DENNIS
LYNCH
Homesick on the Romania-Ukraine Border
In the border city of Galați, locals turned two dorm buildings into a full-fledged shelter and service center for people fleeing the ongoing war in Ukraine.
April 7, 2022
Clothes hang in a common area at Cămin C.
April 7, 2022
Students no longer make up the residents of cămins B and C at Dunărea de Jos University in Galați, Romania. Since the Russian military crossed the border into Ukraine, the residents at the two dorms are shopkeepers, farmers, drivers, pensioners, housewives, teenagers, and toddlers.
The school, civil service groups, and individual volunteers came together at the beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and turned the two neighboring dorm buildings — cămin directly translates to fireplace, home, or hostel — into a temporary refugee center for people fleeing the ongoing conflict. Russian-speaking students translate for refugees, school administrators staff the check-in counter, locals and civil groups supply diapers, food, and medical supplies.
More than 4.3 million people have fled Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion of the country in late February, according to the United Nations Refugee Agency. Around 662,000 of them fled to Romania and around 3,000 of them found shelter or aid here the last several weeks, student and organizer Hatem Aljabwobi said.
They are here because they heard they would find a clean bed, hot showers, hot meals, clothes, SIM cards, and medicine. Many people have spent days sleeping in their cars and just as long without a decent meal, uncertain of where they will end up in the coming days, weeks, and months.
“We don’t ask for much, just your passport and some information to show you are who you say you are and that’s it,” Hatem said.
Some people stay only a few days, moving on quickly to join family abroad, but others have stayed since the beginning of the war. Many said they just want to go home. Many fear they may never will.
“We don’t have plans because of course we want to go home,” said Vira. “Of course if our home will be Russia then we are not going to go there. It is difficult because some people don’t understand that it’s not easy to make a decision. Like everyone asks, ‘where are you going next?’”
Now several weeks into the operation, a rhythm has set in. The halls and lobbies are quiet most of the day, but the energy swells every so often, especially around dinner time. The lobbies of the two buildings become lively and almost chaotic.
Children, always quick to make friends, criss-cross the common areas. They pursue each other every which way, running circles around their parents chatting with other adults, dodging between the strides of volunteers hauling in boxes of dry goods, bottles of water, and hot meals.
Residents return after their days out in town, grabbing cups of coffee and bites to eat from the tables in the lobby. New arrivals queue at the main office door to be processed. Volunteers from local search and rescue organization USVAR carry their bags and show them to their rooms. Others gather at tables and on couches to chat.
Artyom talks to a USVAR volunteer.
The first few days of the war were even more hectic, Hatem said.
“Man, I’m telling you, I didn’t sleep for the first 72 hours,” he said. “I came here and didn’t go home for three days.”
Hatem is studying dentistry at the school and is himself a refugee from Yemen. He’s lived in Romania for about four years. He’s well known around the school and was asked to get involved with the assistance effort because organizers rightly thought he could relate to the refugees’ experiences.
“When they arrive, I know what they’ll ask: ’Who are you and why are you helping me? What should I do? Where should I go?’” he said.
Not long after turning up at the dorms, Hatem was contacted by Washington, D.C.-based World Central Kitchen to organize meals for the operation. The organization supplies 400 meals a day for the refugee center. It’s crucial assistance.
“Come here when people first show up and look at their eyes, tell me what you see,” Hatem said. “After a hot meal, a shower, you see how they relax, you see how their mood changes.”
Hatem and Liliana in one of the lobby offices.
There are people here from all around Ukraine, but most of them come from Odessa Oblast, just across the border along the Black Sea in southern Ukraine. Most are young women who come with their children and most are primarily Russian-speakers.
Psychology student Maria arrived with her family, including son Miroslav, early in March from Kherson, a city just north of Crimea and one of the first cities that Russia hit when it launched its invasion.
The Russian military captured the city early in the conflict and has since turned its attention north to the city of Mykolaiv, where civilian casualties have become a near-daily occurrence. Some of Maria’s family remains in Kherson, including her grandfather.
“I stay in touch with them and they tell me it is quiet now, but it’s still scary,” she said through an interpreter. “One day and you know, you could die.”
Out on a balcony at Cămin C.
Most experts and locals in the first weeks of the war agreed the Russian military would attempt to capture Mykolaiv and then push toward the city of Odessa in support of an expected amphibious assault. Odessites fortified their city over the last several weeks and many non-combatants fled for the nearby Romanian border.
Other Ukrainians have come from across the country. Borysko is from a small town outside Sumy, a nearly 700-mile drive northeast at the Russian border. That area was also an early target of the Russian military.
Fighting kept him and his family at home all hours of the day, but they fled after Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to open a civilian evacuation corridor. He said he was able to leave Ukraine before the government barred military-age men from leaving the country and spent a few weeks in neighboring Moldova before crossing into Romania and turning up at the dorms.
Some of his friends have died fighting back home and a friend recently told him over the phone that Russian soldiers and their Chechen volunteer allies broke into his home and took what food his family left. His grandfather also remains at home.
Borysko and his family want to either go to the United States or Canada, but are having trouble navigating the process. He and his father spoke to lawyers volunteering at the dorms, but U.S. and Canadian immigration were outside their area of expertise.
The volunteer lawyers work out of a first-floor bedroom in Cămin C. Most people come with questions about asylum or temporary protection in Romania or abroad. Roughly one in seven people as of late March have requested asylum or temporary protection in Romania. Most others head elsewhere in Europe.
