2022-05-29_Lessons_Learned_from_Inside_Ukraine
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00:00:30.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:34.000 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while
00:00:37.800 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. Today
00:00:41.440 | on the show, we're going to talk a little bit about living a meaningful life, partly
00:00:45.100 | in terms of serving others, but we're going to talk about what it's actually been like
00:00:49.880 | on the ground in Ukraine, as well as a few other things that you will hear. I'd like
00:00:55.520 | to welcome back to the show a friend of mine, Jimmy. Welcome back to Radical Personal Finance.
00:00:59.240 | Thank you. Thank you for having me back.
00:01:02.920 | So you were last on the show when you've been on the show a couple of times where we have
00:01:06.740 | been talking about Venezuela. And for any uninitiated listeners, you have an extensive
00:01:14.160 | amount of experience working on the ground, providing relief in Venezuela, providing relief
00:01:20.520 | supplies, disaster supplies, as well as being involved in other charitable works and Christian
00:01:26.040 | ministry works in the nation of Venezuela. However, recently you traded out that disaster
00:01:32.560 | zone and you spent some time in an active war zone in Ukraine. And then we'll get to
00:01:39.060 | some of the other more recent adventures, but I'd like to talk about your experiences
00:01:44.160 | in Ukraine. Tell us please, how did you wind up in Ukraine and what is happening on the
00:01:52.200 | ground? What did you observe? What was it like living in Ukraine recently?
00:01:57.960 | Well, the war in Ukraine started on January 24th. And then a week later, after the war
00:02:05.640 | started, I got a phone call from a friend of mine and he said, "Hey, we're looking
00:02:10.840 | for volunteers to come and help in Venezuela. And you definitely qualify for coming up and
00:02:18.720 | helping out. Now, would you like to apply?" And then I said, "Well, I'm in Venezuela
00:02:24.440 | right now. I have to talk to my board." And so I phone my board, the group of people
00:02:32.920 | that I'm an accountant to in Venezuela. And I said, "I'm being asked to volunteer
00:02:39.200 | as a rescue technician and as a medic." Although I'm not a medic, but I have training
00:02:47.960 | on that, some training on that. So they said, "Please go. We're happy to support you
00:02:57.280 | and pray for you." So I phoned my friend back and like two or three days later, I don't
00:03:07.920 | know, I was on a plane to Ukraine. And then I arrived there, I think I arrived there in
00:03:15.680 | 10 days, 10, 11 days after the war had started.
00:03:20.920 | You began in Poland, right? You were doing some work in Poland and then you did eventually
00:03:24.800 | go with a convoy into Ukraine proper.
00:03:27.440 | Yes, yes. I started off at the border between Poland and Ukraine. I was stationed in a place
00:03:35.560 | where we were helping out refugees cross the border. There were thousands of them. Like
00:03:42.720 | one night we counted, well, I didn't count them, but they told me that 74,000 people
00:03:48.200 | had crossed. And some of them needed help. I was doing triage, meaning helping people
00:03:55.720 | to assess their medical needs. I was doing all sorts of things, including helping them
00:04:01.560 | with their luggage or just sometimes their cars would break down in the middle of the
00:04:07.280 | road and it was very cold, incredible cold, minus 12 one night. And so we had to go and
00:04:14.120 | just pick them up, rescue them and then take them to the border.
00:04:20.760 | Tell us some of the stories. Why were people fleeing and what was happening when they were
00:04:25.360 | making that decision?
00:04:27.360 | Well, that time when I got there, they were coming from all over the west and north of
00:04:37.240 | Ukraine. At that time, they were certain and we were certain that the Russians were going
00:04:46.080 | to take over the whole country. There was no question about it. So people were naturally
00:04:51.760 | fleeing and looking, trying to get out of there. Because it was a sure thing that with
00:05:04.760 | countless tanks and army personnel just surrounding Kiev and having taken all the northern part
00:05:13.440 | of Kiev, it was a sure thing. It was just a matter of time before the Russians would
00:05:22.440 | come into Kiev. And then of course, once Kiev was taken, maybe everybody felt that the whole
00:05:28.720 | city was going to fall down. The whole country, I'm sorry, was going to go down.
00:05:35.520 | So over the years, we've talked a lot about refugees and you have been involved in many
00:05:41.360 | different disasters where there have been refugees. You worked with the Red Cross in
00:05:50.200 | Chile after the big earthquake there. You volunteered for several years in Haiti after
00:05:54.520 | the earthquake there. Recently, over the last few years, you have spent huge amounts of
00:05:59.520 | time volunteering in Colombia and Venezuela at the border there. In fact, we've worked
00:06:06.920 | with listeners of the show who've donated money and done relief for even several ministries
00:06:12.520 | that specifically work with refugees coming out of Venezuela into Colombia. And then you've
00:06:18.920 | told me that recently after the pandemic started, you started to work with and see refugees
00:06:25.560 | going from Colombia back into Venezuela, people heading home. And now of course, you've been
00:06:30.840 | on the border between Poland and Ukraine. How do you compare these different refugee
00:06:37.240 | movements? If you were to compare and contrast the Venezuela-Colombia border as compared
00:06:42.680 | to the Ukraine-Poland border, what did you observe?
