Call to Action by Amber Poole
What If?
What if you lived long enough to meet up with your great-grandchildren?
What if they were to ask about what action you took to help women and children escape from being murdered by political systems intent on utterly destroying whole swathes of societies? What if these systems wanted to erase them even from the history books?
What if?
What if your great-grandchildren said: ‘Grandma, I go to college with a girl who lost her whole family in a genocide. Somehow, she managed to escape on a small boat across the Mediterranean and to safety, where she was detained in a camp, raped, nearly starved to death, and beaten, and she was one of the lucky ones because she got out by a small miracle. Grandma, she is my girlfriend. What can I tell her? What action did you take to try to keep her grandma from being murdered?
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I want to take my heart back. This is not 1942. You can’t claim innocence because you don’t know. You do know.
We do know that mothers and their babies are being murdered—all over the world.
In Papua New Guinea, two-thirds of women will experience violence in their lifetime.
Virginia Harrison, The Guardian, Wednesday, August 27, 2025
The United Nations reports that “70% of women in conflict, war, and humanitarian crises experience gender-based violence.” Newsletter, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, November 25, 2024 #NoExcuse
I want to take my heart back. That’s what the younger ones will say to us when they
grow up to the truth of our non-action.
It’s not an easy terrain to navigate. My life changed on February 24, 2022, when our family grew in a single day by 40 women and children crossing the border from Ukraine into Poland.
Sunflowers at My Table, War Diaries of a Ukrainian Community by Amber Poole
I didn’t need to look further than my first cup of morning coffee to know what action to take for the next 18-months before everyone was resettled or moved back to Ukraine.
In other words, one didn’t have time to deliberate the urgency in a young mother’s voice, knocking on your door at three in the morning, apologetically informing you that her boy has a high fever. One simply acts.
Unfortunately, the type of action required is not always this obvious.
Our shelter closed in the summer of 2023 due to a lack of funding and a non-renewable lease. We were successful in acquiring a generous grant to help relocate everyone who did not return to Ukraine. Some of the women were already employed, so it was only a question of paying for the first and last month’s rent and purchasing the domestic goods they would need to set up kitchen and bath to get started in Poland – alone. Other women needed more assistance for a longer time.
When the war broke out in Israel/Palestine, our foundation desired to help. We knew how talented some of the Ukrainian women were with a needle and thread, so we decided to ask if they would be interested in making dolls for Palestinian orphans in Bethlehem. Oksana said yes. She is now employed by our foundation in Poland, making dolls for orphans.
The initiative started with a question. Now we are The Doll Project.
By Spring of 2026, 150 dolls will have been shipped to SOS Children’s Villages in Bethlehem. An in-kind donation. The Blanket Project is now a branch of The Doll Project. We have added another woman of artistic value to our initiatives: Lidka. While Oksana designs and makes the dolls, Lidka is crocheting blankets for them. Both women are also making blankets for children, but to employ more women as the need grows to employ more displaced women and women struggling with mental health issues, and women whose economic reach is short, we need engagement from you. The whole world needs to participate in protecting women and children. We need to secure shelter and safety for displaced women.
We need to work together to create an economy that matches a sustainable budget in which they can raise their children.
They must be free from exploitation!
The Call to Action.
Please donate to our foundation through the link below. Enjoy looking around The Cross Border House. We are rebuilding in a village further north, but this is what we’re capable of doing. Thank you.