"We didn't think you would come!"
Thank you for your prayers, your emails, and your support.
The 24 hours between Saturday 10:30pm and Sunday 10:30pm were heart-breaking and difficult, as well as encouraging and hopeful, and therefore likely among the most impactful of our lives.
It is difficult to put our experiences into words, but we travelled from a village near Katowice to the Polish border, where we spent over an hour (at 3 am) being inspected and registered by both Polish and Ukrainian officials. We then drove to L’viv, where we arrived at 6 am. We were able to drop off the food, clothing, household, and medical supplies at three different locations (one church, one family housing refugees, and the Ukrainian Catholic University), meeting with local Christians and refugees where we went. After taking a two-hour nap and a lunch made by dear friends, we made our way back home.
While we know that the supplies were necessary to those that we delivered it to, we were told that our visit and our solidarity were equally encouraging. However, we must take this opportunity to highlight the incredible work of the local Churches and organisations in Poland and Ukraine:
A family we know has been hosting 6 permanent refugees (in addition to their own family of six!) and short-term refugees in their home
The university has been housing families of students in their dormitories, and has set up a volunteer network of students who have decided to stay in Ukraine
A group of Ukrainian churches has established an informal system of distributing goods and created a supply chain (it was compared to an ant hill!)
Several church leaders in Ukraine have communicated to us that they will not leave Ukraine, and that their responsibility is to stay and pastor those around them
Churches in Poland have individually and cooperatively shuttled people across/and from the Polish border, hosted refugees in their homes, taken Ukrainian children and their mothers to doctors, organised medical supplies to take to Ukraine (at great personal risk), and acted self-sacrificially in many other ways
Some of the experiences that were difficult to process were:
Signs on cars in Ukraine saying “children”
A queue at the border with refugees carrying a few belongings that stretched further than we could comprehend
A volunteer at the University wondering if we brought antibiotics that could help with his long-lasting throat ache
A friend asking to pray for his brother, who was a wounded soldier that refused to get help at a hospital as he did not want to abandon his squad
Other friends caring for their COVID-positive family members in a war zone
A nurse we met had just been relocated to L’viv from Kyiv, as the station she had been working at in a children’s hospital had been bombed
A woman at the Polish border crossing did not have the right papers to cross, and had to look for her elderly grandmother in Ukraine on foot
Schools in Ukraine resumed to operate online on Monday, 14 March, to preserve the normalcy amidst the chaos
Considering all this, what can we do?
Please continue to pray for volunteers and churches in Ukraine and Poland, for strength when fatigue and grief is all-consuming, and for wisdom in making difficult decisions daily
Please pray for the individuals at the borders, who must cross on foot in freezing temperatures
Please pray for those targeting vulnerable women and children with evil intentions to be thwarted
Help financially support Ukraine and Ukrainian churches!
We will be aiming to do another supply run to Ukraine Monday night—so please keep us in your prayers, as well as those we are delivering the supplies to.
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