In the four years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Peterborough native Chloë Black has embarked on six humanitarian aid trips to the war-torn county.
“I didn’t anticipate how much you fall in love with the country and the people,” Black tells kawarthaNOW over Zoom from Kharkiv. “You realize once you go back (home to Canada), no matter how good or bad things are going over here (in Ukraine), there’s just this constant pull to want to come back and help.”
When Black thinks back to when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, there was a culmination of factors that led to her decision to leave the comfort of home to visit Ukraine the first time — despite having no ancestral connections to the country and no military background or experience in a war zone.
“Although I’ve never had any desire to be in the military, at all, I’ve always had a lot of admiration for those generations whose incredible sacrifices I always feel like we all got to profit off of,” Black says. “They were sort of a societal sacrifice, unlike a lot of wars that came after.”
A former competitive cyclist and Peterborough Sports Hall of Fame inductee, Black was in Tucson, Arizona during the pandemic working alongside someone who came from a small town in Ukraine that had been under occupation for about one month. He hadn’t had any contact with his family, and Black says she kept waiting for the world to respond in the way she imagined they did during World War II — but that didn’t happen.
“I remember having these conflicting moments in my head where everything changed,” she says. “I kept yelling at the world like, ‘Why aren’t we doing anything? Why is nobody doing anything?’ We’re watching, saying it’s terrible, and we’re reporting it, but nobody’s doing anything.”
Then, a switch flipped when Black realized she couldn’t be upset at the rest of the world if she wasn’t prepared to do something herself.
“I had those moments where I think I’ve got a good life and things are comfortable and I’m starting to get ahead in life, and then I would feel guilty because so did the people here (in Ukraine),” she recalls. “They didn’t choose this. They didn’t plan for their house to be destroyed, or their children to get killed, or their city to be occupied.”
Though initially Black thought she’d do humanitarian aid, seeing many people in animal rescues trying to move pets to avoid the bombings struck a chord with her.
“That’s when my heart just completely jumped out of my chest. I hadn’t even really thought about the fact that there’s all these animals that have no idea what’s going on — and that’s just domestic animals. I think it’s hard enough to get help for stray animals when there’s not a war.”
That’s what Black is doing now in Kharkiv, living in the apartment of a friend whose daughter she met in Peterborough. She provides care in an animal shelter but, in a few weeks, she’ll be returning to Kyiv where she will work once again with Ukrainian Patriot, an organization that provides aid to frontline defenders and civilians living with the constant threat of shelling.
“A lot of their focus has been just trying to bring some of the kids a little bit of trauma therapy, and really just helping them to get out of the mindset that they have to be in in order to be in an area that’s so close to the front lines,” Black says.
“There are some kids that since COVID have not actually been into a physical classroom. Some kids can, if they have a bomb shelter, but especially kids in the east — it’s too easy to target a school. So, they either have to have a bomb shelter in the school or they just do online learning.”
Through Ukrainian Patriot, Black will be engaging kids in dance and art activities, English classes, and opportunities to just interact with each other. Prior to her departure from Peterborough, she reached out to the community to collect toques, mittens, colouring books, crayons, pencils, and other gifts she could bring for the children.
“It was pretty amazing actually. I had people literally walking up to me in social settings and just handing me a bag full of stuff,” she says. “They (Ukraine Patriot) have what’s called a tickle trunk with all the kids’ stuff in it, and basically I was able to take all the stuff from that suitcase and just fill the tickle trunk.”
During her first trip to Ukraine, Black says she “couldn’t have imagined it getting darker” but was proven wrong during subsequent trips. However, she says she has since seen progress in Ukraine, including a “more confident and self-assured” military.
As for what Black is seeing on the ground during this trip, she says the Ukrainian people remain resilient, though they’re exhausted and worn out from the power failures that make it hard to plan anything.
“These are things that could happen anywhere, but it happens here all the time and every day,” she points out. “While I’ve seen every level of exasperation in people that are normally very resilient and normally very ‘I can figure this out’ or ‘We’ll do something else’, they just look done.”
As for Russia’s constant bombing with missiles and drones, Black says “It’s a tactic and it’s working in that it’s wearing people down,” but that Ukraine is not going to give in.
“I just don’t think anyone can really understand how they won’t quit, and they won’t stop fighting to get their territory back or their children back, or their prisoners of war back,” she says. “This is just so unnecessary — so much unnecessary death and destruction — because it’s never going to end that way that Putin wants it to. It’s just not. It’s just going to be a long, death-filled process, that’s all.”
Black explains that life near the front lines has become so normalized that most people don’t even seek refuge in bomb shelters when the air-raid alarms sound anymore. Last year, Kharkiv averaged about five alarms per day (an alarm even sounded during Black’s Zoom call with kawarthaNOW).
“If there’s an air alert, you go ‘Well, I hope it’s not here’ because it’s just so much that you can’t possibly just keep running downstairs every single time,” Black says. “It’s been over a year of these really heavy attacks in the big urban centres, and it’s been four years of these alerts going off constantly. You can’t live like that. Running for the shelter is not really what people do, and it’s not because they’re trying to be stoic about it — you just can’t live like this.”
If you want to show support to Ukraine, Black suggests telling your elected officials you approve of their support and, even though it sounds small, don’t stop flying your Ukrainian flags. Another way to offer aid from home is to purchase Ukrainian products.
“The stores are operating as best they can and they’re pretty well stocked,” Black says. “They’ve done a fantastic job. Even with all these power outages, you hear generators every morning so the coffee shops can open. No matter what, they will get their generator going and serve you a hot cup of coffee.”
To anyone thinking about volunteering in Ukraine, Black says “you won’t regret it.”
“It’s really amazing thing to be part of a volunteer community, especially in a place where it needs you so desperately,” she says. “When I first came here, I didn’t know anything about Ukraine. I (still) don’t know how to speak the language — I’m learning very slowly how to say a few things. This shows how naive I was, but I wasn’t expecting it to be so much like home.”
If Black has one message to send back home, it’s to warn Canadians to be careful about making assumptions, noting “The bottom line is we don’t want anyone outside of our country telling us how to run our country” and that Ukrainians feel the same.
“Democracies are complex, and they’re complicated and they’re ugly at times, and they don’t always look pretty,” she says. “When people look at Ukraine they should think about themselves, because all they are wanting is what we would want — which is a right to have self-determination.”
If you’d like to hear more about Black’s work, she will be doing a presentation during a fundraiser for Ukraine on Thursday, June 11 at the Market Hall Performing Arts Centre in downtown Peterborough. Her father Alan Black will be performing, as well as Tony D (Guitarro) from MonkeyJunk. More details and ticket sales will be announced soon.
