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It's more than just a ticket. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets.

Today on the show, we're going to talk a little bit about living a meaningful life, partly in terms of serving others, but we're going to talk about what it's actually been like on the ground in Ukraine, as well as a few other things that you will hear. I'd like to welcome back to the show a friend of mine, Jimmy.

Welcome back to Radical Personal Finance. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. So you were last on the show when you've been on the show a couple of times where we have been talking about Venezuela. And for any uninitiated listeners, you have an extensive amount of experience working on the ground, providing relief in Venezuela, providing relief supplies, disaster supplies, as well as being involved in other charitable works and Christian ministry works in the nation of Venezuela.

However, recently you traded out that disaster zone and you spent some time in an active war zone in Ukraine. And then we'll get to some of the other more recent adventures, but I'd like to talk about your experiences in Ukraine. Tell us please, how did you wind up in Ukraine and what is happening on the ground?

What did you observe? What was it like living in Ukraine recently? Well, the war in Ukraine started on January 24th. And then a week later, after the war started, I got a phone call from a friend of mine and he said, "Hey, we're looking for volunteers to come and help in Venezuela.

And you definitely qualify for coming up and helping out. Now, would you like to apply?" And then I said, "Well, I'm in Venezuela right now. I have to talk to my board." And so I phone my board, the group of people that I'm an accountant to in Venezuela. And I said, "I'm being asked to volunteer as a rescue technician and as a medic." Although I'm not a medic, but I have training on that, some training on that.

So they said, "Please go. We're happy to support you and pray for you." So I phoned my friend back and like two or three days later, I don't know, I was on a plane to Ukraine. And then I arrived there, I think I arrived there in 10 days, 10, 11 days after the war had started.

You began in Poland, right? You were doing some work in Poland and then you did eventually go with a convoy into Ukraine proper. Yes, yes. I started off at the border between Poland and Ukraine. I was stationed in a place where we were helping out refugees cross the border.

There were thousands of them. Like one night we counted, well, I didn't count them, but they told me that 74,000 people had crossed. And some of them needed help. I was doing triage, meaning helping people to assess their medical needs. I was doing all sorts of things, including helping them with their luggage or just sometimes their cars would break down in the middle of the road and it was very cold, incredible cold, minus 12 one night.

And so we had to go and just pick them up, rescue them and then take them to the border. Tell us some of the stories. Why were people fleeing and what was happening when they were making that decision? Well, that time when I got there, they were coming from all over the west and north of Ukraine.

At that time, they were certain and we were certain that the Russians were going to take over the whole country. There was no question about it. So people were naturally fleeing and looking, trying to get out of there. Because it was a sure thing that with countless tanks and army personnel just surrounding Kiev and having taken all the northern part of Kiev, it was a sure thing.

It was just a matter of time before the Russians would come into Kiev. And then of course, once Kiev was taken, maybe everybody felt that the whole city was going to fall down. The whole country, I'm sorry, was going to go down. So over the years, we've talked a lot about refugees and you have been involved in many different disasters where there have been refugees.

You worked with the Red Cross in Chile after the big earthquake there. You volunteered for several years in Haiti after the earthquake there. Recently, over the last few years, you have spent huge amounts of time volunteering in Colombia and Venezuela at the border there. In fact, we've worked with listeners of the show who've donated money and done relief for even several ministries that specifically work with refugees coming out of Venezuela into Colombia.

And then you've told me that recently after the pandemic started, you started to work with and see refugees going from Colombia back into Venezuela, people heading home. And now of course, you've been on the border between Poland and Ukraine. How do you compare these different refugee movements? If you were to compare and contrast the Venezuela-Colombia border as compared to the Ukraine-Poland border, what did you observe?

Yeah, what a question. Interesting. Well, the first, you could see the desperation for people to leave and living with really nothing, nothing because they cannot carry much when they leave. And you could compare also the family separation. I saw a lot of men, for example, cannot leave Ukraine. And so they were just, I saw a lot of men dropping off their families at the border and saying goodbye.

