Aid for Ukraine

cITe Developing Educational Materials to Aid those in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine has left many of us speechless. We hug all who have been traumatized and experienced loss. When we think of war, we tend to think of bombs and guns and violence. The unseen second wave of human casualties is the humanitarian crisis in the aftermath. One of our faculty, Rebecca Allen, is an expert in infant and maternal mortality. One of the issues that came to the forefront when talking with people, is the lack of infant formula, and in many regions, the inability to deliver any. We know that breastfeeding is best, of course, but formula-fed infants often do die in these situations from malnutrition and diarrhea-related causes. We have been working with disaster experts and doctors to recommend short-term emergency formula substitutes and ways to non-breast feed infants when clean baby bottles and/or breastmilk aren’t available. As we worked to find this information, we began to realize the scope of the Ukrainian disaster - the second wave of deaths may not be violence, but human deaths from sanitation and infrastructure issues. For instance, talking with survival expert, Diane Vukovic, she pointed out that while people do not often consider it, human waste in a place like metros serving as bomb shelters quickly becomes an issue if standard toilets are overwhelmed or broken. Getting people information that could reduce illness and possible deaths is important and time-sensitive. People actually do often still have their mobile phones. We are IT people… If we circulate information, we can help them. Over the next few days, will be working with Ukrainian volunteers to create internet-spreadable memes to teach important skills like emergency formula, infant feeding strategies, and human waste handling. Here are a few ways you can help:

• Are you an expert in disaster management, sanitation, public health, or trauma and psychology? We can use your advice! The more ideas we get, the more good information we can give out.
• Are you a Ukrainian who can tell us about your needs/test our memes or translate?
• We are looking for a pediatric expert who can help us reformulate oral rice rehydration methods using potatoes or other culturally more common starches.
• Help repost our information. Share, share, share and tag your friends to help them spread it. You can volunteer to work on our social media campaign.
• Are you an artist? You can help us make our information clearer and more appealing by adding pictures. How this information look does matter - pictures help stressed people process what we are telling them.

If you’re interested in helping with this project, please send us an email at cite@msj.edu. We will be pushing out more “bite-sized” updates and ways to help over the following days. We just wanted to give a broad sense of the project for those following it.

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