00:06:49.160 | Yeah, what a question. Interesting. Well, the first, you could see the desperation for
00:06:56.640 | people to leave and living with really nothing, nothing because they cannot carry much when
00:07:05.280 | they leave. And you could compare also the family separation. I saw a lot of men, for
00:07:13.680 | example, cannot leave Ukraine. And so they were just, I saw a lot of men dropping off
00:07:21.720 | their families at the border and saying goodbye. We're talking not 10, 20, we're talking hundreds
00:07:29.800 | of them just driving their cars or just passing by. That didn't happen in Venezuela when I
00:07:38.560 | saw it. I saw a whole family, the father and the mother and the whole family crossing and
00:07:44.680 | escaping. But Venezuela, but Ukraine was different because men were not allowed to leave the
00:07:50.080 | country. I still not allowed to, they expected that they would volunteer for fighting in
00:07:56.680 | the war. So that was probably what, more than what I can compare, I could tell you the differences.
00:08:05.560 | I'm sorry, I know I'm twisting the question and I ask for forgiveness. But the other thing
00:08:11.120 | was the cold. I remember in Venezuela, it was the rain because sometimes we had to halt
00:08:18.200 | and cross the river. And when the river was way up, we had to, well, we had to put ropes
00:08:27.080 | and bridges and be there waiting for them. We just bring shelter to the soccer fields
00:08:35.600 | where they were sleeping. One day I counted almost 2000 people sleeping in the soccer
00:08:41.160 | field. And in Ukraine, it was the cold. It was bitter cold. And so we had to have blankets
00:08:52.560 | and we had to be ready, especially because the border sometimes was slow in processing
00:09:01.400 | all refugees that were coming through. So they had to stay for three, four, five hours.
00:09:08.080 | And it was one night, it was well, minus 12. I don't know, probably zero on your scale
00:09:16.960 | one night.
00:09:19.560 | Were the Polish border, how strict were the Polish border officials on the documentation
00:09:25.580 | of fleeing Ukrainian refugees?
00:09:27.760 | I'm sorry, the question, you have to work it out again.
00:09:32.880 | So how strict were the Polish border officials on the paperwork requirements for fleeing
00:09:39.720 | Ukrainians? Were they allowing people to come across with expired passports? Were they allowing
00:09:44.040 | people to come in with no documentation? Or did they make sure that everyone had to have
00:09:49.320 | the proper international passports? How did they handle that?
00:09:52.960 | No, no, just they had, I think in Ukraine, people, every person gets a passport. I think
00:10:03.560 | it's the law in Ukraine. Your ID is your passport. So everybody seemed to have one. Except some
00:10:15.880 | people didn't. I saw them just showing a little piece of paper, but nobody was rejected for
00:10:21.320 | lack of papers. Definitely. Nobody was. If somebody didn't have a document, I never saw
00:10:29.160 | people rejected. The only people that I saw rejected was people that had some spending,
00:10:35.640 | I don't know, but I did help very few people having to return because they were missing
00:10:43.080 | something and I never understood what they were missing. But they were very few. For
00:10:48.200 | example, out of 74,000, probably one or two, three were rejected.
00:10:54.600 | So as people were coming across the border, what were they doing for accommodation? Were
00:10:58.840 | they immediately getting on a train and heading further into Europe? Were they camping on
00:11:03.280 | the streets? Were locals taking them in? How were they being housed?
00:11:08.920 | At the border where I was, they had a very large reception center. I think they were
00:11:15.960 | capable of handling up to 5,000, 6,000 people per night. And then buses were coming from
00:11:25.000 | all over Europe to pick them up, or they could take the train to wherever they wanted to
00:11:31.080 | go. So I was surprised how efficient the Polish government was with handling the tremendous
00:11:39.720 | amount of refugees. We're talking gazillions, millions, literally millions of them actually.
00:11:48.840 | They had to be processed very quickly. So I was very impressed with how, it was chaotic,
00:12:00.360 | but there was some sense of order in the passing through of the refugees.
00:12:07.560 | Right. In a moment, we'll talk about your experiences inside Ukraine, but I want to
00:12:12.600 | dwell on this topic of becoming a refugee. I teach a course called International Escape
00:12:18.040 | Plan, and part of it is in connection with Ukraine. And I basically, after years of watching
00:12:27.000 | disasters, I have observed that one of the best ways to survive and thrive in a disaster
00:12:33.760 | is by not being physically present where the disaster is located. So any Venezuelan who
00:12:39.560 | fled Venezuela and started living in Miami was able to avoid the worst of the collapse
00:12:46.040 | in Venezuela. Any Ukrainian who fled in the weeks prior to the invasion by Russia and
00:12:54.360 | went to another place was able to avoid some of the worst effects of the invasion. And
00:13:01.200 | so I teach a whole course on this, available at internationalescapeplan.com, and I basically
00:13:08.560 | talk about how if you can do nothing else, if you can prepare a passport and a credit
00:13:14.640 | card so you have money to spend and a cell phone, you can get out. And so you should
00:13:19.120 | prepare for that. Last time you were on, we talked about Venezuela and we discussed the
00:13:23.400 | preparations that you would make if you knew you were going to live in a Venezuelan-style
00:13:28.560 | economic crisis. Now I want to ask you, if you knew that you were going to become a Ukrainian-style
00:13:35.520 | refugee fleeing at the last minute across the Polish border while the Russian army is
00:13:41.080 | invading, what kind of preparations would you make in advance to be prepared for that
00:13:45.680 | kind of disaster scenario?
00:13:47.800 | Yeah, definitely the passport would be a plus, and the international credit card, some cash,
00:13:57.640 | some cash available. I would have a ready-to-go backpack with all the basics, all the survival
00:14:15.640 | basic things that we need now, today, in today's world. As ironic as it may sound, having a
00:14:27.120 | charger, a phone charger, as simple as it is, I noticed a lot of people that are coming
00:14:33.720 | in and borrowing or asking for a phone charger, and I thought, I guess they were not prepared.
00:14:39.640 | So there are simple things that, it's a list of things to run with in case I have to leave.
