Erik Heinonen helps refugees people who are fleeing from war or natural disasters in his job working for Catholic Relief Services. Heinonen, who grew up in Eugene, has been living in Ukraine for the last few years. Now, he and his family have fled the war in Ukraine and are living in Romania as refugees themselves. Heinonen joins us to talk about what he has learned.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud, I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to Erik Heinonen. He grew up in Eugene, and has spent years helping people who were fleeing from war or natural disasters in his job for Catholic Relief Services. That work took him to Greece, Nigeria, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Four years ago, he moved to Ukraine, to the city of Irpin, which is outside of Kiev. Life was good. Last summer, he and his wife had a baby. Then came the war, and after helping other refugees, Heinonen became displaced himself. In February, Heinonen and his wife and baby, along with his step daughter and mother in law, fled to Romania where they remain. Heinonen wrote about his experiences recently for Mother Jones, and he joins us now. Erik Heinonen, thanks very much for making time for us.
Erik Heinonen: You’re very welcome. Good to be with you.
Miller: How are you and your family doing today?
Heinonen: Today we’re doing okay. She just turned 10 months, and is dealing with some gums that are bothering her quite a bit, and it’s making life a little tough, but overall we’re doing okay. Carrying on with life as best we can here, watching what’s going on back at home which is really difficult, but trying to focus on the little things here to just keep moving forward. Focus on the things we can control.
Miller: When you say back home, back home at this point is Irpin, is Ukraine?
Heinonen: Yeah, exactly back home is Irpin. But I think for us, Ukraine definitely goes beyond Irpin. My wife is from Donetsk, step daughter and mother-in-law came from there, they had to leave in 2016 because of the state of the violence there. The war has been going on since 2014, so home is partly for them there. And then for me, I started working in Ukraine in 2014 in Kharkiv, which is another city that’s been hit really hard by rocket attacks and shelling the last six weeks. I’ve worked in a lot of places in the east, so all these places, all these names that are coming through, from Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Izium, Kharkiv, Sievierodonetsk. Those are all places that I’ve been, have worked, lived in some of them as well. So home, it means Irpin, but it’s all of Ukraine for us to some degree.
Miller: How did you and your wife decide to live in Irpin?
Heinonen: So my wife, with her mom and her daughter, decided it was time to go a couple of years ago. And I had been working in Ukraine from 2014 through 2016 when the conflict was a bit more intense, and then had some postings with my organization in different countries. And I was just wrapping up a mission in Mali in Western Africa, and we’d been doing long distance for a while, and we were ready to try and start a life together, and hopefully in the same place. So we kind of went about the business of finding a place that felt like it would fit us well and what we were hoping to build together in Ukraine. Like a lot of us, we put together a spreadsheet, figured out our criteria, and started looking at different neighborhoods and towns and suburbs just outside of Kiev, and ended up with Irpin. We just fell in love with the city, and really lucked out, found a house that really fit our needs, fit what we were looking for at the time and got started, once we’re able to purchase the house, and got started on building a life there.
Miller: What was life like before the war? Before the war arrived there, I should say.
Heinonen: It sounds pretty similar to a lot of folks. The things we were thinking about was finding a group to walk the dogs with, buying bicycles. We were reseeding the lawn, leveling it out and reseeding it so when baby came, we’d have a good place for him or her, turned out to be her, to play. I wanted to build a little gazebo in the yard. Finishing the renovations, getting stepdaughter into school there in Irpin. Took a little while, but we found a good spot. Very normal life. Hoping to get back to Oregon to see my parents after the pandemic, and hadn’t had a chance to see them for almost two years. So that’s what we were thinking about really, up until late fall, was these very simple plans of continuing to build life together, and thinking about kind of getting back into something more normal after the pandemic.
And then you know things started to take a change there in October, November with the military build up. And here we are now.
Miller: So as troops were massing all along the border, and as US authorities were saying Putin means war, what was your thinking as a family? And how did you decide it was time to leave your home?
Heinonen: We were definitely watching closely, really from the beginning in November. Again, my wife, having lived through war with her family once, very attuned to what it means. That meant understanding what does incoming and outgoing rocket fire sound like, being very ready to hide or shelter in place, that had been part of her life before. And we understand what it means to have Russia as a neighbor. So we were watching closely, and trying to just sort of read the tea leaves like everybody else, what we understood from the mainstream media, what was coming through social media, and taking some precautions.
