by Hayley Smith, LHI Founder/Director
Eric held a bag of packaged grain up to my face and exclaimed, “Gretchka!”
“Gretch—what now?”
“It’s called Gretchka. It’s a grain, and you’ll never find a Ukrainian home without it. When the war started, it’s one of the first things that flew off of the shelves. It is a Ukrainian staple and also a comfort food. That’s why we put it in our food boxes.”
Gretchka, or buckwheat porridge, looks a little different from my comfort food of fries dipped in a Wendy’s Frosty, but I trust it’s just as delicious. And it is an invaluable addition to the food boxes that we were assembling for a large aid distribution that day.
A bag of gretchka.
Eric, our gretchka aficionado, is a Canadian expat who happened to be living in Odessa when the war started, and he jumped right into the war relief efforts. Now he runs a distribution warehouse, which is one of LHI’s 7 Operating Centers in Ukraine. This center is in partnership with Manifest Mira.
The warehouse specializes in making food boxes meant for internally-displaced Ukrainian families in the area. Each food box contains, yes, you guessed it, two packages of gretchka, along with all kinds of other foodstuffs, hygiene items, and some school supplies; basically enough to make distributing the somewhat heavy boxes a workout that would burn off any gretchka eaten for breakfast.
Eric and his team have made a point of sourcing almost all of the goods they distribute from within Ukraine. They work with Ukrainian vendors and suppliers to support the local economy, rather than bringing in goods from outside.
Volunteers packing food aid boxes.
Together with Manifest Mira, we have distributed nearly 3,000 of these boxes to displaced families in 18 different towns in the Odessa region. That’s over 119 tons of aid! Each box is lovingly assembled and distributed by Ukrainian volunteers, some local and some who had fled from places like Mariopul in the East.
My colleague Jaron and I got to tag along with the Manifest Mira team to distribute our food boxes to a handful of homes on the outskirts of Odessa. We met families of all kinds - of different sizes and circumstances. Some had lost homes, others had lost family members. Some had fathers, husbands, or sons fighting on the frontlines. The common theme was that they had no money left to buy the necessities.
A young Ukrainian girl and her brothers examine the contents of their food box.
While I depended 100% on a translator to understand what these families were saying, I found another common theme. I was always able to pick out the word “gretchka,” and see the smile on their faces when they saw it in their food boxes..