We're talking not 10, 20, we're talking hundreds of them just driving their cars or just passing by. That didn't happen in Venezuela when I saw it. I saw a whole family, the father and the mother and the whole family crossing and escaping. But Venezuela, but Ukraine was different because men were not allowed to leave the country.

I still not allowed to, they expected that they would volunteer for fighting in the war. So that was probably what, more than what I can compare, I could tell you the differences. I'm sorry, I know I'm twisting the question and I ask for forgiveness. But the other thing was the cold.

I remember in Venezuela, it was the rain because sometimes we had to halt and cross the river. And when the river was way up, we had to, well, we had to put ropes and bridges and be there waiting for them. We just bring shelter to the soccer fields where they were sleeping.

One day I counted almost 2000 people sleeping in the soccer field. And in Ukraine, it was the cold. It was bitter cold. And so we had to have blankets and we had to be ready, especially because the border sometimes was slow in processing all refugees that were coming through.

So they had to stay for three, four, five hours. And it was one night, it was well, minus 12. I don't know, probably zero on your scale one night. Were the Polish border, how strict were the Polish border officials on the documentation of fleeing Ukrainian refugees? I'm sorry, the question, you have to work it out again.

So how strict were the Polish border officials on the paperwork requirements for fleeing Ukrainians? Were they allowing people to come across with expired passports? Were they allowing people to come in with no documentation? Or did they make sure that everyone had to have the proper international passports? How did they handle that?

No, no, just they had, I think in Ukraine, people, every person gets a passport. I think it's the law in Ukraine. Your ID is your passport. So everybody seemed to have one. Except some people didn't. I saw them just showing a little piece of paper, but nobody was rejected for lack of papers.

Definitely. Nobody was. If somebody didn't have a document, I never saw people rejected. The only people that I saw rejected was people that had some spending, I don't know, but I did help very few people having to return because they were missing something and I never understood what they were missing.

But they were very few. For example, out of 74,000, probably one or two, three were rejected. So as people were coming across the border, what were they doing for accommodation? Were they immediately getting on a train and heading further into Europe? Were they camping on the streets? Were locals taking them in?

How were they being housed? At the border where I was, they had a very large reception center. I think they were capable of handling up to 5,000, 6,000 people per night. And then buses were coming from all over Europe to pick them up, or they could take the train to wherever they wanted to go.

So I was surprised how efficient the Polish government was with handling the tremendous amount of refugees. We're talking gazillions, millions, literally millions of them actually. They had to be processed very quickly. So I was very impressed with how, it was chaotic, but there was some sense of order in the passing through of the refugees.

Right. In a moment, we'll talk about your experiences inside Ukraine, but I want to dwell on this topic of becoming a refugee. I teach a course called International Escape Plan, and part of it is in connection with Ukraine. And I basically, after years of watching disasters, I have observed that one of the best ways to survive and thrive in a disaster is by not being physically present where the disaster is located.

So any Venezuelan who fled Venezuela and started living in Miami was able to avoid the worst of the collapse in Venezuela. Any Ukrainian who fled in the weeks prior to the invasion by Russia and went to another place was able to avoid some of the worst effects of the invasion.

And so I teach a whole course on this, available at internationalescapeplan.com, and I basically talk about how if you can do nothing else, if you can prepare a passport and a credit card so you have money to spend and a cell phone, you can get out. And so you should prepare for that.

Last time you were on, we talked about Venezuela and we discussed the preparations that you would make if you knew you were going to live in a Venezuelan-style economic crisis. Now I want to ask you, if you knew that you were going to become a Ukrainian-style refugee fleeing at the last minute across the Polish border while the Russian army is invading, what kind of preparations would you make in advance to be prepared for that kind of disaster scenario?

