Life during wartime

In June of 2024, Joanna Blackwell moved to Kyiv. A native of Arlington, Virginia, she had worked for years for Chemonics International, a global development company which by then had become the number-one implementing partner for USAID around the world. “I was mostly in project management, and then moving toward communications, doing monitoring and evaluation,” Blackwell says. 

After stints in locations including Uganda, Bangladesh, and Moldova, Blackwell now found herself living in a city under Russian attack. Her job was to do communications amid the wrap-up of a seven-year USAID-funded economic development project for Ukraine, which had started well before the war and employed around a hundred people, mostly Ukrainian, she says. “I went to help them collect stories, and I was often talking with the donors [USAID], doing reports, all of that,” Blackwell says. She worked with USAID’s office in Kyiv, whose tasks included funneling back useful information to the home office in Washington.  

She and her American partner, Brian (whose family I have known for decades), settled in for what they thought would be a year’s stay. As Blackwell later wrote in recollecting the experience: “The Kyiv apartment itself was paradise, but because it was in a war zone, it was paradise with flaws. Paradise with the occasional two weeks without water on one of the levels. Paradise with a broken elevator….The front-loading washing machine didn’t drain properly about half the time in this paradise of ours, but it was tucked in a safe interior room. If I was working from home and a daytime air raid struck, I could open the washing machine door and pull up a chair and there was room for my knees, to sit at it like a desk.”

Then Donald Trump was elected. By January 2025, as is now well known, Trump had brought in Elon Musk and a team of mostly very young, inexperienced men to pull the plug on most of USAID’s projects around the world. These included basic food and health programs that sustained millions, and hundreds of thousands of people have already died as a result. But the destruction extended even to projects as pragmatic as the one Blackwell was working on, sustaining the economy of an ally to which we have lent massive military support.

On a recent Zoom call from where she is now living in Massachusetts, Blackwell told me about life in wartime Kyiv, the purposes of the program she was working on, and what happened when everything slammed to a halt—plus how USAID could have better communicated to Americans about what it was doing. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Porch Party: What did you think when you got to Kyiv? The city was already under bombardment—what was it like living there? 

Joanna Blackwell: One of the most striking aspects of day-to-day life was the contrast between the days and the nights. During the day, you are driving through a gorgeous city. It’s vibrant, women are in sundresses, at cafes, going in and out of museums, going to work, picking kids up from school, going to a farmer’s market. There's a huge art scene and amazing restaurants.

And then every single night, it just goes dark, and the alarms go off, the drones. It’s just a totally different world.

Kyiv has gotten pummeled since Trump came into office, compared to when we were there. At the time, other areas, especially in the east, were getting hit all the time, but Kyiv was relatively protected. But you still heard the drones. You heard booms.

PP: Like every single night or just some nights?

JB: I would say, like, five out of seven nights. And they had what they called a “two-wall rule.” The expectation was that you would sleep two walls in, so that you weren’t close to windows.

We had an amazing apartment. But we never slept in the bedrooms, because they had windows. It’s funny, the real estate market there—I often thought about how all the assets of a property, like beautiful windows and being high up, all of that turned into a negative, right? People didn’t want to be on the 12th floor with panoramic views anymore, because it wasn’t safe. But yeah, we just moved one of the mattresses into a hallway where we had the two walls. And we had blast-proof film installed on all the windows—I mean, who knows how effective that would have ended up being. Luckily, nothing actually happened.

PP: Would you guys go out at night, or was everyone inside?

JB: We did. I mean, I had friends and colleagues who had been there much longer and their risk tolerance was very different from mine, early on. I’d hear these alarms, and they would just sit there with a cigarette and be like, “It’s okay.” The longer you were there, you really did adjust. But it took me a while to not have a visceral reaction to alarms. There was a curfew, 12 AM to 5 AM, when nobody was supposed to be on the street. 

PP: Tell me a little about your work there. When you say economic development, what were the goals of this program, or what was it doing?

JB: We were working with businesses—over the course of the whole project, I think we ended up working with about 9000 businesses. Through grants, or through trainings—there were a lot of different sort of interventions or ways we were working with them. The broad goal was just to keep people employed, or increase employment, and to keep the economy running as best it could. And I think it largely did achieve those goals. One awesome activity that we worked on was training women to be tractor drivers, or to use construction equipment. Their husbands were gone and there was clearly destruction, so we could engage women to be a part of that rebuilding.

