The volunteers and the bureaucrats: a collision of two logics

On Jan. 11, 2016, the Pirogov First Volunteer Mobile Hospital (PFVMH), which has become a legend over the year of providing skilled medical assistance to both servicemen and civilian front-line residents, had no choice but leave the Antiterrorist Operation Zone.

Regretfully, it was not because the state has finally got into doing everything itself, without help from volunteers, as ought to have been expected. It’s too far from meeting all the needs, say the military who ask the PFVMH to come back. It was because of the red-tape mechanisms of the cumbersome state machinery (this time, in the person of the Health Ministry), in which little has changed over the two last hot years. It is still able to neither suggest nor implement a qualitative alternative to the superannuated past, over and over again demonstrating a collision of two logics: one of volunteers and one of bureaucrats.

Read the story by Alla Kotlyar on the Dzerkalo Tyzhnya site (in Ukrainain) .