Part of my work is, at times, related to disaster risk reduction, which is all about being ready and resilient in times of disaster, and preparing communities for the things that may come, usually in places where there’s natural disasters like hurricanes and typhoons that happen fairly regularly. So I was taking a little bit of that framework and applying it to our situation, and thinking through what do we need to have ready in case we need to shelter in place, if this goes in the wrong direction, here at home, or if we need to leave the country, having everything ready to go. So we were starting to work on that stuff already in December and January, hoping that things would not lead to conflict.
But the further we got, the worse it seemed to be. There wasn’t any particular trigger that said okay, here’s the thing that happens and now you need to go. But there were enough signs that we’re looking pretty ominous come late January, early February that we started thinking it might be a good idea to relocate to Western Ukraine. Once the US embassy staff was evacuated and we started to see pretty increasingly severe warnings from the State Department, the Secretary of State, we decided okay, this is going to be not easy, but let’s get packed. We’re gonna go to Western Ukraine, and try and ride things out here and hope it all goes in the right direction, in the direction of peace. We left on February 14th, and packed up the car and the dogs in the back, got a roof box and put what we could in there, got everybody in the car, closed up the house, grabbed one of the Ukrainian flags we had off the porch, stuck it in the car, and drove off.
Miller: And everybody was you, your wife, your baby, your mother-in-law, and your step daughter, and two dogs?
Heinonen: Yeah, five people, two dogs. And what we could fit in the roof box there. That’s what we had. We were all hoping that this will be done, and again, that we’ll get to a place where we can come back home within 10 days or two weeks. Booked a place for two weeks, headed out, and made the 10 hour trip to Western Ukraine. And then spent the next I guess 10 days there, watching the news and hoping that peace would prevail in the end. And as we know, that wasn’t the case.
Miller: You wrote in your essay from Mother Jones that being an American citizen meant that you were allowed to leave Ukraine. Otherwise, given that you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 60, that wouldn’t have been possible. What kind of emotions did you wrestle with as you left?
Heinonen: Yeah, that’s a hard one. The people that we see here in Romania, the people that I work with, something like 85% of the people who come across the border into Romania are women and children. Very few men are allowed to leave the country, and it’s generally just in cases where they’re accompanying somebody, a pregnant woman or people who have disabilities and need a caregiver to be with them. So yeah, I am in the minority. And I could feel even as we were waiting to cross the border, it was a process that took us three days to make it across, how do people relate to me, a male aged 18 to 60 who was leaving the country and eventually it would come out in conversation that I was American? But I felt it, and it’s hard.
Miller: What exactly were you feeling? What did you see on the faces or hear from people, from women when they saw that you were leaving?
Heinonen: I don’t know that I picked up anything particular. The people I spoke to, they could hear my accent, that I was clearly not from Ukraine, in the course of conversation understand that I was American, and that, at some level for better or worse, “that’s enough explanation, I get it.”
But it’s tough. People I know closely and people I care dearly about are there, defending their cities, fighting either as part of territorial defense brigades or as members of the Ukrainian armed forces. And I think about them a lot, and obviously hope that they will stay safe in all of this, with an incredible debt of gratitude to them for what they’re doing, to defend the country and defend the people who have remained behind. I don’t know how I’ll fully and sufficiently equate my debt to the people who have stayed behind to defend and to support. But I think about doing the best I can from where I am every day to try and support the people who are here, and be of support however I can to people who are back in Ukraine.
Miller: You have a whole list of questions that you put down in your essay for Mother Jones that you’re dealing with now as a family, everything from very practical considerations to more existential ones. Can you give us a sense for some of those questions?
Heinonen: Yeah. And that’s the thing, as we left, the focus was just to make it to the border and to cross over. And that took a huge mental energy, just because there were so many people leaving all at once, and in the process of getting to the border. The last 8km (about the last 5 miles) took us three days and three nights to get across. So there was just this huge focus on just getting there, and exhaustion of not sleeping, being behind the wheel of the car for so long with the family there. But once we crossed, we realized, started thinking about and kind of coming out of the exhaustion, we’ve got a lot of things that we’re gonna have to figure out here. Olesa, our eleven year old, is in school. Somehow, she’s got to finish fifth grade. Our nine month old, Yaroslava, she’s doing okay from a health standpoint, but she needs to be going to her monthly checkups. We’ve got some medications we need to find for her, there’s medications we need to find for my wife and for my mother in law.
