By ANN FOTHERINGHAM
WHEN Bryce Cunningham put a post on social media calling for donations to help people fleeing Ukraine, he thought he might get enough to “fill a van or two”.
Within a few hours, however, the Ayrshire farmer and his team had been overwhelmed not just by bags and boxes of food, toiletries and clothing, but by the heartfelt generosity of his community and beyond.
“It has been absolutely amazing,” he says. “It has restored my faith in humanity.”
Bryce runs Mossgiel Organic Farm in Mauchline, where he lives with wife Ashlea, a schoolteacher, and the couple’s four children Harris, Arran, Murray and Blaire.
“Ashlea and I were watching this horrendous news coming out of Ukraine on Saturday night, and there was a shot of a man kissing his wife and daughter goodbye,” he explains. “The wee girl was about the same age as my daughter, Blaire, who is nearly two, and I was just watching and thinking – that could be us. This could be the very last time that family is together, and that could be us.
“At the same time, our friends Olga and Konrad, who were working with a Polish group in Glasgow trying to fill an articulated lorry with supplies, asked us for help.”
Bryce adds: “We put a post on social media, asking people to drop in donations to our coffee shop and we’d use the farm vans to take the stuff down to Paisley, which is where the lorry was leaving from. The next morning, I took a small van up, thinking I’d probably only half-fill it, and I couldn’t believe what was waiting for me.
“We filled that first van in 10 minutes.”
The donations kept coming – in less than 30 hours, thousands of items, including clothing, bedding, tinned food and toiletries, much of it brand new, had been collected at the farm itself and The Snug coffee shop at the Cross in Mauchline. The team is still sorting through it all, with the help of Saxon Furniture who gave them the use of a warehouse at Sandyford, near Ayr, and there is now enough to fill four lorries.
However, lengthy delays at Dover and post-Brexit red tape have left Bryce, who posts regular video updates on the Mossgiel Organic Facebook page, feeling exhausted and exasperated.
“The first lorry was held up at Dover, then impounded in Calais for two days,” he says. “I find it seriously frustrating and mindboggling that we are in this situation.
“I’m a business owner, I understand there has to be red tape sometimes, but this is ridiculous. We are working with a charity in Poland, we have a Ukrainian lorry, and the Ukrainian Consulate is helping us, but still, they would not bend. They just kept saying the rules could not be changed.
“I just saw red.”
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Bryce grins: “I feel a bit sorry for my MP Alan Brown and MSP Elena Whitham because I was so angry they got the brunt of it. They have been very supportive but there is not a huge amount they can do.
“The whole situation is terrible. I’ve spoken to several exporters and they all say the same thing – it was never this bad before Brexit.”
Bryce and Ashlea have started a petition in a plea to Prime Minister Boris Johnson to allow humanitarian aid through without charities having to face crippling red tape at customs and already, it has around 1500 signatures. (You can visit it here https://bit.ly/3sC5sxr).
Mossgiel is no longer accepting donations but the support from local people is still forthcoming.
“My experience of this kind of thing is that people turn up and help for a day and that’s it,” says Bryce. “That hasn’t happened this time. We’re still getting so many offers of support to help us, it’s fantastic.
There have been tears, too. “It has been emotional,” admits Bryce. “We spoke to Oleksandr, a postal lorry driver from Ukraine, who got stuck here when the war started because the company who own his truck had a Russian bank account and sanctions stopped them from being able to make transactions.
“He is desperate to get back to Ukraine, to deliver the supplies we have collected, but also to get to the front line and to fight for his country. He is incredible, a real hero.”
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