We were walking through Warsaw High School #1 to meet the 50 Ukrainian teenage students who had been enrolled in his school in just the past six weeks.
These kids were among the massive exodus of refugees from Ukraine who had fled Vladimir Putin’s killing spree in what was once a vibrant country filled with promise, now coping with unprovoked destruction on a scale not seen since the second World War.
As the headmaster escorted us toward the first classroom of Ukrainian teens, he stopped to warn us that some of the stories we would hear could be “difficult”. That we anticipated. But this burly, otherwise “in charge” educator was having a tough time, eyes welling with tears as he told us about a particular 16 year-old girl (who we’ll call Eva), a relatively recent arrival in Warsaw.
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Eva had been living in a suburb of Mariupol with her parents and a younger brother. Her dad was a fighter in the Ukrainian defense forces on active duty the night that missiles first hit their apartment complex. Terrified, Eva’s mom woke the children, grabbing as much as could fit into a couple of suitcases, got everybody into the car, and drove west in a small caravan of friends and neighbors.
They had gotten about two miles from their neighborhood when a missile hit the car directly in front of Eva’s, blowing it to smithereens, another mom and her children inside. Eva and her family, already in a state of shock from the bombings and abrupt departure from their home, watched in horror as their friends were killed.
Eva wasn’t the only child in the class who sat expressionless and silent as we spoke with her classmates. But there were others who asked us questions and told us their stories—many of them communicating pretty well in English. They were anxious to talk about everything from life in the U.S. and our favorite classic American cars—to unimaginable horror stories of violence they witnessed and the anxiety they hold about their futures.
Some 13 million refugees who have already left Ukraine (or have moved to safer regions in the western districts of the country) are just the latest additions to the more than 80 million global refugees who have fled war, disasters, and injustice. Many refugees have languished in intractable social limbo for years upon years.
Poland and other countries in the region have been incredibly compassionate and generous to Ukrainians, inviting them into their communities and homes as they seek safety from the vicious Russian invasion.
But how long will the kindness and acceptance of others last?
We suspect that patience and openness under these circumstances will not be inexhaustible. And then, there’s the matter of scale.
Poland alone has welcomed nearly 3 million Ukrainians (about 800,000 refugees have already returned to Ukraine). Another 700,000 have applied for special 18-month Polish ID cards entitling them access to housing support, schools, social services, and work permits.
As of last week, some 300,000 Ukrainians are in Warsaw—having raised the city’s population by more than 15 percent. This is proportionately equivalent to New York City accepting and providing services to over 1.2 million traumatized, non-English speaking war refugees over a matter of weeks.
The refugees in Warsaw include some 100,000 school age children, of which only about 20,000 have been enrolled in schools, such as the high school we visited.
Warsaw’s dynamic mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, has opened special centers for many of the children trying to learn remotely, and he wants to establish temporary “container classrooms” to accommodate the kids who will need to be in classroom settings.
But, right now, resources permit fulfilling only a fraction of the need. And, of course, this is not the only item on the mayor’s agenda. Warsaw’s health and hospitals systems are under serious stress, not to mention the need to find permanent housing and jobs for the new arrivals.
Ukrainian refugees of all ages will clearly be struggling for the foreseeable future. It is essential to act urgently. We (the U.S. and our Ukraine-supporting allies), must ensure that children receive appropriate support to deal with trauma, and that they get into an effective educational trajectory as quickly as possible.
What’s to be done?
We recommend that the UNHCR (United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees) coordinate a focused effort to address the two major challenges for displaced children: mental health support and educational continuity. And the agency must do so now—and at scale.
The goal should be to provide this critical support for every Ukrainian refugee or internally displaced child. This effort should be funded by affluent countries, but all yielding authority for coordination to the High Commissioner. That said, it is essential that these efforts be highly transparent and accountable to the donor nations from programmatic, timeliness, and fiscal perspectives.
Specific strategies to meet the scale of these challenges in the shortest possible time-frame include proven technology-based approaches—such as language appropriate remote learning systems, well-designed digital content, and availability of necessary hardware. Technology and digital systems could also have wide application in training Ukrainian-speaking mental health professionals about psychological first aid and support.
And the High Commissioner should immediately adopt innovative ideas—such as creating plans to expand educational infrastructure capacity by adapting mobile or “container” classrooms, deploying 3-D printers to help build new facilities, and transforming vacant buildings into schools.
In the meantime, the contributions of foundations, corporations, and individuals are saving lives and giving hope to people whose lives have been turned upside down. Helping support a school’s lunch programs for refugee kids, hiring Ukraine speaking teachers and psychologists, organizing summer camps that offer kids a positive experience along with Polish language instruction, creating “school to school” programs with educational centers in the US are all terrific contributions.
When we visited a shelter for refugee families in downtown Warsaw, we were shown a “suggestion box” filled with scraps of paper on which kids had written down things they wished for, like a tee shirt or a soccer ball. Make no mistake, meeting those kinds of needs for traumatized kids means a lot, too.
That these same efforts should be organized for every one of the world’s 35 million refugee children should go without saying. While attention is so hyper-focused on the catastrophe in Ukraine, the hope is we’ll learn strategies that can be applied elsewhere. We have to start somewhere. Let’s start here, and now.
