Local group returns from helping refugees in Ukraine, Poland

Local group comes home following humanitarian work in Ukraine

A group of local medical workers and logistics specialists from Empact Northwest spent more than a week in Ukraine helping families with their medical needs.

SEATTLE - A group of local medical workers and logistics specialists from Empact Northwest spent more than a week in Ukraine helping families with their medical needs.

The team says they were exhausted from their long journey, and although they've helped in disasters before, they say this experience was different.

Jake Gillanders, Executive Director for Empact Northwest, says the people they saw coming across the border into Poland are "frightened, and they have so little."

Gillanders and Sil Wong-Underwood were part of an 11-day medical mission to help those who had left everything behind.

Sil Wong-Underwood is a Logistics Unit Leader with Empact Northwest. She says, "It is gut-wrenching to see."

"It is a humanitarian crisis," said Gillanders.

Wong-Underwood and Gillanders helped to set up mobile operations in areas where refugees are flooding to the Polish border, near the town of Przemsyl. They say the team's family physicians, paramedics and acute trauma care doctors will help to provide medicine and health care for refugees in the months to come.

"Many of these folks don't have anywhere to go," said Gillanders. "To see these fathers saying goodbye to their families, not knowing if they are going to see them again is pretty heartbreaking."

He says the scene at a train station in Poland also struck a nerve.

"Little girls the same age as my daughter, look just like her, playing with her stuffies on nothing but a foam mat, sleeping on train station platform for three to four hours," said Gillanders.

"It's moms and grandparents with their children. You see children everywhere—and how do you explain this to them?" said Wong-Underwood.

Gillanders said 100,000–130,000 refugees are crossing the border with Poland daily, as Russia continues its attacks.

"To see something that's manmade, human-made, and within the control of people and the direct result of people's choices, it's a whole different category for us, and it's just heartbreaking," said Gillanders.

Although this was a tough assignment, the team says they'd go back in a heartbeat in order to help the people in Ukraine. Gillanders said they expect that their teams may be helping refugees there through August.

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