When war broke out in Ukraine in the middle of history Ph.D. candidate Sam Finkelman’s yearlong research trip to Russia, Hungary, and Ukraine, he spent the first week feeling helpless, frantically looking at his phone in disbelief from his apartment in Budapest.
“Then it hit me. I’m in a country next to Ukraine where there’s this war happening; Ukraine’s a country I care deeply about; I have a lot of friends and loved ones there; and there’s this massive refugee crisis,” he says. “There’s something I can do.”
What started off as a rental car trip to the Ukrainian border to transport refugees has led to the creation of a nonprofit organization delivering medical supplies and tactical gear into the heart of Ukraine. Finkelman and his new colleagues have named the organization Zhyty Khochu, meaning “I Want to Live,” inspired by a line from a famous 1890 Ukrainian work by Lesya Ukrainka called “Contra Spem Spero!”
Finkelman, who had arrived in Budapest from Moscow in January, was living with an American friend, Weyland Joyner. The two of them planned to rent the car to head to the border. Before their trip, they met up with acquaintance Yuliah Kurbatova who needed a place to stay in Budapest. She connected them to Liza Rubchynskaya, who had been collecting medical supplies and needed them transported to Ukrainian hospitals. Rather than bring an empty car to pick up refugees, they could bring a car full of much-needed supplies.
“Once we met Liza, everything fell into place because she has incredible medical knowledge and connections with Ukrainian hospitals, maternal wards, and orphanages. So she started getting us lists,” he says.
The new friend group scurried around Budapest to various pharmacies trying to fill prescriptions from hospitals in Ukraine before their first run to the border. Rubchynskaya’s sister Karina was on the ground in Kyiv, traveling to hospitals, getting lists of supplies and texting them to her sister.
“It was a learning experience for all of us to realize where to get that stuff in Hungary. We started teaming up with more Hungarian friends who could help and quickly began realizing how many languages were involved: both national languages like Ukrainian, Russian, Hungarian and English, but also the language of medical knowledge,” he says. “Then, as we started loading up on defense and supply gear, there was a whole other facet of words in Russian that I never thought I would need, from ‘tourniquet’ to ‘bulletproof vest.’”
On March 2, they crossed the Hungarian border into Uzhhorod, Ukraine, to drop off the first batch of medical supplies and connect with the five refugees they were transporting to Budapest. There were a grandmother from Kharkiv and her twin 13-year-old granddaughters, whom she was raising after their mother’s death, and an elderly woman and her adult daughter from Odesa.
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