00:14:50.920 | The problem is I don't think people understood, even though they could see all the signs that
00:14:58.600 | things were going not to go well in Ukraine, they were still confident that nothing would
00:15:06.540 | happen to them, there was not going to be an invasion, mainly because Russia kept saying
00:15:11.760 | that they were not planning such a thing. I think the Ukrainians trusted that the invasion
00:15:19.480 | was not going to happen, and when it did happen, they were not prepared, many of them were
00:15:26.200 | not prepared. I could tell you that. Winter clothing, that was the most. We had to help
00:15:35.880 | them because they were suffering from hypothermia in the middle of the winter, so either they
00:15:41.200 | didn't grab, or maybe they escaped in the middle of the night, and I didn't ask, but
00:15:47.360 | I think you have to, after that I kept my backpack with everything, the basics with
00:15:55.400 | me all the time. In fact, my escape backpack, I used it for the whole time as my pillow,
00:16:03.520 | because in case I said I had to run, a missile attack, which happened to me several times,
00:16:12.040 | so in case I had to run, I slept with my run backpack most of the time.
00:16:20.240 | Do you think that, so obviously winter clothing, winter coats, etc., was important. Do you
00:16:27.160 | think that if somebody had had things like camping gear, backpacking tents, things like
00:16:33.160 | that, do you think that would have been helpful, or would it have been more of a hindrance
00:16:36.680 | in that scenario because it was too much luggage, too bulky, and people could go and stay in
00:16:41.400 | hotels?
00:16:42.400 | Oh, no, no, no, no. You could not possibly camp in Ukraine. The temperatures were just
00:16:52.360 | incredibly cold. I did camp one time out of necessity, and in the middle of the night,
00:17:02.120 | I ran for, because it's just impossible. Maybe now that it's summertime, maybe you could
00:17:10.760 | think of camping equipment. In fact, I have my camping equipment with me. I have two backpacks,
00:17:19.120 | one is with my camping equipment, and the other one is with my run supplies, runaway
00:17:25.280 | supplies. But I'm going to take it back when I go back, and in ten days, I will take my
00:17:34.240 | camping equipment with me.
00:17:36.920 | With regard to money, was the financial system working? Could, for example, if the Ukrainians
00:17:43.400 | were fleeing, were they able to access their bank accounts, get money out so they could
00:17:48.360 | pay for their fares across Europe, or did you observe any problems in the local financial
00:17:52.040 | system?
00:17:53.040 | No, the system was working quite well. I was surprised that you could even get money, Ukrainian
00:18:01.080 | money, from the cash machine in the Ukraine, and that never stopped working, which was
00:18:08.080 | very impressive because you would expect that the banking system would collapse. It didn't.
00:18:13.840 | It kept going. The problem is, I think most people did not have the money to spare, say,
00:18:22.000 | "Okay, I'm going to take so much money." But the other thing was that the Europeans
00:18:29.920 | were so well, they didn't have a standing job. People didn't need to pay, the trains
00:18:35.880 | were free, the shelters, there was food. Again, I'm going to reiterate, I was very impressed
00:18:46.880 | with the Poland side. I was very impressed with the way they handled the whole situation.
00:18:55.000 | There's this idea that in certain disaster times, when you have to flee, that having
00:19:03.280 | alternative forms of money, for example, having a valuable piece of jewelry or a gold coin
00:19:09.640 | can be helpful to bribe a border guard to let you out. Also, there were reports with
00:19:15.080 | Bitcoin. There were several tweet threads that I archived while watching the situation
00:19:19.920 | in Ukraine, where people were saying, "I'm fleeing Ukraine, and the only thing that would
00:19:23.400 | work for me was Bitcoin, and I used that to get out." Did you personally observe anything
00:19:30.580 | like that, or did you hear any stories personally from anybody that used anything other than
00:19:36.040 | just the normal day-to-day banking system as part of their escape plan?
00:19:42.200 | Not really, because I was even able to use my credit card in the Ukraine, which all of
00:19:50.880 | that surprised me. I could use my credit card, my debit card, I could exchange US dollars
00:20:03.860 | or euros. Ukraine is a very difficult situation, because somehow the country did not, even
00:20:22.940 | though amazingly enough, it was supposed to collapse, and it didn't. I was expecting the
00:20:35.280 | electricity to go off, fuel shortages, although there are some fuel shortages, you could still
00:20:40.920 | travel around. So the country, during the first weeks, even up to now, when I left,
00:20:50.120 | it didn't hold very, very well. It was not like Venezuela, everything slowly, slowly
00:20:55.600 | collapsed and then suddenly they had a complete collapse. Banking, schools, everything, transportation,
00:21:03.480 | gas, everything collapsed. But in Ukraine, everything kept well. Kiev did have some issues.
00:21:17.400 | When I got there, they were just too real. But they were managing very well, and they
00:21:25.880 | still manage very well, which is quite surprising, because they were facing one of the largest
00:21:32.600 | armies in the world.
00:21:36.720 | You have extensive experience working in an economic collapse, right? You have experience
00:21:44.160 | of going to Venezuela and trading a $5 US bill for a backpack full of Venezuelan bank
00:21:52.280 | notes. You have experience knowing that the inflation is so bad that you can't even take
00:21:58.280 | 20s and 50s, because no one has enough money to change it. So you have experience in both
00:22:02.200 | kinds of economies. What I'd like to ask, and the reason I'm asking this, is because
00:22:06.960 | most of my listeners are from the United States, and people are always trying to figure out,
00:22:12.440 | "Well, if there were a collapse in the United States, what would that look like?" And years
00:22:16.320 | ago I used to think, "Oh, well, it would look like Venezuela." I'm now convinced that it
00:22:20.880 | would not look like Venezuela, and I think that your recent experience in Ukraine is
00:22:26.640 | a good piece of data to fit in to that analysis. So here's my question. Why do you think it
00:22:34.480 | is so different in Ukraine versus Venezuela? What are the differences between the kinds
00:22:45.480 | of crisis that each country is facing that led to Venezuela having virtually no electricity,
00:22:52.160 | Venezuela having a collapsed financial system, but Ukraine continuing to be able to keep
00:22:57.880 | the lights on, continuing to have functioning ATMs, a functioning credit card system, etc.?