PP: Oh right, because a lot of the guys were deployed.

JB: Exactly. It helped rebuild their communities, it helped put some money in their pockets. We also worked with some robotic companies who were making prosthetics, like prosthetic arms… We were just looking for businesses that were able to engage with us. 

PP: Some of these sound like they had implications for the war, but it might also just be, say, a food supply business? 

JB: Yeah, like there was a beekeeping training, and there was also a focus on helping the companies find international markets—so figuring out online markets like Etsy, for example. It was a fun job, because I came in toward the end of a project that had done so much work and I got to talk about it. 

PP: So when did things change? How did you learn about it?

JB: Brian and I had been home for the holidays, from 2024 into 2025. And of course, we knew the results of the election. We knew something was going to happen—we clearly had no concept of how far it could go and how quickly. And my assignment was supposed to end in June of 2025; I wasn't going to stay all the way through the end, originally. So we got back from our holiday trip, around mid-January of 2025, and there were only about two weeks before most of the projects that Chemonics was implementing, like 80% of them, got stop work orders. It was over the weekend.

PP: There was one weekend where just suddenly everything stopped? 

JB: Yeah. It was crazy because during those 10 business days, I was approached to extend my assignment. They were like, we want you to stay longer, to the end. I was like, that's great. And then a few days later, nobody was allowed to do work. Stop work orders existed, we had heard about them—but they were only used in incredibly rare circumstances, when a project was grossly underperforming, which clearly didn't apply in this case.

PP: How did you find out about it, on that day?

JB: A bunch of us expats were at one person's lasagna party on a Saturday. And we were having lasagna and wine and having a nice enough evening, but everybody felt the tides were turning, because we had been kind of getting that impression from corporate messaging. And then all of a sudden the home office directors who happened to be at this party, you heard their phones going off, and they got these official letters that weren’t really clear. Corporately, they were trying to decipher these letters. From that point, it was over.

PP: Do you know what the date was?

JB: January 25th.

PP: Oh, so it was right after the inauguration.

JB: Yeah! I think it was the first big attack, or kill. We were DOGE’d almost immediately; it sort of set the tone. And there were quite a few people cheering it on, because nobody understood what USAID was doing. So anyone on the project who was not a core administrative person, like payroll or those core functions, we were told not to work. I’d go into the office and we’d all just kind of be there, and it was very odd. 

PP: You were being paid and you came to the office, but they were like, “Don't do anything”?

JB: Yeah. So weird. A couple weeks go by, and the corporate decision was made that expats who were not directly operational or administrative should go to Krakow, or Warsaw, or Chisinau [in Moldova]. Basically, leave Kyiv and Ukraine as a cost savings measure, because there was danger pay and all of these allowances to keep us there. But they wanted us close by in case we could come back and resume work.

PP: So what did you guys do initially? 

JB: We went to Krakow. Had a nice enough time. Just waiting around, fingers crossed that somehow everything would just quickly get undone and we'd go back to business as usual. We got an Airbnb. 

And then I got furloughed, so I wasn't getting paid anymore, but they still didn't know how things would shake out. And then it became very clear that the project was done.

PP: Did it get wound up at all, or did the whole thing just halt?

JB: It shifted quickly into, let's just get all of the data and make sure we have everything somewhere. For all intents and purposes, yeah, whatever work we were doing with an individual company did stop day to day. 

PP: But people tried to save the documentation.

JB: And to convey to the partners, all of these businesses that we were working with, what was going on and say, please do give us as much data as you have, even if it's off cycle.

PP: It sounds very practical, the work you were doing. 

JB: Yeah. I was looking through my notebook yesterday, and the last page that was related to the project I was working on was a senior management team meeting on January 23rd. This is right before the stop work order. And, oh my god, it was such a miserable meeting. Part of the reason we thought things were going to change pretty quickly is that we started getting these requests to, like, whitewash everything and completely reframe the work of the project. It was no longer about helping Ukraine. It was about America First. So we were all sitting around this table, looking at our activities and trying to figure out how to protect them by making it seem like the objective was to make America great again.

That was the Trump philosophy—if it’s not America First, it's going to get cut. There was a period of time where we felt like we might be able to justify it, to reframe our work in those terms and try to go on.

PP: I would ask that question myself, in a way. Obviously, what you were doing sounds useful to Ukraine, not just as a country but as an American ally that we're supporting in a time of war, so in that sense it’s useful to us. But what is the American case for this work? That's something that's come up with USAID—what is the United States' vested interest in helping in other countries? 

