Pizza For Ukraine: Update

Someday, they’re going to tell stories about all this.  

Do any of you have contacts in the restaurant world, especially owners of pizzerias or sub shops?  I’d welcome an introduction: perhaps we can work together to get more help to Kharkiv.

Pizza donations have been very slow lately. Please do spread the word if you can.

We did manage two amazing deliveries this week. The first was to a shelter in the basement of the ruined Palace Of Labor in central Kharkiv. About 25 families currently live in the basement shelter here.

Jenny from the pizza crew writesJ that "This was our most emotionally vivid trip. It's eerie to look at the ruin where there used to be life. But the people who stayed to live in the basements are very friendly. They don't lose heart, so we shouldn’t, either.”  Jenny’s mother used to work in the Dept. Of Social Policy in City Hall, seen in the background below, though she (like so much of Kharkiv) has been out of work since the start of the war.  

Then, we did our largest delivery so far, bringing lots of pizza to an aid distribution center in the Nemyshlyansky district in northeast Kharkiv. The food kits distributed here are really important, and these centers are just about the only place to get baby food. With sporadic shelling at random times, people avoid gathering in crowds in order to minimize the risk of random catastrophe. Sometimes, though, gatherings cannot be helped. At least we were able to bring pizza.

Feel free to share this with anyone who might be interested; it helps enormously.  Individually, we perhaps cannot bring peace or victory, or even warm and dry homes for half a million people. But we can send pizza. It’s not nothing.