Name of the initiative: "Baking with love"
The small village of Polyana became the center of the volunteer movement in the Klishkovets community of Bukovyna. Thanks to the SCLR program, the activists of the village received a micro-grant for the purchase of equipment and products for cooking for hospitals and rest camps for IDP children, and a public organization started operating here.
In many yards in Polyana, even in the first months of the war, people installed large stoves on their own. On them are cauldrons, autoclaves on improvised wood stoves, nearby are pyramids of cans and plastic containers. Every week, they bake mountains of cakes, bagels and pizzas together, twist hundreds of cans of stews, salads and pates, buckets of cabbage rolls and cutlets, bunderiki, baba and much more.Then all this is packed in volunteer bags and taken to hospitals in Chernivtsi and other regions. Some of the goodies are given to children - they come to the picturesque Polyana from the surrounding villages for day camps - as well as to displaced persons.
- As soon as the war started, 45 people came to us from Severodonetsk, - recalls local resident Natalia Guivan. - It was so scary: people were running away, they lost everything, they were saved with some small scraps. They lived in the church for more than a year. Then we decided to unite in the village and prepare food for them. Later, several families moved to separate houses. And we realized that now there is a greater need for hospitals, for the wounded. Started working for them.
The initiator of the project, Pavlina Klyus, has been working in Italy for more than 20 years. But as soon as she heard about the war on the 22nd, she immediately hurried home, because her hands are needed more here. Now her house is a real bakery: women knead the dough in old-fashioned nightstands, despite the heat, throw wood into the oven in the yard. Local housewives work side by side with displaced women from Luhansk region.
On weekends, local youth gather around the stove in the church yard. Hundreds of home-made pizzas are baked per day, which are then taken to those who are in the most difficult situation. They also treat children - they constantly went to Polyana for day camps in the summer.
The project "Baking with love" became the first successful initiative of the local public organization "Act Now". "Thanks to this initiative, our organization tried its hand at project activities," says its head, Roman Petrashishen. "We learned how to plan and implement events, keep financial records, and report. This became a significant support for the volunteers of our village. Now we are planning the next projects together."