Yeah, definitely the passport would be a plus, and the international credit card, some cash, some cash available. I would have a ready-to-go backpack with all the basics, all the survival basic things that we need now, today, in today's world. As ironic as it may sound, having a charger, a phone charger, as simple as it is, I noticed a lot of people that are coming in and borrowing or asking for a phone charger, and I thought, I guess they were not prepared.

So there are simple things that, it's a list of things to run with in case I have to leave. The problem is I don't think people understood, even though they could see all the signs that things were going not to go well in Ukraine, they were still confident that nothing would happen to them, there was not going to be an invasion, mainly because Russia kept saying that they were not planning such a thing.

I think the Ukrainians trusted that the invasion was not going to happen, and when it did happen, they were not prepared, many of them were not prepared. I could tell you that. Winter clothing, that was the most. We had to help them because they were suffering from hypothermia in the middle of the winter, so either they didn't grab, or maybe they escaped in the middle of the night, and I didn't ask, but I think you have to, after that I kept my backpack with everything, the basics with me all the time.

In fact, my escape backpack, I used it for the whole time as my pillow, because in case I said I had to run, a missile attack, which happened to me several times, so in case I had to run, I slept with my run backpack most of the time. Do you think that, so obviously winter clothing, winter coats, etc., was important.

Do you think that if somebody had had things like camping gear, backpacking tents, things like that, do you think that would have been helpful, or would it have been more of a hindrance in that scenario because it was too much luggage, too bulky, and people could go and stay in hotels?

Oh, no, no, no, no. You could not possibly camp in Ukraine. The temperatures were just incredibly cold. I did camp one time out of necessity, and in the middle of the night, I ran for, because it's just impossible. Maybe now that it's summertime, maybe you could think of camping equipment.

In fact, I have my camping equipment with me. I have two backpacks, one is with my camping equipment, and the other one is with my run supplies, runaway supplies. But I'm going to take it back when I go back, and in ten days, I will take my camping equipment with me.

With regard to money, was the financial system working? Could, for example, if the Ukrainians were fleeing, were they able to access their bank accounts, get money out so they could pay for their fares across Europe, or did you observe any problems in the local financial system? No, the system was working quite well.

I was surprised that you could even get money, Ukrainian money, from the cash machine in the Ukraine, and that never stopped working, which was very impressive because you would expect that the banking system would collapse. It didn't. It kept going. The problem is, I think most people did not have the money to spare, say, "Okay, I'm going to take so much money." But the other thing was that the Europeans were so well, they didn't have a standing job.

People didn't need to pay, the trains were free, the shelters, there was food. Again, I'm going to reiterate, I was very impressed with the Poland side. I was very impressed with the way they handled the whole situation. There's this idea that in certain disaster times, when you have to flee, that having alternative forms of money, for example, having a valuable piece of jewelry or a gold coin can be helpful to bribe a border guard to let you out.

Also, there were reports with Bitcoin. There were several tweet threads that I archived while watching the situation in Ukraine, where people were saying, "I'm fleeing Ukraine, and the only thing that would work for me was Bitcoin, and I used that to get out." Did you personally observe anything like that, or did you hear any stories personally from anybody that used anything other than just the normal day-to-day banking system as part of their escape plan?

Not really, because I was even able to use my credit card in the Ukraine, which all of that surprised me. I could use my credit card, my debit card, I could exchange US dollars or euros. Ukraine is a very difficult situation, because somehow the country did not, even though amazingly enough, it was supposed to collapse, and it didn't.

I was expecting the electricity to go off, fuel shortages, although there are some fuel shortages, you could still travel around. So the country, during the first weeks, even up to now, when I left, it didn't hold very, very well. It was not like Venezuela, everything slowly, slowly collapsed and then suddenly they had a complete collapse.

Banking, schools, everything, transportation, gas, everything collapsed. But in Ukraine, everything kept well. Kiev did have some issues. When I got there, they were just too real. But they were managing very well, and they still manage very well, which is quite surprising, because they were facing one of the largest armies in the world.