00:23:02.680 | What are the differences that contributed to that?
00:23:06.040 | Well, what are the differences? Well, the Ukraine, I'm going to talk about Ukraine,
00:23:18.720 | they're very confident, and they're really well-united. Like, whatever decision the president
00:23:26.280 | of the country makes is very well supported by everyone. And I think I'm very impressed
00:23:34.720 | by his leadership and how he, I think he's a hero, literally. He's the one who was able
00:23:45.000 | to gather everybody together as a community, and it's a community war. And there is a lot
00:23:58.800 | of unity. In the meantime, in Venezuela, there is no unity at all. There is a lot of fighting,
00:24:08.360 | there is within the different groups fighting between themselves. But Ukraine is certainly
00:24:14.880 | different. There is a lot of unity and a lot of commonality. ICE people, for example, volunteers
00:24:22.720 | taking food to the front lines, including myself, and picking up wounded soldiers, using
00:24:32.600 | their cars, their own cars, their own personal cars to go and deliver supplies, delivering
00:24:40.320 | anything that the people on the front lines may need. There is no such a thing.
00:24:49.800 | So I want to pivot now back to the story. I want to pivot to your story. After being
00:24:57.040 | at the border, working with refugees, you then went in with a relief convoy into Ukraine
00:25:04.240 | proper. Tell us more about that trip and what you wound up doing inside Ukraine.
00:25:14.280 | Go ahead, please.
00:25:15.280 | Yes. First to Kiev, to Lviv, I'm sorry. And I made a lot of connections when I was at
00:25:24.280 | the border because we were sending supplies to different places, including the Christian
00:25:31.560 | church. And then I connected with one of the pastors of that church. So when I finished
00:25:37.920 | my work at the border, I decided to phone that pastor and I asked him if I could be
00:25:46.720 | of any use. And of course, he said, "Come right away." Of course, I had made connections
00:25:52.200 | for convoys to go to his church. So I was able to send a couple of two, three or four
00:25:57.400 | convoys that were coming with donations from Europe. So I was welcome there basically because
00:26:04.480 | I could be of help and I was a contact person for convoys to come into their warehouse.
00:26:15.680 | And then you stayed there in Ukraine for how long?
00:26:19.520 | I was there for a total of six weeks.
00:26:21.840 | And what were you doing?
00:26:22.840 | Seven weeks, I'm sorry. Well, in the first week and a half, I was at the border helping
00:26:30.000 | refugees cross the border. And then for the next two weeks, a week and a half, I'm sorry,
00:26:36.760 | I was two weeks, I was in Lviv helping, teaching, making water filters and emergency rocket
00:26:46.640 | stops, teaching people how to make them and helping also with the convoys, helping them
00:26:57.320 | sort through because we would divide, for example, the medicines for hospitals and the
00:27:03.960 | medicines for trauma for people in the front lines because they all came in different boxes.
00:27:09.960 | So we needed to sort through according to the need that people had inside. So food,
00:27:17.000 | children, and depending on the requests we were getting, like field food. Also, people
00:27:23.960 | were donating camping supplies, which they would go to the front lines and medicine,
00:27:30.920 | trauma medicine. And since I have a background in medics, in rescue, I knew what to send.
00:27:39.760 | I sort of have the knowledge of what to sort through. So I prepared, I helped guiding them
00:27:45.960 | to prepare the delivery packages to the soldiers or the volunteers that would come to pick
00:27:52.440 | them up.
00:27:54.760 | In where you were?
00:27:55.760 | And then, and then I moved to Kiev. And in Kiev, I was connected with a search and rescue
00:28:05.400 | group of a Baptist church. And they were basically helping people escape from occupied territories.
00:28:17.720 | And they were delivering supplies to different places like Chernobyl, Bucha, and also helping
00:28:25.800 | we build a bomb shelter in case we were bombed. And they were also providing supplies to orphanages.
00:28:35.280 | And they're still doing that.
00:28:37.200 | What was the risk of violence there where you were?
00:28:41.240 | Well, not different. The only risk of violence was the missile attacks that happened. And
00:28:54.360 | unfortunately, the missiles are quite inaccurate. And so they end up hitting the wrong places.
00:29:04.920 | Like they were on my last day when I was leaving, they were supposed to hit, I think they were
00:29:10.120 | planning to hit a bridge, but they destroyed seven houses, four houses instead. Seven people
00:29:17.880 | died.
00:29:20.440 | What was it like? Were people going, were some people just trying to go around their
00:29:24.960 | normal day? Were people staffing the stores? Were people going to their offices and working?
00:29:31.040 | Or was everything shut down and nothing happening? What was it like?
00:29:37.240 | Well, everything, people try to, in Lviv, people try to live a normal life. And the
00:29:46.240 | people that have work or that still have work, they will go to work as normal as they could
00:29:52.400 | be. And there were people also that were unemployed and quite a few of them because their business
00:29:58.440 | closed down or shut down. And they were not selling things, especially in the agriculture.
00:30:03.240 | There's a lot of agriculture there. And that seemed to be in a very slow, in this very
00:30:10.800 | slow recommend.
