Ukraine Revisited 🇺🇦 Michael DiBenedetto at Hell's Kitchen

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Michael DiBenedetto  0:02  
I said, "You know, if it turns out that you're short and you need the help, I don't particularly like the cold, but it is what it is. Be happy to come back."

Brett Barry  0:12  
That's a clip from six months ago when we connected with Catskiller Michael DiBenedetto, who was in Ukraine, volunteering as a driver with an organization called "Road to Relief." It's winter now and Michael did go back. On today's show, reconnecting with Michael DiBenedetto in Kharkiv and marking two years since Russia's full-scale invasion. I'm Brett Barry and this is "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast."

Audio  0:47  
[PHONE RINGING]

Michael DiBenedetto  0:47  
Hello?

Brett Barry  0:48  
Hello, Michael.

Michael DiBenedetto  0:49  
Hey, Brett.

Brett Barry  0:50  
Hey, you sound great.

Michael DiBenedetto  0:52  
Oh, well, I'm feeling a little better than I was. Yeah, I had a little cold still hold on a little bit. I mean, it's still winter here. Oh, it's wonderful to hear your voice. When I was working at the church, almost nobody spoke English and I have to say that working with people and not being able to talk to somebody is, I don't know, it's a little ... it was a little wearing me out.

Brett Barry  1:18  
Yeah.

Michael DiBenedetto  1:18  
Because you want to say things; you want to have a little conversation; not that I'm much of a conversationist, but ...

Brett Barry  1:24  
You know, you obviously enjoy volunteering giving of yourself. You could do that here. You could do that in many places around the world. What ... what brings you back to Ukraine again and again?

Michael DiBenedetto  1:40  
Well, I ... I love the people here; not that I don't love the people at home, but I love the people in Ukraine. They're so appreciative. They're so thankful for somebody to think about coming over to help them out. I also think that the situation, even though there are people in need, where we live or elsewhere in the country. This is a little different situation, where these people were, you know, trying to live their lives and, basically, a neighbor decided, "Well, I think we would like that country back." You know, it'd be like Mexico saying to the United States, "You know what? We really want Texas and New Mexico, Arizona, California, we would like them back and so we invade Texas." So I feel really bad for these ... these people here that this invasion has happened and a lot of people ... they know in the U.S. think ... it's not that big deal, it's a border dispute, but it really is a big deal. Putin, it really is a big deal and I don't think that he will stop with ... with Ukraine.

Brett Barry  2:49  
What brought you back and how did you discover this new organization?

Michael DiBenedetto  2:53  
So when I left, the director ... we had enough drivers at the time and it was hard for them to find drivers in the wintertime that could drive in the snow and people that would consider volunteering in the wintertime. I mean, everything was beautiful here, you know, other than missiles and artillery and things like that. The country's beautiful: all the ... the gardens were full, the fruit trees were full. But, yeah, I had told her that I would come back in the wintertime when they needed people more and that was my plan. And then, I think the week after I left, she was ... she and the person were killed out on a mission and the organization dissolved. But, you know, I wanted to come back and help. There was a church ... it's in Kharkiv and I ended up having a conversation with the person there, and he said, "Yes, we can use you. We have a warehouse. We do deliveries and the first week I was there, we were packing up food in this warehouse." I think there were like 700 or something like that. People lined up ... I was shocked that one morning I went out for delivery that all these people are lined up down the street waiting to get this food that we packaged up. So they do a lot of food deliveries, giveaways for soldiers and civilians ... we also delivered stoves out to areas that didn't have heat [wood stoves], and then they deliver the firewood as well, so I was involved in doing some of that back out in the country, and ... and when I was at the warehouse, there's a person that had stopped by to pick up a load of food. He's the volunteer coordinator for the Hell's Kitchen Bakery in Kharkiv. I stopped by and I started baking bread and I bake bread for a while, and then I started helping somebody doing some mechanical work, and they said, "Oh, I think that we have a job for you other than baking bread, so that's what I've been doing the last week is working, making things for soldiers."

