An Orillia doctor recently spent a week volunteering with Rescuers Without Borders to help Ukrainian citizens forced to flee their homeland. Jeff Pitcher was in Medyka, Poland, a major border crossing to western Ukraine. “A lot of people lived in underground bomb shelters for two or three weeks before I got there,” he said. “They had limited access to food, clean water, and even access to the Internet and the outside world because the Russians cut off all their communications devices, such as the Internet and mobile phone towers.” A common theme that Pitcher observed from conversations with Ukrainians was that their local schools and hospitals had been destroyed. “I think it was designed to encourage people to leave,” he said. “I went to Ukraine to do medical examinations on people and saw mothers and children with their fathers. When they reached the border checkpoint, the fathers hugged their family and many tears came to their eyes. “The father would return to Ukraine to fight and the women and children would leave for Poland.” The 40-year-old doctor says his experience in the area was “heartbreaking”. He said many people coming across the border were suffering from stomach flu who drank dirty water. “We will deal with their dehydration,” he said. “Many of them had chronic medical needs and did not have their medicines, so we refilled their prescriptions.” Some even suffered gunshot wounds a few days ago, he said. Some women and children also suffered from shrapnel wounds and facial injuries. “There was a lady who surprisingly escaped from Mariupol,” he said. “Her house was destroyed, her family was killed, but she managed to escape with a friend in a car and they drove through the farmers’ fields while being shot by the Russians.” Pitcher says the woman was visibly shaking when she crossed the border, overcome by the stress of a life-changing experience. Despite seeing traumatic sights and hearing disability stories from survivors, Pitcher says he is grateful he had the opportunity to go to the war-torn area. “I think I was able to make a big difference in helping people,” he said. “In addition, I was able to undertake many medical supplies, which have reached various parts of the country.” The most difficult part for Pitcher, as a father of three, was watching children in the middle of the night being carried by their mothers with their little siblings behind with their teddy bears crawling on the ground. “Their eyes were sunken and their faces were flat,” he said. “You could see that so much had happened.” While war will affect the lives of Ukrainians forever, Pitcher says people are strong and resilient. “They continue and they know what needs to be done,” he said. “These mothers brought their children to foreign countries because they knew they had to bring their children to safety. “Men are left behind because they know they have to fight for their freedom and their right to democracy.” Pitcher has helped rescue missions in the past, most notably New York after 9/11 and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. “This was very different because I have never done work in a war zone,” he said. “Seeing natural disasters leads to a similar situation in the sense that people have lost their homes, they have lost some friends, but this is so widespread and it is war.” He says he has never seen death on the scale of what is happening in Ukraine. “When they leave these war-torn cities, there are corpses everywhere,” Pitcher explained. “There are corpses of civilians, corpses of the military, and you can imagine these little children seeing these corpses lying on the ground that the Russians are leaving outside to intimidate.” Pitcher encourages locals to help Ukrainians by joining organizations seeking refugee families. He also said that there was a great need to support organizations providing support to refugees living in Europe. “One of these organizations is the Salvation Army,” he said. “They have organizations in Europe and inside Ukraine. They provide shelter, food and mental health support. “
