Our mission has evolved! We maintain continuous, direct communication with individuals and organizations on the ground in Ukraine, striving to gain real-time insight into their needs and requirements. This allows us to ensure that our actions have the most significant impact possible.

During our mission to Ukraine last year, our dedicated team collaborated closely with the “Light of the World” Christian church in Reni. This remarkable church is actively engaged in a wide array of support activities, not only for their own community but also for the numerous refugees in their vicinity.

One of their many remarkable initiatives is the provision of daycare, education, and recreational facilities for children and young adults. We aim to place these vital services at the forefront of our upcoming mission!

Together with the inspiring Michele, the leader of this community, we have carefully assessed their needs and formulated the following mission objectives.

Background:
We first visited Reni during our spring deployment in 2023.
A local contact introduced us to Mrs. Michelle Potgieter. She is the head of the “Light for the World” Christian Church. She also owns a large building in the center of Reni. The building houses a coffee shop on the ground floor but the upper 3 floors are used for all kinds of community outreach functions. They run daycare services for children, provide all kinds of support services for IDP’s, host schools and training courses and much more. This is also the building where we ran pop-up medical clinics.

Need:
Michelle and her church group are heavily involved in providing the disadvantaged demographic of the city and surrounding areas as well as hosting and helping the IDP’s in the area.

The demand on their services has grown significantly since the start of the war in 2022. One of the many challenges is reliable communications. Regular rocket attacks as well as repeated Russian cyber attacks have disabled telecoms services for long periods.
In addition to telecom outages there are also frequent power outages. These are due both by the rocket attacks on the city and surrounding areas as well as attacks on power plants further away which service the area.

The above needs can be addressed by installing a dedicated satellite internet service which is independent of the nationwide telecoms infrastructure. Additionally the building above the Light Cafe can be fitted out with a robust wifi network. A reliable and redundant power supply can be provided by installing solar panels on the roof which power one or multiple large battery packs. 

Tasks:

• Installation of Starlink terminal on roof of building located at 160 June 28th Street, Reni.
• Install indoor wifi access points on all floors and configure multiple SSID’s.
• Install solar panels on roof of building and connect to charge controller plus batteries.
• Configure battery packs as failover power supply for Starlink terminal and wifi access points.
• Provide maintenance and support training for Starlink and wifi equipment.
• Deliver 20 battery powered lanterns to function as emergency indoor lighting.
• Provide pre configured laptops (20) and provide basic training for usage and maintenance.
• Deliver 100 children (school-) backpacks prefilled with suitable contents to be distributed to local children.
• Deliver 2 flatscreen TV’s and 10 children sized bean bags to the daycare center.

Optional Tasks:

• Fund and work together with local tradesmen to strengthen and extend part of the daycare building to make it more suitable as a shelter during air raids.
• Medical pop-up clinics.

Find out more details and how you can support the mission via the following link:

#ukraine #ukrainwar #humanitarian #reni