The Businessman Who Organised Ambulance Convoys
Lucas Wojcik, a businessman from Meuse department in northeastern France, is behind an initiative to deliver emergency vehicles to help besieged Ukrainians. Thanks to fundraising, and several organisations who responded to his appeal, 22 ambulances driven by volunteers left the small town of
Commercy on March 7 and headed for Ukraine.
It all started a few days earlier when Wojcik posted an appeal on a Facebook page he created called Anti War Ambulance Convoy. “I work in the ambulance business,” he wrote, “and following the start of war in Ukraine, I decided to personally mobilise three medical vehicles filled with basic necessities and medicines ... There will be several other convoys depending on the support.”
There was of support. Soon, the Facebook page was filled with messages from ambulance and taxi drivers volunteering to join the convoy. Wojcik says there were more than 50 in all, not only from Commercy but also from other communities.
Wojcik heads up Euro Machines, which specialises in new and used emergency vehicles. He has had experience delivering vehicles: in 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea, a group of Parisian students asked for his help to get ambulances to Ukraine, and Wojcik readily agreed.
After the initial convoy, two more departed later in March, for a total of 38 ambulances – Wojcik himself drove one. All were equipped with donated first-aid supplies. “The vehicles were delivered to aid associations in Ukraine,” Wojcik explains.
He has covered much of the cost of this initiative, some of which has been reimbursed by charitable organisations. A crowd-funding campaign helped pay for petrol and food for the drivers.
“If you don’t give from your pocket, you can’t initiate much,” Wojcik says.
Sitting in the back of the small white cattle truck, Gyz and Nila, two African lions, were unaware that the distant bangs they heard over the engine’s noise were the sounds of war. They couldn’t know that at one point their volunteer driver had to talk his way through an armed Russian roadblock outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, or that earlier attempts had failed and he’d had to look for other routes to the Polish border. This little ark was just one of the thousands of vehicles trying to reach safety.
It was Tuesday, March 1. The cargo was noisy; there were the stressed growls of the wild cats (six lions, four tigers and two caracals), plus the whining of Zair, a member of the endangered African wild dog species. Also on board was a capuchin monkey. The animals had been in the truck for hours. Gyz and Nila were in proper cages, but others were in hastily improvised lodgings. The lioness Flori, for instance, was housed in a wooden crate held together by cages placed tightly around it. It was a surreal scene in the middle of Europe’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
“You can imagine this as a movie script,” says Peter de Haan of the Dutch animal rescue organisation AAP (the Dutch word for ‘ape’), which helped arrange this evacuation from its base east of Amsterdam. “We had been planning to bring these animals out of Ukraine in May,” he explains. But when the war started, Ukraine’s Wild Animal Rescue shelter asked AAP for immediate help – the only other option was to leave them to die.
“You cannot just move wild animals, especially endangered species, across borders any time you want”
The shelter, located near Kyiv, cares for wounded or abused wild animals. Gyz had once been on display in a cage at a shopping centre and Nila in a nightclub before the shelter took them in. AAP generally doesn’t work outside the European Union, but made an exception to welcome as many animals from the Kyiv shelter as they could on such short notice. Sadly, many others had to stay behind.
On Wednesday night the truck’s occupants arrived at the Polish border, among thousands of human refugees, where they sat for eight hours. “You cannot just move wild animals, especially endangered species, across borders any time you want,” says De Haan. “It involves paperwork and permits from CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora).” The process usually takes several days, but all parties involved understood these were special circumstances and arranged everything in hours.
In Poland, the truck was met by representatives of Poznan Zoo, where the animals rested for a few days before being loaded onto animal-transport trucks. One came from the Nature Help Centre Opglabbeek, AAP’s Belgian partner, to take two lions to Belgium. Another journeyed 2600 kilometres to Spain, where AAP runs a large rescue centre. Its two drivers stopped every couple of hours to give the animals fresh water and food.
AAP’s director, David van Gennep, travelled to Spain to greet the truck on March 9, more than a week after the animals had left Ukraine. “They were terrified and stressed,” he says. “We put Gyz and Nila together in the enclosure and it was good to see how they immediately greeted each other and started licking. And the next morning, Zair was running around and playing, chasing his own tail.”
AAP can’t rescue all the animals trapped by the war in Ukraine, he says, but at least it can help these lucky few find places to live in peace. “After everything they have been through,” says van Gennep, “our first goal is to see them develop into healthy, normal animals.”