You have extensive experience working in an economic collapse, right? You have experience of going to Venezuela and trading a $5 US bill for a backpack full of Venezuelan bank notes. You have experience knowing that the inflation is so bad that you can't even take 20s and 50s, because no one has enough money to change it.

So you have experience in both kinds of economies. What I'd like to ask, and the reason I'm asking this, is because most of my listeners are from the United States, and people are always trying to figure out, "Well, if there were a collapse in the United States, what would that look like?" And years ago I used to think, "Oh, well, it would look like Venezuela." I'm now convinced that it would not look like Venezuela, and I think that your recent experience in Ukraine is a good piece of data to fit in to that analysis.

So here's my question. Why do you think it is so different in Ukraine versus Venezuela? What are the differences between the kinds of crisis that each country is facing that led to Venezuela having virtually no electricity, Venezuela having a collapsed financial system, but Ukraine continuing to be able to keep the lights on, continuing to have functioning ATMs, a functioning credit card system, etc.?

What are the differences that contributed to that? Well, what are the differences? Well, the Ukraine, I'm going to talk about Ukraine, they're very confident, and they're really well-united. Like, whatever decision the president of the country makes is very well supported by everyone. And I think I'm very impressed by his leadership and how he, I think he's a hero, literally.

He's the one who was able to gather everybody together as a community, and it's a community war. And there is a lot of unity. In the meantime, in Venezuela, there is no unity at all. There is a lot of fighting, there is within the different groups fighting between themselves.

But Ukraine is certainly different. There is a lot of unity and a lot of commonality. ICE people, for example, volunteers taking food to the front lines, including myself, and picking up wounded soldiers, using their cars, their own cars, their own personal cars to go and deliver supplies, delivering anything that the people on the front lines may need.

There is no such a thing. So I want to pivot now back to the story. I want to pivot to your story. After being at the border, working with refugees, you then went in with a relief convoy into Ukraine proper. Tell us more about that trip and what you wound up doing inside Ukraine.

Go ahead, please. Yes. First to Kiev, to Lviv, I'm sorry. And I made a lot of connections when I was at the border because we were sending supplies to different places, including the Christian church. And then I connected with one of the pastors of that church. So when I finished my work at the border, I decided to phone that pastor and I asked him if I could be of any use.

And of course, he said, "Come right away." Of course, I had made connections for convoys to go to his church. So I was able to send a couple of two, three or four convoys that were coming with donations from Europe. So I was welcome there basically because I could be of help and I was a contact person for convoys to come into their warehouse.

And then you stayed there in Ukraine for how long? I was there for a total of six weeks. And what were you doing? Seven weeks, I'm sorry. Well, in the first week and a half, I was at the border helping refugees cross the border. And then for the next two weeks, a week and a half, I'm sorry, I was two weeks, I was in Lviv helping, teaching, making water filters and emergency rocket stops, teaching people how to make them and helping also with the convoys, helping them sort through because we would divide, for example, the medicines for hospitals and the medicines for trauma for people in the front lines because they all came in different boxes.

So we needed to sort through according to the need that people had inside. So food, children, and depending on the requests we were getting, like field food. Also, people were donating camping supplies, which they would go to the front lines and medicine, trauma medicine. And since I have a background in medics, in rescue, I knew what to send.

I sort of have the knowledge of what to sort through. So I prepared, I helped guiding them to prepare the delivery packages to the soldiers or the volunteers that would come to pick them up. In where you were? And then, and then I moved to Kiev. And in Kiev, I was connected with a search and rescue group of a Baptist church.

And they were basically helping people escape from occupied territories. And they were delivering supplies to different places like Chernobyl, Bucha, and also helping we build a bomb shelter in case we were bombed. And they were also providing supplies to orphanages. And they're still doing that. What was the risk of violence there where you were?

Well, not different. The only risk of violence was the missile attacks that happened. And unfortunately, the missiles are quite inaccurate. And so they end up hitting the wrong places. Like they were on my last day when I was leaving, they were supposed to hit, I think they were planning to hit a bridge, but they destroyed seven houses, four houses instead.

