new emergency antidote medications had been ordered to counteract the sarin gas that he reported had been used. For who? He went on to talk about designing emergency evacuation routes for the volunteers (it seems unlikely that they do not already have these since many of these organizations this is what they do and that doesn’t seem like something that would be left to chance).
Jacob, the actual human in charge, had told us earlier that because of the increased conflict in the East they expected another spike in the number of refugees headed to the border. It has slowed down this week (with 3-4 thousand still crossing a day), but in previous weeks it was 8 to 10 thousand daily with one day of over 12 thousand.
Doug, the previously mentioned alarm bell ringer, and his concerns had caught L and M’s attention. L started asking questions especially after the mention of the Russian soldiers who had dug trenches around Chernobyl and had become injured from the release of radiation. It was then that she decided that she was not going to go. M almost immediately stated he would go instead. L and He left the tent to return to the hotel with toys and gummy vitamins, the contents of a bag that had been packed for this escapade. Our first night on the border had officially begun.
*Later that evening he would be told he wasn’t needed. It remains unclear to me why these children would need a doctor to be transported out of the conflict area. I can’t imagine our utility in this process in most cases.
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