GAMMA DEKE DELIVERS ASSISTANCE TO UKRAINE

RETIRED ATTORNEY DRIVES A DONATED AMBULANCE AND PROVIDES HELP TO CITIZENS THROUGH THE WAR-TORN COUNTRY

BY MICHAEL E. HILTS, GAMMA ‘76

y November last year, ten months of incessant Russian missiles and shelling had turned hospitals, schools and private homes across Ukraine into rubble and left the nation’s citizens in desperate need of medical equipment and supplies. The Rotary Club of Staunton, Va., including member Mike Quillen, Gamma ’72, is among many humanitarian volunteers who stepped up last fall to help Ukraine in its time of need. Brock Bierman, head of the Rotary in Staunton, asked Mike, who had just returned from a Gamma chapter reunion in Nashville, if he would go to Ukraine. Mike didn’t hesitate.

BBy November last year, ten months of incessant Russian missiles and shelling had turned hospitals, schools and private homes across Ukraine into rubble and left the nation’s citizens in desperate need of medical equipment and supplies. The Rotary Club of Staunton, Va., including member Mike Quillen, Gamma ’72, is among many humanitarian volunteers who stepped up last fall to help Ukraine in its time of need. Brock Bierman, head of the Rotary in Staunton, asked Mike, who had just returned from a Gamma chapter reunion in Nashville, if he would go to Ukraine. Mike didn’t hesitate.

A retired attorney from Staunton, Va., Brother Quillen spent eight days in Ukraine helping deliver ambulances to the government. Mike got behind the wheel of one of nearly 44 donated ambulances that wound their way from the Slovakian border, navigated around the Carpathian Mountains, and zig-zagged through military roadblocks and checkpoints to Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv.

Some of the vehicles were delivered to the ministry of health, some to Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces. The TDFs are the military reserves of Ukraine’s army, comprised mostly of combat veterans but also local civilian volunteers and some foreign volunteers from the International Legion. The latter group formed in February immediately upon Russia’s invasion.

Brother Quillen drove his ambulance more than 1,000 miles in three days, as he continued on after arriving in Kyiv, heading to Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine. The latter part of the drive took Mike through Ukraine’s breadbasket – miles and miles of fertile farmland.

Brother Quillen drove his ambulance more than 1,000 miles in the first three days, continuing on after arriving in Kyiv, heading to Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine. The latter part of the drive took Mike through Ukraine’s breadbasket – miles and miles of fertile farmland. He saw many grain trucks heading to the Black Sea port of Odessa to be offloaded onto container ships – though Russia was threatening at the time to renege on its pact to halt its blockade of grain shipments, which had resumed in August. Ukraine supplies from 10 to 15 percent the world’s wheat, corn, and barley – and half of its sunflower oil.

The vehicle Mike drove will be used in the area, including Kerson, which had been liberated from Russian control in early November, but was devastated again weeks later by new shelling and more forced citizen evacuations.

“Up at 5 a.m. each day to keep a tight itinerary, we drove in strange conditions, taking time to visit orphanages and shelters to meet with local leaders and citizens.”

Mike says he wasn’t too frightened as he took to the road. That’s because, by the time the convoys started, Russian shelling had calmed down a bit. It did increase again by mid-November, with Russia still targeting civilian infrastructure – and taking innocent lives. “We saw missile strikes from the road, perhaps a mile or two from us,” Mike says. “In Odessa, as we walked the streets, we were hearing frequent anti-aircraft fire.”

The ambulance project was part of a broader collaborative started in July between Rotary Clubs and Ukraine Friends, a U.S.-based non-profit with the ‘singular focus of stopping the suffering of free people under military siege.’

Rotary Clubs and Ukraine Friends each donated $300,000 to acquire some of the ambulances; the Richmond District applied for a grant of $50k to buy three ambulances and equipment. Rotary districts in the U.S., Ukraine, and Slovakia found volunteer drivers and coordinated the deliveries.

Beyond procuring emergency vehicles, Ukraine Friends also funded and coordinated evacuating children from targeted Ukraine cities, assisting in rehabbing schools, supplying books, computers and supplies, and individual first aid kits (IFAKs). Each kit contains a dozen items – bandages, materials and treatments to control bleeding and dress wounds that can save 90% of the field casualties that occur on the front lines; the past year in Ukraine, those front lines have been throughout most of the country.

Since last February, the Russian invasion has forced more than

13 million Ukrainians to flee their homes, creating a humanitarian crisis. Rotary awarded nearly $12 million in 353 disaster response grants from the start of the war through October.

The ambulance routes were arranged to help deliver medical supplies and winter coats to citizens in the multiple shelters set up for internally displaced people.

“We visited several bomb shelters, orphanages, and other locations across Ukraine sheltering IDPs, or internally displaced persons, who had been forced from their homes but remained in the country. These people needing shelters with power, food, and clothing,” Mike says. “One location we visited was a former Soviet summer camp for kids. It had been mothballed and empty since 1991, when Ukraine became independent. When pressed into service last fall as a shelter that could be home to displaced families, it looked the same as it did in 1991 – an eerie time capsule of its Soviet days. Murals of kids in uniforms, wearing red scarves.”

Mike adds, “I am amazed by the strength of the Ukrainian people, how positive they are. I felt first-hand the resolve of the Ukrainian people to resist and recover occupied territory and was surprised by the extent to which they carried on with their everyday lives while war was waged all around them.”

To a large extent, life goes on, with almost normal activity, even in the bombed out areas of large cities without electricity.

The beach on the Black Sea in Odessa is an immensely popular recreational attraction. During the war, access has been rationed, but Ukranians still head there in big numbers. Unafraid, they head to the beach like they’re going to see the ‘fireworks’ – the missile fire.

“The people of Ukraine want their country back and are not in the mood to compromise,” Mike learned while he was there helping them. He could sense their clear hatred of Putin and Russians, but also says the story of what spawned that hatred goes back well before Putin’s current atrocities. “To learn more before my visit, I read the book Bloodlands,” a 2010 book that covers the period between the World Wars and murder of 14 million people in the region, controlled by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic States.

Quillen also said the ambulance volunteers met with the mayor of Bucha, a city in northern Ukraine west of Kyiv. There, Russia massacred over 450 Ukraine civilians during invasions in March. The ambulance volunteers dined with Mayor Anatoliy Fedoruk by candlelight, since much of the territory remained without power, and all were looking forward to Mayor Fedoruk’s planned visit to the U.S. early in 2023.

To learn more about programs to support Ukraine, visit the Ukraine Friends or Rotary sites