Interview with Wioletta Hass-Lipinska, headteacher and activist

Wioletta Hass-Lipinska is a community activist, working with a network of Polish and Scottish organisations to collect and ship supplies for Ukrainian refugees in Poland.

Wioletta! It’s so good to be talking to you — please would you talk my readers through who you are and what you do?

My name is Wioletta Hass-Lipinska, I’m the headteacher at the Perth Polish Saturday School, and I’m an activist. I’m working with the Polish Scouts, Polish shops and a huge number of Polish and Scottish organisations to get supplies to Ukrainian refugees in Poland.

Can you talk us through the urgency of the situation you’re responding to?

We saw thousands of people come through the border. You have to remember that the people who are coming through the border left everything. They have one suitcase. People need clothes, everything.

So, we are working with Polish organisations in Poland to send the stuff people need to the refugee camps in Poland. We’ve collected so many clothes, we actually can’t take any more clothes just now so we are collecting everything but: medicines, baby stuff, formula milk, stuff for babies, wipes and nappies, tampons and pads.

The people coming over this border are mostly women and children. The men’s stuff — the bandages, first aid kits — is going to Ukraine.

This war, it won’t be a week. We have to help people and help people long term. Because the war will have after-effects, people will have nothing.

600,000 people are coming to Poland. And most of them want to go back. They want to be in Poland now because they are afraid for their lives. But their husbands, their brothers, their fathers are in Ukraine. They want to go back and have their home there. We need to help them to survive, give them the high quality life they need just now.

I’ve got Ukrainian friends in bomb shelters and they don’t know if they’re going to live or what will be left for them if they do. I’ve got a friend who’s looking for a psychologist because her children have seen people killed. They needed help immediately and from a Ukrainian speaking psychologist. There are thousands, thousands of people in this situation.

How did this project, in its current form, come about?

A lot of organisations are coming to us. I wouldn’t do anything without people. I want to give a massive thank you to the whole community, all those who donated, the volunteers — they spent their own time, hours and hours sorting. They are very very important.

Kinross Council have helped us more than we could have imagined. So have Scottish business people, so have the midwives at Ninewells. If we work together, we can do more and do better.

We knew that we would have the response from the Polish community, but the response from the Scottish community is huge. I’ve lived in Scotland for ages, I know people will help, but this response is amazing. They don’t see this as “our war”. It’s brought everyone together. I see the faces of people I don’t even know because there have been hundreds. So thank you to all of the community and all of the volunteers.

Do you have any tips on how to organise and how to help in this incredibly practical way?

Put stuff in boxes and label it — e.g., nappies or ladies hygiene. It will save volunteer time. It’s not a job for ten or twenty people, sometimes we have over fifty volunteers sorting things out!

When you’re an activist, it’s every single moment. This is not a job, it’s what is in our hearts. We are constantly learning how to do things better; we started this less than a week ago, and our first donation was from a Scottish lady on Sunday morning. And then we did a Facebook post and people started bringing things to the Polish shops. We’ve constantly had to find new storage.

Finally, is there anything else that you’d like to share with my readers?

I’ve learned that everyone has big human insight. Sometimes when we have our normal lives, we work together, we are friends, we don’t think about the most important things we have. A roof over our heads, food, a safe space for our children. This situation showed all of us that people can work together, give their heart, time and money and thoughts to the people who really need this. We have to remember that this is not the Russian people. Most of them are against war. All of Europe are working together, and we work together with the fantastic people we’ve got around us. It’s not about me. It’s about us.

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