JB: It's a good question. I mean, messaging around USAID has always been a little bit fraught. There are different interests, and so you're always speaking to a certain audience, you know? Among the people working for USAID, the idea of using our national bounty to help other countries, for humanitarian assistance and aid—sure, that was always the way we thought about it and wanted to talk about it. But I think a huge failure on USAID’s part was that we didn’t talk about the fact that the majority of USAID funding stayed in the U.S.—we were using U.S. companies, U.S. farmers, and it actually helped Americans and the American economy. That’s a huge part of it, and part of why we're seeing these sectors in the US struggling, because they had been supporting our broader global engagement.

I did a lot of agriculture and food security and economic work. But there's also the HIV/AIDS work, for example; if we can help other countries to control diseases or outbreaks, that keeps them from coming to our shores. There are many ways to look at it as mutually beneficial. And just creating a stronger global order, having alliances instead of conflicts. It wasn't perfect. But looking back at how things were messaged, the economic benefits to Americans of what we were doing abroad were not ever articulated very well.

PP: When you look ahead, to what extent do you think it would be possible to rebuild any of this?

JB: We're all waiting for the midterms in November, but it really can’t change until we have a different leadership in place. USAID was really popular and bipartisan—there were always questions about how money was being spent, but even people like Rubio, who are now cheering on the dismantling of USAID, used to get it.

I think it could take a very long time to rebuild. I have no sense how long it might take other countries to trust the United States. Even if we had a sensible leadership, if we got back to that place, you never know when we're going to get another MAGA sort of uprising. I mean, trust is just something you earn.

PP: With this work not being done by the US, what do you know about what is happening back in Kyiv? I realize you’re kind of trying to chart an omission or a negative space, which is hard.

JB: I don't know if I can speak to that. I'm always thrilled when I see people on LinkedIn, like my Ukrainian colleagues, saying, like, “New job!” People are moving on. I think Chemonics is still implementing two projects, and one is UK-funded. So there are other donors, and there are people who are shifting into other companies that are using funds from the UK, or Sweden. One of my first thoughts last year was for male Ukrainian colleagues who were, because of the work they were doing, protected from conscription. So I’m especially happy when I see male colleagues remove their “open to work” banner.

PP: What are you doing now? Are you working, or looking for a job?

JB: The tricky thing for me initially was this hit at a time where I felt like I had my three-year plan. I had negotiated good compensation after being underpaid for a long time, everything was well set up, and Brian and I were pretty happy in Kyiv and building a home. There was a lot of frustration and grief over the loss of everything that we had set up.

Because of our family, largely, we’ve had a really soft landing, and I’ve had the time to process and figure out what's next. I’m doing a ton of volunteering and networking. I’m taking the food security work that I had been doing abroad, and looking at that here. But I haven't landed a job. 

PP: With a lot of people I’ve talked to from USAID, who were employed there directly or as contractors, it is taking people a minute. There are a lot of resets happening.

JB: Well, there are thousands of people that have my same basic skills or background, you know? And with Trump, there just aren’t a lot of sectors untouched by what's going on. It’s this convergence of a whole lot of variables that are not to our advantage. Supply and demand is off. Also, even just the mechanics of job searching, with AI, it's just wild. It feels like the only way you can move the needle at all is if you have a connection to a person. Otherwise you’re just sending stuff off into the void.

But, on a personal level, because we've had so much support, we’ve spent a lot of time with our niece. We wouldn’t have lived with our nephew as a teenager and our niece, who’s a baby—we would never have had a year with them. There are so many days now where I've sort of come to terms with what happened, where I feel like I have a direction forward and I actually am happy.

This recommendation comes courtesy of our cat, Lovely. Every May, our household likes to celebrate what I have christened Fill the House with Live Chipmunks Season, a time when Lovely thoughtfully carries in one or more local chipmunks and sets them free indoors. Try this, and your whole family can enjoy chasing chipmunks from room to room as they hide in corners, freeze like knickknacks on tables, decorate your house with droppings, and run maniacally back and forth between pieces of furniture, ignoring open doors and temptingly baited live traps. It could not be more exciting. And, as you can see, no home office is really complete without its own chipmunk.

If you’ve read this far: thank you. And if you haven’t done so already, consider upgrading to become a paid member, which will allow you to expound in the comments on both chipmunk entrapment and the future of USAID. See you next time.