“Some want to go to the U.K., to Germany, or to Poland because some of their family has fled to Poland, but there are also [a lot of them] who choose to stay in this area because it’s close to Ukraine and they hope that until they are obligated to request asylum, the war will be over and they can go back home,” volunteer attorney Dragos Palade said.
Sitting in the lobby.
The Council of Europe in early March introduced temporary protection across the European Union for refugees fleeing the war in Ukraine. While asylum must be applied for and granted on an individual basis, temporary protection does not require individual applications.
The program is specifically designed to alleviate national asylum systems and include the rights of “residence, access to the labour market and housing, medical assistance, and access to education for children,” according to the Council of Europe.
Canada has adopted a special “authorization for emergency travel” program that offers three-year visitor visas to Ukrainian nationals. The program is for “temporary safe harbour in Canada, until it is safe to return to Ukraine,” according to the Canadian government. The U.S. government has a limited program to accept 100,000 refugees.
The choice of where to go and what to do is not an easy one. The war has complicated the plans of Nuri and her family, who planned to move abroad even before the war started.
Nuri arrived in Galați from Kropyvnytskyi in the second week of March along with her husband, her son, her brother in law and his family and her father-in-law. They listened to explosions and sirens for five days before deciding to leave. They packed up a few suitcases of clothes and like many people first fled to Moldova, from which they eventually made it to Galați.
Her own parents arrived about a week later. They had spent a few days in Moldova, but had trouble finding decent food and lodging. The typically six-hour journey from Kropyvnytskyi to the Moldovan border took two days and they slept in the car.
The extended family lives in two dorm rooms across the hall from each other in Cămin B. Their doors are often open and there is a near constant flow of family members between the rooms. It makes the second floor hallway feel homey.
Nuri’s family members in the Cămin B lobby.
The first time we spoke, Nuri said the family plans to follow through with pre-war plans to move to Germany, but after hearing they would need to stay there for three years to get a permanent visa, they’re having second thoughts.
Nuri is studying the English and German languages as well as literature at university in her hometown. She’s set to graduate this year and so cannot commit to living in Germany for three years, but she and her family have also ruled out moving back to Ukraine long-term. They want to go back to sell their homes, cars, and other belongings. Then they’ll set off for good.
“We don’t want to plan our future in Ukraine, it’s very difficult and we don’t know what’s going to happen in a year or the next five years,” Nuri said. “We need to take care of the children.”
Her parents were born in Azerbaijan and could go back there, a country they left decades ago because of political instability and a poor job market. They could rejoin their extended families there, but good work remains hard to come by. For now they plan to stay in Romania. Nuri is planning to start working at a factory in town offering work to refugees.
Nuri’s neighbors in Cămin B also hope to wait out the war. They arrived in the first week of March from their homes just across the Ukrainian border. The two sisters and their children left after hearing explosions at a nearby airfield. The men in the family remain in Ukraine, barred from leaving their country by national decree: Dans la prison des frontiers.
“We want to return to Ukraine, to our homes, our husbands and our animals are there,” Anna said.
Many people put on a smile when they speak to a journalist, but worried faces are abundant. You see the worry on the faces of women speaking in hushed tones over cigarettes on the balconies and talking on the phone at the end of hallways and in the corners of rooms.
People are uncertain about their futures, uncertain over the fate of their loved ones back in Ukraine, and uncertain for the future of their country.
A typical scene at the Cămin C lobby.
Vira wonders what she may find when she returns to her homeland, if she ever does. She has family and went to school in the coastal city of Mariupol, a Ukrainian stronghold at the border of the self-declared, Russia-backed People’s Republic of Donetsk.
The Russian military besieged the city early on in the conflict and has pounded it harder with artillery than any other city in the country. They are now engaged in a brutal street-to-street fight with Ukrainian forces there and appear intent to make an example out of a city considered the home of ultranationalist National Guard detachment Azov Batallion.
“They destroyed my school, it does not exist anymore,” Vira said. “It was one of the best schools in Ukraine. They had just rebuilt it.”
As of mid-March, she hadn’t heard from her family in Mariupol in two weeks. Utilities, including cell and phone service, have long been cut in the city. Like so many others here, she hopes to wait out the war and return home. But money is a finite resource and she said she knows she may be forced to make a longer term decision.
“We would love to accept it all like some adventure, some nice trip, but every adventure has an end,” Vira said. “You go home to your comforts, to your favorite bed, to your kitchen, and your stuff.”
The two dorms can host up to 260 people and are nearly at capacity. Six weeks into the conflict, donations are tapering off, but the need remains.
Artyom and friends.
Russian negotiators in late March agreed to ceasefires in several areas around Kyiv and the north and the military effectively abandoned its offensive in northern Ukraine, but made no mention of southern cities like Mykolaiv, Kherson, or Mariupol — now the Russian military is concentrating its military might in the country’s east and south, where it has been far more effective fighting Ukrainian forces.
Organizers are prepared to expand the operation if there is a surge of refugees.
“We don’t know how long [the war] will go on,” Hatem said. “If there is a need we will open another building. We will not leave them on the street.”
The damage for many has already been done — family and friends are dead, homes and entire cities destroyed, and plans for the future abandoned. Like millions of their compatriots, many people who have sheltered at Dunărea de Jos University live in limbo, faced with choices that were unimaginable just a couple of months ago.
“You don’t want to go far because then you have to go far to come back, but also you look at what’s going on and you feel ‘I have to move forward,’ but where?” Vira said. “Now it’s complicated. It’s not an adventure, maybe it’s forever.”
