Over the past week and right now people are arriving from Ukraine, refugees of war crossing international borders and arriving in our city, Bergamo. The vast majority of them are women and children.

Desperate people forced to flee from a devastating conflict. People leaving their lives behind them, leaving everything and arriving, shocked, extremely confused and profoundly frightened.

At Sguazzi we are organizing a relief network to offer these people essential and immediate assistance.

We are opening a call centre and organizing a support network made up Ukrainian and Russian language speakers. We need to provide an immediate linguistic and cultural buffer for these families and lessen their already immeasurable trauma.

Behind this initial front-line assistance, we are also establishing psychological and medical support. This infrastructure will be realised from the current operations Sguazzi implemented during the Covid crisis and we are swiftly expanding this.

Only when we will know exactly the specific needs, we will also be organizing collections of general goods to provide to those fleeing the war in Ukraine: food, clothes, shoes etc.

As previously mentioned, most the people escaping the conflict and arriving here in Italy are young children and mothers. We need to organize a network of volunteers that will offer their time to provide the care they need, they deserve.

Public schools have been requested to open their classes to include these children but it is our aim to ease and reduce the enormous hurdles needed to overcome their forced exile. We endeavour to make this transition as smooth as possible for them.

If you would like to help us, we have already opened a fund-raising channel.

Details here: https://www.sguazzi.org/ritmo/

People are crossing borders today, crossing borders in enormous numbers to escape the fighting so it is impossible to say what is needed accurately at this stage. This is a highly dynamic crisis, our assistance must start now!