UKRAINE CONFILCT   This morning I was on my own in Lviv, a large urban city in the Ukraine.  It feels no different like being in a city center like San Francisco, Budapest, Vienna, Hamburg, etc.  I’m thankful we have a place to stay in the city center as it is so easy to be just another [...]

UKRAINE CONFILCT   Reflections on walking through a cemetery of fresh graves of Ukrainian soldiers.We did not start out looking for this place. Had we known we were going to come across it, we might have shied away. We just walked around a corner and there it was - we were shocked, yet drawn in. A mixture [...]

UKRAINE CONFILCT   Spent the day visiting patients. Many are far from families. We brought oranges and chocolate, massaged some hands and toes. We joked and chatted through a translator and hope we eased some of the pain or at least provided a distraction. Some were clearly in a lot of discomfort. Pain is treated with ibuprofen. [...]

UKRAINE CONFILCT   Today we met the war. We drove to Zytomyr to deliver ortho supplies to a clinic. On the two hour drive we passed bombed out buildings, houses, bridges. In the town we saw the school, apartment buildings, houses and hospital that were hit by missiles.The hospital that is still standing has many complex patients, [...]

UKRAINE CONFILCT   The Protez Prosthetic Center is a joint project with two brothers, both Ukrainian, one living in Minnesota, the other here in Mukachevo. There are over 15,000 amputees and they need prosthetic limbs to heal. This organization has brought over 30 patients to the USA for complex prosthetics . There are over 750 on the [...]

UKRAINE CONFILCT   Our team is now in Mukachevo, western Ukraine. Our many bags of trauma supplies have been loaded into a van and are on the way to the front lines in Bekhmut where there are raging battles with many injuries of Ukrainians and Russians.We have delivered critical orthopedic equipment to a trauma surgeon here. He [...]

UKRAINE CONFILCT   Today our Ukrainian driver picked us up in Budapest, Hungary and we drove to Mukachevo, Ukraine. Crossing the border took a while as we had 17 bags of medical supplies packed to the max.They were filled with trauma supplies including 100 tourniquets, medications and limb-saving orthopedic supplies. The Hungarian border control had us open [...]

UKRAINE CONFILCTHands On Global team continues serving IDPs on the ground in Chernavitzi. Due to gas shortages the team has had to move from the Romanian border town of Siret into Chernavitzi city. This is a bit unsettling as there are daily air raids but there is no other option.The shelters are still housing many IDPs [...]

By Lina Knutsdatter Thingstad ~ Hands On Global Team Leader Last week we were, as usual, at different shelters in Chernivtsi ~ all the way up to the Carphatian mountains, close to the Ivano-frankivsk region. We visited refugees in very remote areas, where health service is more than difficult to attend, and where internally displaced people [...]