Brett Barry  5:17  
Like ...

Michael DiBenedetto  5:18  
Things.

Everyone  5:19  
[LAUGHTER]

Michael DiBenedetto  5:19  
I just have to leave it at that for now.

Brett Barry  5:24  
Okay, and that's through the same organization?

Michael DiBenedetto  5:26  
Through the same organization ... that's Hell's Kitchen. They started right after the war started. They do amazing work here. They actually bake about at a thousand over a thousand rolls a day that some go to the church, so they'll take food for soldiers and for the hospitals and they'll do all the complete lunch with the rolls and everything ... the rolls by themselves about half of them [six or seven hundred]. Did they go back to that ... Trinity Church? Because they supply them with the flour. They trade that off.

Brett Barry  6:03  
Hell's Kitchen serves more than 1,000 meals and several 1,000 loaves of bread every day in Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine, situated just about 20 miles from the Russian border. Liuda and Yehor co-founded the organization at the start of the war. Here's Liuda.

Liuda Horoshko  6:25  
Okay, we started it like the next day when the war began, you call my husband and I ... we saw some ... somewhere on the internet, probably Facebook. We saw a message from soldiers that if anyone could help them with a fresh food course, you have to understand that ... that like to my understanding that more than 70% of people left the city in those days and you had nothing like no public transport, no shops opened like it was impossible to buy something to eat and to help themselves. And also, it's February [it's winter 2022 and spring 2022]. We're very, very cold in Ukraine and soldiers ... they wrote on their Facebook and asked her if someone could help them with their fresh food.

Brett Barry  7:26  
Liuda and husband, Yehor, had been working in IT before the war with their colleague, Ivan. Ivan also runs a hostel and offered the basement with a kitchen to loot his new organization.

Liuda Horoshko  7:41  
Before the war, we worked together in IT field, but Ivan also was an owner of the hostel, and in that hostel, he has a very good basement and because of the city was bombed and shelled very, very intensively those days, so we called to Ivan, and he said like ... "Yes, I also stayed into the city" ... and we went to him. We decided, "Okay, we can ... we can cook ... cook for our soldiers." So it's how it started that we began to cook.

Brett Barry  8:20  
You've since moved from that kitchen to another location?

Liuda Horoshko  8:24  
Yeah, yeah, we moved in May 2023. We moved to another location, but it's very funny. We moved just 150 meters from the old place, so we almost like on the same location. We're here ... seven days, seventeen hours in the kitchen. It's almost two years of the war. Personally, me ... I had three days off and again. When I say, "days off," it was like ... I spend these days with like being on the phone, so I didn't came to the kitchen, but ... but I was on the phone still.

Brett Barry  9:03  
How are you and Yehor supporting yourselves, if you've had to give up your business to devote all of your time to this effort?

Liuda Horoshko  9:12  
Just before the war, we began to build our house.

Brett Barry  9:17  
Liuda explained how she and Yehor had well paying jobs in IT. They saved money to build a house and from what I could understand from our conversation ... the war put those house plans on hold, so those savings are sustaining the couple still, as they've devoted the last two years of their lives to full-time volunteer work. She explained that a friend who left the city has also donated her apartment to the couple ... rent-free, which also helps.

Liuda Horoshko  9:46  
He went to Sweden and we rented her flat ... about when the war began starting from May 2023, we came back to the flat and we pay nothing: not for bills, not for renting. She pays the bills and she doesn't take any rent from us because she knows what we are doing here.

Brett Barry  9:46  
That's very nice.

Liuda Horoshko  10:14  
Yeah, that's very nice of her and, in fact, this is not a unique story about when people who left Ukraine: they give their flats or houses either ... either for free from volunteers or they took a summer, just to ... just to pay bills, for example.

Brett Barry  10:36  
How many volunteers are working for your organization?