00:30:14.320 | But in general, they tried to live a normal life in Lviv, in spite of the fact that the
00:30:21.120 | sirens kept going off constantly. And at least when I was there, we suffered three missile
00:30:28.400 | attacks.
00:30:30.920 | How did you prepare for the physical danger yourself, the risk of a missile? Did you sleep
00:30:35.720 | in the basement? What did you do?
00:30:37.600 | No, no, I slept in a normal apartment building. There's no, there's only one that I visited,
00:30:48.400 | only one bomb shelter in the whole city, I think. And it was far away. So when the sirens
00:30:54.840 | came, you just hope that you didn't get strike by a missile. But they came close though,
00:31:01.000 | because I live very, very close by a very strategic place that I thought this is, I
00:31:08.760 | was almost certain that it was going to be attacked, but never, never attacked. What
00:31:14.440 | was attacked was a place where I used to go shopping for supplies every day. Every day
00:31:19.240 | I would go there, either in the morning or in the afternoon to buy my supplies for building
00:31:25.560 | with stoves or the things that I was doing. And one afternoon, the missile hit it, like
00:31:32.640 | within 50, 100 meters from where I used to go shopping.
00:31:39.600 | It's my understanding that although many people feared significant shortages in Ukraine,
00:31:45.920 | that the supply lines were actually working pretty well. What did you notice was widely
00:31:52.900 | available and what did you notice was in short supply?
00:32:00.800 | I noticed that supermarkets were, at the beginning, were quite packed with everything you needed.
00:32:06.600 | And slowly, slowly you start seeing things disappearing from the shelves. But there was
00:32:10.880 | no panic shopping, not at all. It surprised me because I've been in the United States
00:32:18.560 | and every time the tragedy is about to happen, people just running, don't buy everything
00:32:25.720 | including whatever they can buy. But there, they were calm and there was no panic shopping
00:32:33.640 | whatsoever. And I was, interestingly, I asked a lady and I asked her why she was not stocking
00:32:44.400 | up and then she said, "No, no, of course not. Other people may need it." So, it surprised
00:32:53.440 | me their solidarity because, you know, if you're here in North America, if you see like
00:33:01.280 | 20 gallons of water, glass water in Walmart, somebody will come in a truck and put it in
00:33:08.960 | this pickup truck without thinking of the rest of the people. But they were like very,
00:33:13.600 | even in that, there was a lot of solidarity.
00:33:17.200 | That's really beautiful. Was there anything that was in short supply that really surprised
00:33:23.960 | you?
00:33:29.680 | They rely a lot on bottled water and I noticed that at the end, the bottled water was starting
00:33:36.400 | to disappear. And then that's why I put a lot of emphasis on water filters. And I think
00:33:43.920 | when I left, they started to listen to my emergency preparedness speech of making water
00:33:50.560 | filters or getting water filters. But they were, I think they have an excess of confidence,
00:33:58.440 | especially in Lviv. But when I went back to Lviv on my last days, I noticed that they
00:34:06.920 | were starting to think that things were going to be rougher than expected.
00:34:13.560 | After spending time in basically an active war zone, or at least on the periphery of
00:34:20.160 | an active war zone, what lessons did you personally learn? What changes, what decisions did you
00:34:27.320 | make or what changed for you personally based on what you learned there?
00:34:33.680 | Nothing really changed as far as me. I think it's just everything was, I feel reaffirmed
00:34:39.360 | that on how well I was prepared, because practically everything that I had with me was used. And
00:34:51.160 | I kept it like, you know, you train all your life for this. And I was, so I'll say I was
00:35:02.240 | well prepared. And I didn't know how well prepared I was until I was in a situation
00:35:08.040 | in which I needed to be well prepared. My quick run bag had everything I needed. And
00:35:14.480 | when I needed it, my backpack with camping gear and emergency supplies were ready. My
00:35:21.480 | medical supplies were ready. So I think, as you know, as you know me, I have been prepared
00:35:30.760 | for this for a long time. So I was able to see, to experience that I've done all these
00:35:39.320 | preparations have, at least in Ukraine, paid off.
00:35:44.460 | Did you, so that was your experience, but the normal person, right, the average person
00:35:51.060 | isn't, doesn't think about preparedness in the way that you, someone who's involved in
00:35:56.060 | disaster relief does. So were people that you observed, were they facing hardship because
00:36:04.340 | they weren't prepared and they were facing genuine hardship or genuine shortages, or
00:36:09.500 | did you just feel better because you were prepared?
00:36:14.260 | I think both of them, they were just not prepared. Like for example, some of my students that
00:36:25.660 | I taught survival skills and medical skills, none of them taught, have like any idea that
00:36:34.500 | they will be in that situation. So there was not, there was lack of insight on their part
00:36:42.340 | that one day they would face a situation like they were facing and suddenly they had to,
00:36:47.100 | they were put into that situation. So I think, I think the big difference is that they were
00:36:58.460 | too confident. Some people were too confident that the situation in Ukraine will not get
00:37:04.380 | the way it got. Excessive confidence. And that's usually what happens in the lack of
00:37:11.340 | emergency preparedness. People just think nothing, nothing will happen to them. That
00:37:17.780 | they're not in harm's way.
00:37:22.260 | I think that's a good place to pivot to the next part of our discussion, which has a few
00:37:29.300 | unexpected surprises. You had a long planned vacation/adventure trip in North America.
00:37:36.600 | So you left Ukraine and then what happened?
00:37:40.580 | Well I had bought a bike in Canada.
00:37:45.580 | And by bike you mean motorcycle?
