^ Kherson Oblast, Ukraine | June 11th, 2023
Stuck pt. 1:
The roads into many of these town are still submerged, leaving small farm paths as the only option to access the villages. A rain storm mitigated the cruel heat of previous days and blanketed the skies diminishing some of the risk of aerial detection and shelling. Yet unfortunately, it also turned the farm paths into a soup of thick mud and debris, with the ever present threat of mines waiting silently off the main road. On a run with @bear_ukraine to an isolated village in Kherson Oblast.
Stuck pt. 2: The smaller cars got out with the help of brute force and mud sodden aid workers. But the water truck, laden with 1000L of drinking water, wasn’t budging. We called trucks to come help. But when they arrived, even they struggled to move the water laden sprinter.
Then, in a moment straight out of a dark comedy, an ancient Lada came puttering over the hill crest, bouncing wildly over the mud ruts and bumps, engine smoking intermittently. The driver, a young local, came up laughing “I’ll get you out.” And despite how improbable it seemed, my first thought was “this fucker is gonna do it.”
The Lada hooked up to our tow rope and took off, engine wildly revving, billowing thick white smoke. And after a few tugs, the tiny Lada pulled the sprinter, 1000L of l water and all, out of the mud and on the way to the small village. The delivery would go on despite it all.
The team @bear_ukraine finished the days task, installed a new water tank and delivered their daily water drop.
The road out of town was an equally mud laden farm backroad through a field potentially hiding unexplored ordinances or mines. To leave the city, @frente_brazucra called in @nordoganimalrescue, whopulled us at breakneck speeds through the mud, a moment best described as treacherous given that we could see nothing through the mud covered windshield. When we made it to the other side, we had a momentary sigh of relief, and began to clean the windshield.