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Comment by scrose | Hacker News Reader

On the topic of helping, does anyone have ideas/tips on how to help refugees attempting to communicate with the embassies in another country for refugee status/assistance?

I have extended family from Ukraine that speaks very little English and also can’t communicate in the countries native language that they fled to, but my partner and I cannot call those embassies to help relay information because we’re in the USA and our numbers don’t work. We have a few roundabout ideas to try(ie call the family on WhatsApp and be on speakerphone), but we’re wondering if anyone has experience doing this or knows of any agencies on the ground that are providing help around this?

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Look for established and older Ukrainian diaspora groups in the country in question. Also many of the countries have established portals for refugees. Try to vet any helpers, unfortunately there are criminals that prey on refugees

If it's any help, I am helping to organise for the parents of my Ukranian friend to move to Bulgaria. And possibly a few other friends. It's picturesque in the mountains and Russian is widely spoken. Renting an appartment here is about 150 EUR/mo. If they are Russian speakers, they will have a bit easier time here than Poland, language-wise. Call me if I can help: +359 879 340194.

The overall campaign in Bulgaria was started and still lead by here:

www.bg4ua.com

There is now also some official governmental site: https://ukraine.gov.bg/

Donations are here.. about ~~130K so far, target is 0.5-1M :

https://platformata.bg/en/kauzi/1544:bg4ua/details/campaign....

Thanks for the link. We have arranged for about 20 studio appartments to be made available for Ukranians, and, it's possible we could organise more. I submitted details to the google form on bg4ua website. Please give me a call to see what else we can do, if you are involved with them or otherwise, I'm up late (+359 879 340194).

You could just contact Polish organization (if they are in Poland) if u want i can link few organizations.

Right now we have about 2milion UA refugees in Poland and about 2-3 million immigrants so they should be able to have normal life for a short period of time and communicate in Russian/Ukrainian in most places cause of enormous polish efforts otherwise they should go to Poland and from there you could start supporting them.

What do you mean "we’re in the USA and our numbers don’t work"?

There are Facebook groups here in Denmark seeking Ukrainian speakers etc, there might be ones for the country you need.

Locally we have Ukrainian (and Russian) Facebook groups full with people willing to help for such things. For anything else I've been using the speakerphone workaround.

What countries? If you've got fast internet, I've used skype international calling quite successfully before. Supported in quite a few places. Used it when I had to 'locally' call NZ from Japan once.

https://www.skype.com/en/international-calls/

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