00:37:48.580 | Motorcycle, yes. And my plan was to, my commitment actually was to come and pick it up in September,
00:37:54.740 | in May, because I had made that commitment. So the main reason why I had to return was
00:38:03.380 | because I had made a commitment to pick up my bike, my motorcycle, and I would take it
00:38:08.740 | down to Houston and eventually to Venezuela. So I took three weeks off Ukraine and I came
00:38:15.180 | to pick up my bike so I was able to ride my bike from Alberta, Canada to Houston. But
00:38:27.580 | I also did some bike riding near the Alaskan border.
00:38:32.060 | So you spent some time motorcycling near Alaska and then you rode down through the United
00:38:37.300 | States. Last week you happened to be passing through Texas. So tell us that story.
00:38:45.940 | Well I was coming and I rode through several states. It was cold in Colorado and Utah,
00:38:59.940 | I think, and snowing. So I had to ride my bike under snowy conditions. And then suddenly
00:39:06.220 | I started driving south and south, south, it started to get warmer and warmer. Now it's
00:39:12.380 | heating, temperatures here down in Texas, very, very hot. But on my last week I decided
00:39:21.020 | to slow down because I estimated that I was going to come down during this long weekend.
00:39:28.100 | So I was not riding as many hours per day. So one day when I made it to El Paso, Texas,
00:39:36.100 | I decided to instead of taking the main highway, I would take the south route. So it would
00:39:44.740 | take me one day longer to make it to Houston, but I thought it would be nice to be in a
00:39:51.860 | – I didn't have to rush. So I was coming through the south to the – I'm mostly
00:40:00.660 | on the roads along the El Paso border, the Texas border. And then one day I was planning
00:40:10.660 | to – and my second day I was planning to sleep in the city of Uvalde. I even had found
00:40:19.780 | a couple of motels where I was thinking that I would stay. But because I was going very
00:40:25.900 | slow, one day I wasted four, five, six hours here and there. So I didn't make it to Uvalde.
00:40:35.860 | I was like four or five hours away from it. And that day when the tragedy of the massacre
00:40:44.620 | of Uvalde happened, I was not that far, although I was far away, probably five, six, seven
00:40:52.620 | hours away from Uvalde. And then I started – so one day, one morning, I think it was
00:41:03.660 | a mid-afternoon or morning, I saw a lot of cars rushing by. What got my attention was
00:41:11.100 | that there were two school buses rushing. Like the buses were going at least 75 miles
00:41:18.460 | per hour. And then you never see a bus, a school bus, riding at 75 miles per hour. And
00:41:24.060 | I thought that's odd. And two school buses, like they looked like – almost like they
00:41:28.380 | were racing. And I thought that's very strange. And then after that, I saw a couple of police
00:41:34.620 | cars and a couple of border patrol cars rushing. And then a couple of ambulances, a fire truck,
00:41:43.740 | and people and a bunch of different cars just rushing by me. And so I thought, "Oops,
00:41:54.940 | America is under attack." That's what I thought. No, seriously, because it's so
00:42:01.180 | unusual. There was hardly any cars there. And suddenly, you see all these people rushing
00:42:06.860 | and even an helicopter rushing, flying, and I thought, "No." Because it felt like
00:42:13.020 | I was in the Ukraine again. Maybe President Putin decided to push the button and send
00:42:17.660 | the missiles this way. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I thought.
00:42:22.380 | You probably didn't have any cell phone signal out there. You probably couldn't.
00:42:27.660 | No, no, no, nothing. So I was like, "For sure, for certain, America has been attacked."
00:42:36.140 | I was absolutely certain that that had happened. Because what are the odds of an empty highway,
00:42:43.100 | suddenly seeing school buses? It was funny because one guy was driving his car. I don't
00:42:49.740 | know what happened to his car, but he was a very well-dressed guy. And he was in the middle of the
00:42:55.260 | highway waiting to get a ride. Of course, I didn't stop because I thought, "You don't pick
00:43:01.820 | up somebody in the middle of the desert." The police picked him up, though. I saw that the car
00:43:07.900 | behind me came and gave him a ride. But I thought it was odd to see somebody asking for help in the
00:43:17.100 | middle of the desert. And he was not an immigrant. You think this person just crossed into Mexico
00:43:25.580 | or the United States. He was somebody that was well-dressed. And I kept thinking, "No, this is
00:43:31.660 | not right." It didn't feel right at all, seeing so many cars passing by me, rushing by me.
00:43:37.340 | But I'm taking some emergency supplies to my team in Ukraine. So I'm thinking, "Maybe I have to stay
00:43:44.940 | here in the United States for a long time and camp here." So I was even thinking, "Well, I have this."
00:43:53.260 | And then I started to identify places where I could camp. There's a lot of abandoned houses
00:43:58.220 | in the desert, or campings. And I said, "Well, I could have a shelter here." So I was actually
00:44:04.460 | planning to stay for a long time, just in case the United States had been attacked.
00:44:10.700 | When I got the internet, I realized then that the city that I was supposed to go to the next day
00:44:19.420 | had suffered the massacre. >> When did you arrive then in Uvalde?
00:44:25.100 | >> I arrived the day and a half after the massacre. >> What was it like? What did you experience there?
