We may have been quiet online and on our socials, but this is not the case on the ground. This May, our team of trained ex-veterans extracted a family of four from Odessa, South-Western Ukraine, and relocated them to Maldova, covering over 2500km across three countries.
To put this into perspective, this is more than seven times the distance from London to Paris (which is only around 344km).
The family included a grandmother with extremely advanced Parkinson’s disease, and a nine-year-old son with Autism. Parkinson’s disease can affect speech and muscles and can often make it harder for a person to communicate. Likewise, Autistic children can have trouble understanding what is happening around them, so our team had to work sensitively with the family and get them to a safer location as quickly and efficiently as we could, whilst causing minimal stress.
For this particular extraction, we were partnered with the Global Autism Project, an international community who are working with displaced Autistic Ukrainians and their families. Our team were asked to facilitate.
Currently, Odessa is a high-risk zone, rigged with deadly mines and experiencing regular explosions. In addition, civilians cannot access necessities, such as gas. Therefore, it was our priority to move this family to safety in Maldova as soon as possible.
As always, we couldn’t have conducted the planning and extraction of this high-risk task so rapidly without the support of F3 Missing Children’s Intelligence Agency, a non-profit organisation designed to reunite families with their children.
To find out more about our partners, visit their pages here: https://nocaseiscold.org and https://globalautismproject.org