Seven people died. What was it like? Were people going, were some people just trying to go around their normal day? Were people staffing the stores? Were people going to their offices and working? Or was everything shut down and nothing happening? What was it like? Well, everything, people try to, in Lviv, people try to live a normal life.

And the people that have work or that still have work, they will go to work as normal as they could be. And there were people also that were unemployed and quite a few of them because their business closed down or shut down. And they were not selling things, especially in the agriculture.

There's a lot of agriculture there. And that seemed to be in a very slow, in this very slow recommend. But in general, they tried to live a normal life in Lviv, in spite of the fact that the sirens kept going off constantly. And at least when I was there, we suffered three missile attacks.

How did you prepare for the physical danger yourself, the risk of a missile? Did you sleep in the basement? What did you do? No, no, I slept in a normal apartment building. There's no, there's only one that I visited, only one bomb shelter in the whole city, I think.

And it was far away. So when the sirens came, you just hope that you didn't get strike by a missile. But they came close though, because I live very, very close by a very strategic place that I thought this is, I was almost certain that it was going to be attacked, but never, never attacked.

What was attacked was a place where I used to go shopping for supplies every day. Every day I would go there, either in the morning or in the afternoon to buy my supplies for building with stoves or the things that I was doing. And one afternoon, the missile hit it, like within 50, 100 meters from where I used to go shopping.

It's my understanding that although many people feared significant shortages in Ukraine, that the supply lines were actually working pretty well. What did you notice was widely available and what did you notice was in short supply? I noticed that supermarkets were, at the beginning, were quite packed with everything you needed.

And slowly, slowly you start seeing things disappearing from the shelves. But there was no panic shopping, not at all. It surprised me because I've been in the United States and every time the tragedy is about to happen, people just running, don't buy everything including whatever they can buy. But there, they were calm and there was no panic shopping whatsoever.

And I was, interestingly, I asked a lady and I asked her why she was not stocking up and then she said, "No, no, of course not. Other people may need it." So, it surprised me their solidarity because, you know, if you're here in North America, if you see like 20 gallons of water, glass water in Walmart, somebody will come in a truck and put it in this pickup truck without thinking of the rest of the people.

But they were like very, even in that, there was a lot of solidarity. That's really beautiful. Was there anything that was in short supply that really surprised you? They rely a lot on bottled water and I noticed that at the end, the bottled water was starting to disappear. And then that's why I put a lot of emphasis on water filters.

And I think when I left, they started to listen to my emergency preparedness speech of making water filters or getting water filters. But they were, I think they have an excess of confidence, especially in Lviv. But when I went back to Lviv on my last days, I noticed that they were starting to think that things were going to be rougher than expected.

After spending time in basically an active war zone, or at least on the periphery of an active war zone, what lessons did you personally learn? What changes, what decisions did you make or what changed for you personally based on what you learned there? Nothing really changed as far as me.

I think it's just everything was, I feel reaffirmed that on how well I was prepared, because practically everything that I had with me was used. And I kept it like, you know, you train all your life for this. And I was, so I'll say I was well prepared. And I didn't know how well prepared I was until I was in a situation in which I needed to be well prepared.

My quick run bag had everything I needed. And when I needed it, my backpack with camping gear and emergency supplies were ready. My medical supplies were ready. So I think, as you know, as you know me, I have been prepared for this for a long time. So I was able to see, to experience that I've done all these preparations have, at least in Ukraine, paid off.

Did you, so that was your experience, but the normal person, right, the average person isn't, doesn't think about preparedness in the way that you, someone who's involved in disaster relief does. So were people that you observed, were they facing hardship because they weren't prepared and they were facing genuine hardship or genuine shortages, or did you just feel better because you were prepared?