Liuda Horoshko  10:40  
When we will speak about ... just kitchen, it's around 70 ... speaking about other projects. As I said, Yehor conducts ... how to say ... other projects, so I think more than 110.

Brett Barry  10:57  
What are you cooking? What's on the menu today?

Liuda Horoshko  10:59  
So we cook soup like for the first course: we cook a soup or borscht ... the people who we feed. Military ... they ask her for ... for borscht more than for soup, and for the second course, it's either macaroni or ... or porridge. I know that in England, porridge, it's only about oatmeal.

Brett Barry  11:24  
Right.

Liuda Horoshko  11:25  
But in Ukraine, we say porridge like about like rice or buckwheat, so any kind of ...

Brett Barry  11:34  
Grains?

Liuda Horoshko  11:34  
... any kind of grains here, we call it "porridge," so ... so ... so different kind of porridges ... meat, but not meat [chicken]. We buy on the chicken course meat. It's like two or three, I think, three times more expensive than chicken: chicken and salad. Also, depending on what kind of vegetables do we have it at the moment ... what can we afford ourselves to buy.

Brett Barry  12:06  
And a lot of bread?

Liuda Horoshko  12:08  
And yeah, a lot of bread like 1,500 rolls every day.

Brett Barry  12:16  
So you're giving food to the church, to the military, to the hospitals ... is that mostly?

Liuda Horoshko  12:23  
For church, we give only bread and the food we distribute 50/50 for militaries and also for hospitals that are in ... in the city. But, again, you have to understand that these days in the Kharkiv, it's like mostly hospitals are full of injured soldiers.

Brett Barry  12:50  
Nicely, so it's mostly going to soldiers?

Liuda Horoshko  12:52  
Mostly, yeah, you know, these days ... foreign volunteers ... they help us a lot, really. For example, as I said, "We have in our kitchen and we have bakery for today," I think, 80%. It's foreign volunteers who cover bakery. I mean, people who work on the bakery mostly foreign volunteers. We feel this understanding and we feel that the whole world is with us, supporting us, so it's also gives us another ... another hope, another strength to ... to go on to continue to fight and never stop.

Brett Barry  13:36  
How's our friend Michael doing?

Liuda Horoshko  13:37  
He's very friendly. He's very nice. Not ... not too many foreign people would hug. We like ... we with you, but really, I don't know, maybe it's some kind of chemistry. But, yeah, we feel each other very, very good and he helps us a lot ... a lot, and every time he stops for a minute, he has like a minute of free-time and he asked like ... "Do you need some help? Can I help you?" Yeah, so he's amazing. Yeah, thanks.

Audio  14:10  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  14:12  
After the break, more from Catskills own Michael DiBenedetto who is seemingly undaunted by things like daily air raid sirens. More on that in just a moment. When Michael is back home, he reads the Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For a subscription of your own, call 518-763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. Kaatscast is supported by a generous grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation and by listeners like you. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can do so at kaatscast.com. This past week marks two years since Putin invaded Ukraine, where Catskiller Michael DiBenedetto is currently volunteering with Hell's Kitchen—an organization cooking and serving food in the city of Kharkiv, situated just 30 kilometers from the Russian border. That's where Michael heard this air raid siren on his morning walk to work and recorded a clip on his phone. When you do get an air raid alert, where do you take cover?

Michael DiBenedetto  15:36  
No place.

Brett Barry  15:36  
No place.

Michael DiBenedetto  15:38  
Nobody does.

Audio  15:38  
[AIR RAID SIREN SOUND]

Michael DiBenedetto  15:40  
People are just going about their business; they're going about their business here. I suspect if something major was going to happen and they do and, you know, then you could head down into the basement or into the subways ... something like that, but the sirens are going off all the time here. I would say, "You know, some days when it's nice out, they may be two or three times an hour, the air raid sirens were off." There's an app on my phone that somebody here at the kitchen told me about that you can look and see what's going on. We're only, I think, 30 kilometers from the border here [from the Russian border], so anytime ... somebody starts sending rockets or missiles or something like that over, even if it's not headed, particularly in the city's direction, the air raid sirens go off for the whole district. So on this app, it tells you what was being launched, what to be careful of, okay, there's no danger in the city at this moment or whatever, which is a really nice thing.