00:44:35.340 | >> Well, I decided that I was going to go and just hang around and talk to people and be supportive
00:44:45.180 | to people. And so I intentionally drove there to stop in the city of Uvalde. I did. There was
00:44:55.340 | no organized counseling. You could just go to the main... They had two main shrines for people
00:45:02.140 | mourning. So just hanging around there, you always... The whole day, day and a half, almost
00:45:08.220 | two days I was there, you always find somebody, because it's a small community. So there was
00:45:13.180 | always somebody hurting. So I would come and talk to them and just share. But what was interesting
00:45:20.940 | was that for me, was that I would share with them that I was coming from Ukraine, servicing in the
00:45:27.500 | Ukraine. And they immediately connected with me. There was an immediate connection with all the
00:45:32.940 | people that I was talking to about their tragedy and what I had gone through. So I guess my
00:45:42.620 | background, my recent background helped a lot. And if I can share experience with it, that I had
00:45:52.380 | on my blog the last day that I'm sharing on my blog, the last day I was sitting,
00:45:57.420 | just in the afternoon, that was... Wow. That was two days ago. Yeah, two days, two afternoons ago,
00:46:09.500 | I was sitting in the...
00:46:15.340 | get guidance. And so that's where I was the last day. And so I was sitting there having my lunch.
00:46:28.540 | I didn't want to talk. I was so tired. And I went as far as I could from people. So I sat by myself
00:46:36.140 | on a table. And then a man came in and sat by me. And I had my Ukrainian hat, Ukrainian shirt. So he
00:46:47.820 | said he was interested. And I said, and he asked me, "Why did you come? Why did you choose to come?
00:46:55.260 | You know, from here, why did..." And then I said, "Well, I decided to come and be supportive."
00:47:00.860 | And then I started talking to him about Ukraine. And then I started talking to him about the
00:47:08.140 | massacre of Bucha. But, you know, I haven't cried. I really haven't cried, remembering what I saw in
00:47:14.700 | Bucha. And then suddenly, when I... I don't know, just as I was talking, I broke down in tears. I
00:47:22.940 | mean, I was crying when I remember about what I had seen in Bucha, but also Chernobyl and Irpin.
00:47:32.540 | I really hadn't had time to process what I've seen in the Ukraine. And so the guy was very nice to me.
00:47:41.180 | He was very supportive. He started, like, talking to me. And it felt really good when I was talking
00:47:52.300 | to him. So, but I hadn't asked him who he was. And...
00:47:57.900 | Me, and I share my story. And because I share my story, I start crying. I guess I haven't
00:48:08.620 | processed everything what I've seen in Ukraine. And so, but he was very supportive. He was...
00:48:14.860 | He had... We share with... We share our same principles and Christian faith.
00:48:20.860 | So he was incredibly supportive. And then at the end, I said, when I was starting to feel much
00:48:26.620 | better, I asked him, "Who are you? What are you... And what are you doing here?" So I turned things
00:48:32.220 | around, asking him. And then he told me that he was the former school principal of the school where
00:48:41.660 | the massacre had taken place. He had gone out of that school for another school, like, just recently.
00:48:47.980 | And he said that the two teachers were very close to him, very close friends. Every student that
00:48:55.740 | was there. So, and he was almost crying. And, but you know something, it's amazing. This guy, I thought,
00:49:02.220 | with so much grief and so much pain, is sharing with me, is encouraging me. And I guess God,
00:49:10.780 | God is the way God uses people. He was using a broken man to help another broken man.
00:49:17.740 | That's how God operates, I thought. And so we said goodbye. We both were at the end,
00:49:24.700 | of course, we both had tears in our eyes.
00:49:27.180 | Wow. What a story. In the midst of tremendous evil and suffering, it brings into great relief
00:49:37.500 | and highlights good and kindness of strangers, the solidarity of a community. And it's always
00:49:45.740 | such that painful combination of the grief of horror and of evil, mixed with neighbors,
00:49:55.020 | loving neighbors, people encouraging one another. And so even in the midst of
00:49:59.740 | great evil, you see good, right? You see love expressed in the middle of it.
00:50:06.380 | Yeah, definitely. I saw a lot of, it's interesting, but there is commonality between Ukraine and
00:50:16.140 | Texas. It was that I saw humanity. I saw people with faith supporting each other. I saw people
00:50:35.100 | just solidarity, tremendous amount of solidarity. And then I felt almost like if I was in Ukraine,
00:50:46.380 | when I see a lot of evil, where I saw a lot of evil, lots of it, but at the same time,
00:50:52.220 | a lot of human kindness, lots of it. So you could see good and evil. I saw good and evil in two
00:51:00.780 | places within the period of a month. And that gives me absolute confidence that God does care,
00:51:10.140 | because even when there is evil, there is abundance of grace and love.
00:51:16.140 | Amen. So now you are, you're shipping your motorcycle and you're going to be heading back
00:51:23.500 | to Ukraine. So as you go forward, going back to Ukraine, does your mission look similar to
00:51:31.500 | what it did before? Well, I'm not sure where my team is right now or where they've been deployed.
00:51:42.460 | I know they work because originally they were working north of Kiev,
00:51:51.660 | but now that the activities have taken place in the east, I don't really, I know they were,
00:52:00.060 | when I left, they were starting to plan, doing the planning for getting involved in the occupied
00:52:06.380 | territories in the west. But I don't have much contact with them. They know, I told them I'm
00:52:12.460 | coming back and I told them I will be coming and help with training on preparedness and
00:52:18.860 | emergency survival. So, but I haven't, I really don't know where I'm going to be deployed,
00:52:26.300 | depending where the team is. It could be Krakiv, it could be many people, but no, not on the cities.
00:52:33.900 | No, no, we, we, they usually go near, near where the action is taking place and they make themselves
00:52:40.700 | available for refugees or people in need of assistance. So they are behind the, they're,
00:52:47.420 | they don't, they, sometimes I hear that they have gone behind the lines to rescue people. So
00:52:54.060 | they're very protective of me, so they wouldn't let me go behind the lines.
