Former soldier Rob McTavish personally delivered vital medical supplies to the war-torn country.
Standing among the ruins of people’s homes, Rob McTavish felt a heaviness in his heart. Only six or seven months ago, he reflected, families lived happily, children played, and birthdays were celebrated.
McTavish felt like an intruder as he entered one destroyed house after another, “You’re in someone’s house…” he said, “and they’re not.”
The photographs were still on the walls, the personal effects were still there, but McTavish couldn’t help wondering, “Why aren’t they here?” Where are they now?
McTavish, program director at SFU’s Center for Education Excellence and former soldier and peacekeeper, traveled to Ukraine via Poland in August to carry five suitcases of donated medical supplies and equipment to hospitals around the country. war-torn.
Like the rest of the world, McTavish and his family witnessed the Russian invasion of Ukraine on television. The devastation and bombardment of civilian targets left him thinking about the injustice and inequity of war. But it wasn’t until he and his partner, Cher Hill, took in Ukrainian refugees – sixteen-year-old Max and his grandmother – that the war got personal for the family.
Travel to Ukraine
The family responded to a request from the community and opened its doors to refugees in June.
McTavish was asked to help transport medical supplies to Ukraine because of his military background. He was introduced to the organization Humanitarian Emergency Response Operations (HERO), which provides direct humanitarian aid to countries in need.
Thanks to his social connections and the guarantee that he would personally deliver the supplies, he said he was able to obtain crucial donations, including combat first aid and orthopedic medical equipment worth almost half a million. of dollars.
“It’s important to put them in the right hands,” he said of the trust donors had in him.
As a thank you to donors, McTavish brought home a Ukrainian flag signed by the warzone medical professionals who received it.
In the war zone
McTavish crossed borders, breaking through checkpoints and curfews from Kyiv to Dnipro. During his trip, he filmed the ruins of the bombings that caused more than 7.6 million people to flee Ukraine, according to data from the UN refugee agency’s website.
He traveled to the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine to meet soldiers at the front and delivered bottles of water to the troops before traveling to Zaporizhzhia to meet Max’s parents. He was happy to be able to tell them that their only child was safe in Canada.
He distributed the medical supplies in Dnipro before heading north to Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city, where he continued his mission and filmed the excitement of doctors receiving the donations. “It was like little children opening Christmas presents,” he said.
During his trip, he was approached by another relative, who asked him to take his teenage son to Canada.
“‘You will save our family’s DNA,'” the father said.
The father’s request and underlying assumption that his family would not survive the conflict moved him. “It’s the injustice and injustice of war,” he said.
The teenager, Danny, will arrive in October to join the McTavish family in hopes of a better future.
Since McTavish returned from Ukraine in August, he has been collecting donations for a return trip in January. “More and more donations have been pouring in since the story came out,” he said. More surgical equipment from hospitals has arrived, and he’s raising money for battlefield aid like drone batteries and body armor to help soldiers on the front lines.
McTavish said the trip was rewarding. “It gave me a sense of accomplishment, a sense of doing something to help with that,” he said.
Although it was her face that was associated with the donation mission, it was a team effort, and her family was the backbone of it.
He hopes his story will inspire people to lend a hand. “You don’t have to do much to help,” he said.
“We have no connection with Ukraine,” he added. “My wife is not Ukrainian, I am not Ukrainian. But, for us, it started with opening our doors to this family who needed a place to stay. We are lucky to have the space and to be able to do that. We recognize that not everyone has that luxury, but as a family, I have three of my own children. We’ve met and talked about it, but you don’t have to to do what we do – take a family into your home, but there are so many little things that can be done.
“Like we have people doing sock drives, we have people knitting blankets, we have people driving, going to medical appointments, cutting vegetables from their garden. So that’s the only thing if we can get this out is you can do everything from knit a pair of socks, or next time you’re at Costco, grab an extra pair of socks to give away. They really add up. You don’t you don’t have to take a family or go to Ukraine with medical supplies. You can do those little things.”