Brett Barry  16:55  
What's the difference in the ... the weather now this time of year as opposed to when you were there last time? Is it ... is it Catskills like or more ... is it more severe?

Michael DiBenedetto  17:05  
It's just like Catskills.

Brett Barry  17:06  
Yeah, just like the Catskills.

Michael DiBenedetto  17:07  
It's just like Catskills ... the sun has been out very seldom, but there's been very little snow. We got about four inches of snow [four or five inches of snow] a few days ago ... that melted ... there's a lot of ice on the ground, but the weather's ... the weather is fairly similar. They used to get a lot more snow. And now, yeah, it's about ... about the same as the Catskills.

Brett Barry  17:30  
Okay, so weather and ... and risk aside. What are the logistics involved in getting yourself to Ukraine and ... and to Kharkiv to volunteer with an organization like Hell's Kitchen?

Michael DiBenedetto  17:46  
There are no flights into the country, obviously. So you'd have to fly into the ... probably the easiest place would be to fly into Warsaw, Poland. Flights were not very expensive for me. This time, I flew into Amsterdam and ... and drove with a friend of mine from Amsterdam to Kharkiv. The first time I came, I flew into Warsaw ... took a bus from Warsaw to the capital [Kyiv], and then a train down to Slovyansk. I'll basically do the opposite going home. I'll take the bus from Kyiv to Warsaw. Very inexpensive, too. I think the bus is for, I don't know, it's 11 hours, 12-hour bus ride, something like that, and I think it's maybe $20. It's an easy place for anybody to volunteer. You don't have to have any skills here. You don't have to be able to drive. The metro system is good. Once you get here, it's very inexpensive and they feed you here, so food is here. You have to provide your lodging, which I didn't have to do when I was here over the summer, so my hotel is costing me about $15 a night.

Brett Barry  19:06  
A $15 hotel here would be really well. Impossible, but sketchy. What's the condition of the hotel that year and what is $15 good?

Michael DiBenedetto  19:15  
It's good.

Brett Barry  19:15  
Yeah, yeah.

Michael DiBenedetto  19:16  
It's clean. I mean, it's ... it's, you know, you could spend $50 or $60 on a [really], you know, 5-star hotel, but I wasn't looking for that. So, you know, everything's clean in there. Yeah, you know, I'm happy with it.

Brett Barry  19:31  
And what's an average day for you like ... do you have a schedule?

Michael DiBenedetto  19:34  
I do have a schedule. At the kitchen, they usually start here [8:30-9 o'clock] and they have two shifts. You can stay as long as you want. When I was doing the bread, I pretty much stayed all day because it was that or, you know, walk around town or go to my hotel room. And then, they get done [5 or 5:30] ... they'll get done. And again, they're making probably 1,000 to 1,400 rolls in the day. I do go to the restaurants here now and then. I can buy a nice pasta dinner for ... I think it was $3.75 with a glass of wine.

Brett Barry  20:12  
Wow!

Michael DiBenedetto  20:13  
And a lot of times, I'll be the only one in the restaurant and there'll be a couple people working there or whatever. I don't know how long that's sustainable, but there's a lot of restaurants open ... a lot of coffee shops, so I think people are trying to do the best they can.

Brett Barry  20:32  
Liuda explained how Kharkiv's population has changed since the war began and she for one is frustrated by a back to normal mentality that many residents appear to have adopted. For Liuda, it's premature.

Liuda Horoshko  20:46  
And the difference is that the people who are ... who are in Kharkiv. These days, it's the people that moved from oblast [from region]. Do you understand what I mean?

Brett Barry  21:00  
So, refugees.