00:52:58.140 | I had intended to draw out one more story from you and it has to do with the
00:53:05.980 | interaction between two areas, both in crisis zones. So while you have been in Ukraine,
00:53:14.540 | you've continued to be working and involved in Christian ministry in prisons all across
00:53:21.740 | Venezuela. I think we can talk about that now. And so there's been this amazing juxtaposition
00:53:30.620 | where, and again, if I, if I share any details that we shouldn't share, then of course, just let
00:53:36.620 | me know. But over the last couple of years, one of the things that has happened remarkably with
00:53:41.180 | some of your work and, and the things that we've been involved in is that opportunities for
00:53:47.660 | Christian ministry have opened up again in many Venezuelan prisons. And so you've been involved
00:53:53.980 | in coordinating and organizing a more formalized ministry effort in, in these prisons. And so
00:54:03.740 | I've seen pictures of prisoners in Venezuela gathering together to pray for those in Ukraine,
00:54:12.300 | and you've shared with Ukrainians and they're turning around and seeking to be an encouragement
00:54:18.300 | and pray for those in Venezuela. And I just think that's a remarkable story. Share a little bit
00:54:24.060 | about that, please. Well, we have definitely been blessed our ministry in Venezuela.
00:54:34.140 | We have access to six, seven penitentiaries now, and the churches that we have encountered us are
00:54:46.460 | completely alive. Like one church has 3,400 members. Another one has 2,000, over 2,000.
00:54:54.300 | There is 38 churches that we now support indirectly. And also we're doing the gardening
00:54:59.580 | projects there. So we have, we have a lot of input and a lot of presence in different prisons now. So
00:55:08.700 | we are now currently serving to almost 12,000 inmates. And we have, we intend to, we go there
00:55:18.780 | every three, two to three months, visiting all the prisons, supervising our garden projects.
00:55:25.340 | We provide employment to probably at least 300, 400 inmates in our gardens. So the ministry has
00:55:32.060 | grown considerably now. I hope it to go back when I, when I came back from Ukraine in August,
00:55:39.500 | and just continue supporting the ministry, the prison ministry. One of the things that happened
00:55:47.580 | was they said, when I told them, because we had a board of directors that I would call.
00:55:52.300 | So the inmates had vigils and they took my cost as their cost. And so they were like,
00:56:01.980 | outpouring of hundreds, thousands of people praying for me. And they would send me pictures
00:56:08.380 | of their prayer meetings. And literally you see five, 700, a thousand inmates
00:56:14.380 | gathering in, in, in soccer fields, baseball fields, basketball courts, and saying, "Neri,
00:56:21.820 | Pastor Neri." They call me Pastor Neri. "Pastor Neri, we're praying for you every day."
00:56:25.820 | So it was basically this, my, my mission brought a lot of unity in, in, in the prison ministry
00:56:33.500 | and the cost. So they, they're very supportive of what I'm doing in Ukraine. And of course,
00:56:39.420 | when I show pictures of the, of the inmates in, in Ukraine and all of them praying for me,
00:56:45.500 | people are really, really encouraging.
00:56:47.340 | - Wonderful. I thank you for coming on and sharing your stories. And it's my hope that
00:56:51.420 | we can take the lessons and be prepared for ourselves for some of these horrific disaster
00:56:59.180 | scenarios that you've described. And most importantly, so that we can be on a solid
00:57:03.900 | foundation to be able to help others who may not be prepared when, when this happens. Whether we
00:57:08.300 | face the disaster of the loss of a child or the loss of a friend in a, in a horrific massacre,
00:57:15.660 | or whether we face a war zone or an economic collapse, we want to be prepared to be positioned
00:57:22.860 | so that we can help our community and be in solidarity with those around us.
00:57:27.980 | - Yes. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate that, Josh.
00:57:33.900 | - My pleasure. Thank you for coming on. And that brings us to the end of today's interview. If you
00:57:39.580 | are interested in more of the adventures of today's guest, you can find more information at
00:57:44.780 | creativephilanthropy.blog. Creativephilanthropy.blog. It's been a great, you can keep up with,
00:57:53.420 | keep up with his writings there, with his travels there, et cetera. Thank you so much. Thank you so
00:57:58.700 | much for listening. Thank you so much for, for contributing. By the way, you'll notice,
00:58:04.060 | a long time listeners of the show know that from time to time I've done various fundraising things.
00:58:08.700 | I've reported on some of the stuff happening in Venezuela. I've often taken some of the old
00:58:12.700 | episodes off of the feed and been somewhat cagey with details and whatnot, simply because of the
00:58:19.100 | sensitivity of it. But this audience has single handedly done a tremendous amount of work.
00:58:25.900 | Last year, or I guess two years ago, I raised a significant amount of money. We've purchased a
00:58:31.980 | truck and a truck and some other equipment for some of the, the relief workers and missionaries
00:58:41.660 | and relief workers working on the border. We've taken in significant amounts of food into
00:58:46.380 | Venezuela. Also started, you heard him allude to the garden projects, have a significant number
00:58:53.180 | of garden projects. And I've actually, it's opened up to be able to have a platform to do far more
00:58:58.780 | than we thought in the past. So at this point in time, we can actually do some of the work there
00:59:03.580 | in the prisons, can meet officially with permission of some of the officials, et cetera. So it's been
00:59:08.540 | a great, a very productive time. And I want to thank you for all of your involvement in that.
00:59:13.100 | Thankfully, I think most of us don't live in these disaster zones. I think thankfully,
00:59:19.580 | it's not a deep impact to on a daily basis to most of our lives, but we still need to learn
00:59:25.420 | from those who are going through them. And may our hearts be touched and may we have opportunities
00:59:31.020 | to minister to those who are in need, open our wallets when possible, et cetera. Thank you for
00:59:36.300 | listening and I'll be back with you soon. [Music]