Bringing aid to Ukraine: ‘Now others were also benefitting from my studies’
Person of the Year nominee image: Fien Lurvink
Russian Studies master’s student Fien Lurvink was nominated as Leidsch Dagblad’s Person of the Year for her charity work as chair of the Keep Them Warm student organisation. She and other students took aid to Ukraine and brought refugees back with them.
Lurvink became involved with Keep Them Warm over a year ago after she read that it was looking for new board members. ‘When the war broke out in Ukraine, I was doing the bachelor’s in Russian Studies. The lectures and seminars were often about Ukraine and I felt I should be putting my knowledge and skills to good use. When I read the call for board members, I saw it as the chance to help.’
Conversations with refugees
Donors, volunteers and contacts at hospitals enable the students to collect aid and bring it in vans to the Polish-Ukrainian border. On the way the vans are loaded with medical supplies and blankets. ‘That’s what is needed most’, Lurvink explains. On the journey back, which takes three days, there is room for six refugees in each van. The students make sure they are brought to a safe reception centre in the Netherlands.
The second day in the van is more relaxed as everyone gets used to each other, says Lurvink. ‘The conversations you have differ greatly per group. We sometimes had really good deeper conversations where people spoke about how they see their future. But I’ve also had times where there was little in the way of contact. You can always tell whether people want to talk. It makes for a better atmosphere if there are children because then there’s more laughing.’
Aggressor’s language
To begin with she felt nervous about speaking Russian with Ukrainians. ‘It’s the language of their aggressor and I knew it could be sensitive.’ But then someone spoke Russian to her and she felt able to speak it in return. ‘The other students had to use a translation app to ask everything but I could just ask simple things, like what people wanted to eat. That was the first time I felt my knowledge of Russian was useful rather than just being fun for me. Someone else was also benefitting from it. And in my studies I can now not just look in an academic way at the situation in Ukraine but also understand it more from the human perspective.’
Weird
Lurvink passed on the baton to a new board in September. When she heard a few months later that she had been nominated for Person of the Year, she didn’t believe it at first. ‘It felt weird because I hadn’t done it alone. But it’s a great way to get attention for Keep Them Warm.’
Person of the Year
Cycling duo Sven Broekhuizen and Rick Keijzer were named Persons of the Year on 18 January. Leidsch Dagblad has been naming a Person of the Year since 2017. Readers of the paper can nominate candidates they think have made a positive contribution to the Leiden and Duin- en Bollenstreek region or to society. Student Claire van Megen won last year for her work for the mental health of her fellow students.