Liuda Horoshko  21:02  
Because there are refugees here. Yeah, refugees. Of course, for example, once we can win the war, I would say 95% of people whom we know with whom we were acquainted home like our friends as they left the city and mostly left the country and ... like our story ... I think it may be 15% came back, but the city is full of people these days.

Brett Barry  21:38  
The people who are there ... are they going about their lives as normally as possible? Is there a sense of normalcy in terms of what they're doing with there everyday?

Liuda Horoshko  21:49  
Yeah, most of the people in Kharkiv live their normal life: people work, people go to restaurants to drink coffee, play with their children, and limit their normal life. Yeah, it's ... for me, it's a ... it's a topic for discussion, I would say, "Because I think that first of all people should get together and resolve the most of the highest priority and problem, and then continue to live in their normal life." We have to win this war. We paid a huge price for ... for this victory, just to continue living our life with the ... with our choice. These days, foreign volunteers ... they help us a lot.

Audio  22:45  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  22:46  
Are you feeling any kind of hope or optimism for the immediate future or do you see this going on much longer?

Liuda Horoshko  22:56  
Personally, me ... I'm waiting for the victory each single day.

Brett Barry  23:06  
Mm-hmm.

Liuda Horoshko  23:06  
When people ask like ... how would you can go on without ... without stopping or without days off like ... I think ... I hope or I believe in black swans. I don't know what to say that's ...

Brett Barry  23:09  
Right.

Liuda Horoshko  23:09  
... something happened and this war will stop unexpectedly, but I'm not an average Ukrainian. So, but again, it gives me ... it gives me ... it gives me ...

Brett Barry  23:33  
Hope.

Liuda Horoshko  23:34  
Hope, strength, yeah, to go on from day-to-day.

Brett Barry  23:40  
Thank you, Liuda. Slava Ukraini!

Liuda Horoshko  23:42  
Thank you so much. Heroiam Slava! Yeah, thank you. Take care.

Brett Barry  23:47  
You, too.

Audio  23:51  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  23:51  
After our call, Michael DiBenedetto texted and asked if I'd speak with Hell's Kitchen's volunteer coordinator, Franklin Orosco. There's a link to that conversation in the show notes. Click to hear about Franklin's arrival in Ukraine three and a half years ago.

Franklin Orosco  24:07  
I went up to Minsk in Belarus, where I was teaching, and then we had that nasty election with Lukashenko and the post-election violence, and so I flew here. It was one of four countries I could come to because of COVID. I speak a bit of Russian and I had been here. I liked it before, so it was peaceful here. I thought it was gonna be a nice change.

Brett Barry  24:34  
And his work with Hell's Kitchen; coordinating with incoming volunteers.

Franklin Orosco  24:38  
Volunteers were just coming in whenever they wanted to and leaving whenever they wanted to and you could never be sure of having the team that you needed to get the order done for the bread that ... so I just started organizing more, and then put together in a FAQ and tried to make things better for volunteers by meeting them at the train station; taking them to their ... where they were going to stay and helping them check in and putting up. They needed it and keeping in touch with them, especially if there were blasts going on ... explosions. Then, we started to chat groups that we could do check-ins and just inform each other kind of support each other.

Brett Barry  25:17  
Franklin is a California and Vermont transplant whose lived in Europe for three decades. Tune into our interview for his perspective on the war in Ukraine, the importance of American involvement, and lots more. Link in the show notes. Plus, a link to Franklin's comprehensive and fascinating FAQ document, covering everything from what clothes to pack to identifying air raid shelters to after-work hangouts to a list of grocery prices: a yogurt pouch costs 19 Ukrainian hryvnia ... that's about 49 cents; local beer: 20 hryvnia about 52 cents. Don't forget to click on the show notes for that resource and my interview with Franklin who is ready to welcome you to Hell's Kitchen Ukraine. "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is produced by Silver Hollow Audio. Join us next time for a history hike with Woodstock's Will Nixon. Until then, we'll see you on Instagram @kaatscast. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening.