Back when Oleksii Yarylchenko was a student of Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, he and his volunteer friends started publicly speaking about corruption in Red Cross Society in Ukraine. Humanitarian supplies were for sale, and participants of supposedly free first aid courses were charged a fee. Not many Ukrainians could believe it, especially after Euromaidan in 2013-2014.
For Oleksii, social activism is a way to change the life in Ukraine for the better. After the necessary displacement from his city of Donetsk because of the warfare, Oleksii helped with evacuation of people and their adjustment to their new lives. Currently, he and his friends are helping the healthcare reform. Their Ukrainian Heart Association works on prevention of heart diseases in Ukraine.
During the corruption scandal in the Red Cross Society, TI Ukraine provided legal aid to the group of volunteers who decided to fight against corruption in the humanitarian organization. In 2017, Oleksii Yarylchenko supported TI Ukraine awareness campaign #IDontBribe .
(translation below)
“What is corruption for you, my reader? We often hear about it, but the personalization swtich in our mind doesn’t react – we see only how much an official has stolen, instead of how many people haven’t received the medicines they need or how many accidents have happened because of bad roads. The reality is different: the money does not come from thin air, it comes from our pockets, often at the expense of somebody’s life.
So what is corruption for me? For the first time, I faced corruption back in school, when I needed to get a note urgently. I considered it something absolutely natural – not a bribe, but a purchase of “extra services.” Later, I encountered corruption more than once, but the time when I really felt its cost was in Red Cross. With storages full of humanitarian aid, I was supposed to tell people we couldn’t help them. I kept trying to make myself believe that the problem was not with the people in the organization, whom I considered role models, but in the bureaucracy, which prevented us from doing good. Only after I met Michael Tulsky and Ann Burdyliak I had to admit the truth – bureaucracy had nothing to do with it, those people just made money from sale of humanitarian aid behind the smokescreen of the good deeds of the Red Cross.
What shocked me most was another thing – when we just started disclosing the schemes and bringing the problem into the public spotlight, we faced pressure not only from those whose financing we were interfering with, but also from those we were trying to help. Those people understood that we were fighting a fully rotten system, but they were guided by fear of losing even the crumbs they were getting. They didn’t care that they were supposed to receive the humanitarian aid for free instead of paying half the price for it. They definitely didn’t care that if we engaged in secret sales of the humanitarian aid, we could only help a few dozen families instead of hundreds.
That was when I understood that I didn’t want to be like them – that corruption was an abyss which dragged the society into itself. Everyone following its lead fuels it, and later it ruins other people’s lives. Doesn’t matter what it is – sale of humanitarian aid, a request to “thank” the doctor or a bribe for a police officer.
Don’t be part of the corruption – be part of those who ruin this system.
In this picture are two beautiful smiling ladies who, a month after the picture was taken, responded to our request for support from International Red Cross and Red Cross Federation by recommending to just stay away from all of that.
#IDontBribe”