Big question, where are we going to live? I was able to find something on Booking.com for a while, and then after that, where do we stay the next two weeks, in the next four weeks, in the next four months? We’ve got two dogs. That makes it harder to find a place to live. Not really sure where we need to even be. And at the time, not really understanding too, can we go back in three weeks? Is the war going to end quickly enough that going back to Ukraine, whether it’s to Irpin or someplace else, is feasible? And then all sorts of other small questions, like we leave with winter clothes, at some point, it’s gonna get warm again. Car insurance in a new country. And doing all this in Romanian. I do speak Romanian, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova next door. What I spoke 15 years ago is enough to get us through life here, but it’s a whole new big challenge to deal with a lot of the daily tasks if I’m not around. My wife speaks English well, but that can only get you so far here in Romania.
Miller: If I’d asked you in the past what refugees and displaced people need most, what you’d understood based on the experience you had based on the work you’ve done as an aid worker, what would you have said?
Heinonen: You know, you go back to the very most basic needs that we think of, and sort of the general hierarchy: you need to make sure that people have access to shelter, food and water, and we in the humanitarian world and the work we do spend a lot of energy and time and resources into developing the best ways to provide those types of services in different contexts, ranging from after hurricanes and earthquakes to protracted conflicts, and to situations like Ukraine we’re seeing now. That’s what we focus on a lot. And we understand that mental health and psychosocial health is important, but we think frequently it’s not viewed as the first thing to be thinking about. We’re really focused on those more material needs.
And those are important, because you have to meet those needs or else people are gonna be in a real bad situation. But I’ve definitely felt here how heavy the weight of the mental burden can be, of the stress of trying to solve these problems for your family, for yourself, and many of them at the same time. But also the stress and the weight of what’s going on back at home, being worried about family members, being worried about friends, neighbors, colleagues, and the sort of lack of control that you have in all of that. And in the world of social media, it becomes really hard, because you can’t tear yourself away from it. You’re in contact with people, you’re living what they’re living to a degree, while dealing with what you’re dealing with. Just the mental side of it is really difficult. And it takes a while for people to get into a place of stability, to really start even thinking about some of these other needs that they’re going to need to attend to. So that’s something I definitely appreciate in a new way, how hard it is to deal with the mental side of displacement?
Miller: Maybe it’s still early yet, but do you have a sense how your own personal experience with fleeing your home with your family, fleeing war, if it’s going to change the way you provide help to other people?
Heinonen: I think we do, in this humanitarian world, we do a reasonable job of thinking through these aspects of psychosocial stress and helping meet people’s needs for mental health. We try. But for me, it will be something that I will continue to try to understand better, and how to integrate better into my own work.
And also, to really just keep in mind when I do have the chance to sit down and speak with people who have gone through crisis, have gone through conflict- I studied anthropology many, many years ago, and thinking from that perspective has always, to me, felt very helpful in how I approach to work. But I think this has really driven home the point of how important it is to engage in dialogue, and be there in solidarity with people, to understand their situation. And that just simply listening and being there to have a conversation can be incredibly powerful and meaningful for people who have gone through this type of situation. So, reinforcement of just how important that element of the work is, of listening and being present with people.
Miller: What would it take for you and your family to go back to Irpin?
Heinonen: Just about every person that I’ve talked to here in Iași, Romania, where we’re living now, friends I’ve been chatting with, people I’ve met in other places I’ve visited in Romania, basically everyone says the same thing: We want to go home. We want to go home. For us, that’s what we want as well. When we can do it is a question that we talk about just about every day. Our city was liberated right towards the end of March. Unfortunately, also a site of atrocities. We’re just next door to Bucha, and we’ve seen, unfortunately, many of the same things. A large part of the city has been destroyed. Many, many, many homes lost, apartment blocks lost. And there’s been a lot of mining, mines left throughout our town, and other bits and pieces of artillery shells that haven’t exploded, that may still be a threat.
The city itself, the mayor’s office has been doing an incredible job of getting the city cleaned up, cleaning up the streets, starting to repair the literally hundreds of miles of power lines and water mains and gas lines that have been damaged to get basic services back up and running. That’ll be a huge step for the city, and it will allow a lot of people to come back. The longer term question is mines, and safety. So for us, we want to go back as soon as we can. But we understand that it’s not going to be soon, and that it’s important that it be safe before we do that.
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