I think both of them, they were just not prepared. Like for example, some of my students that I taught survival skills and medical skills, none of them taught, have like any idea that they will be in that situation. So there was not, there was lack of insight on their part that one day they would face a situation like they were facing and suddenly they had to, they were put into that situation.

So I think, I think the big difference is that they were too confident. Some people were too confident that the situation in Ukraine will not get the way it got. Excessive confidence. And that's usually what happens in the lack of emergency preparedness. People just think nothing, nothing will happen to them.

That they're not in harm's way. I think that's a good place to pivot to the next part of our discussion, which has a few unexpected surprises. You had a long planned vacation/adventure trip in North America. So you left Ukraine and then what happened? Well I had bought a bike in Canada.

And by bike you mean motorcycle? Motorcycle, yes. And my plan was to, my commitment actually was to come and pick it up in September, in May, because I had made that commitment. So the main reason why I had to return was because I had made a commitment to pick up my bike, my motorcycle, and I would take it down to Houston and eventually to Venezuela.

So I took three weeks off Ukraine and I came to pick up my bike so I was able to ride my bike from Alberta, Canada to Houston. But I also did some bike riding near the Alaskan border. So you spent some time motorcycling near Alaska and then you rode down through the United States.

Last week you happened to be passing through Texas. So tell us that story. Well I was coming and I rode through several states. It was cold in Colorado and Utah, I think, and snowing. So I had to ride my bike under snowy conditions. And then suddenly I started driving south and south, south, it started to get warmer and warmer.

Now it's heating, temperatures here down in Texas, very, very hot. But on my last week I decided to slow down because I estimated that I was going to come down during this long weekend. So I was not riding as many hours per day. So one day when I made it to El Paso, Texas, I decided to instead of taking the main highway, I would take the south route.

So it would take me one day longer to make it to Houston, but I thought it would be nice to be in a – I didn't have to rush. So I was coming through the south to the – I'm mostly on the roads along the El Paso border, the Texas border.

And then one day I was planning to – and my second day I was planning to sleep in the city of Uvalde. I even had found a couple of motels where I was thinking that I would stay. But because I was going very slow, one day I wasted four, five, six hours here and there.

So I didn't make it to Uvalde. I was like four or five hours away from it. And that day when the tragedy of the massacre of Uvalde happened, I was not that far, although I was far away, probably five, six, seven hours away from Uvalde. And then I started – so one day, one morning, I think it was a mid-afternoon or morning, I saw a lot of cars rushing by.

What got my attention was that there were two school buses rushing. Like the buses were going at least 75 miles per hour. And then you never see a bus, a school bus, riding at 75 miles per hour. And I thought that's odd. And two school buses, like they looked like – almost like they were racing.

And I thought that's very strange. And then after that, I saw a couple of police cars and a couple of border patrol cars rushing. And then a couple of ambulances, a fire truck, and people and a bunch of different cars just rushing by me. And so I thought, "Oops, America is under attack." That's what I thought.

No, seriously, because it's so unusual. There was hardly any cars there. And suddenly, you see all these people rushing and even an helicopter rushing, flying, and I thought, "No." Because it felt like I was in the Ukraine again. Maybe President Putin decided to push the button and send the missiles this way.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what I thought. You probably didn't have any cell phone signal out there. You probably couldn't. No, no, no, nothing. So I was like, "For sure, for certain, America has been attacked." I was absolutely certain that that had happened. Because what are the odds of an empty highway, suddenly seeing school buses?

It was funny because one guy was driving his car. I don't know what happened to his car, but he was a very well-dressed guy. And he was in the middle of the highway waiting to get a ride. Of course, I didn't stop because I thought, "You don't pick up somebody in the middle of the desert." The police picked him up, though.

I saw that the car behind me came and gave him a ride. But I thought it was odd to see somebody asking for help in the middle of the desert. And he was not an immigrant. You think this person just crossed into Mexico or the United States. He was somebody that was well-dressed.

And I kept thinking, "No, this is not right." It didn't feel right at all, seeing so many cars passing by me, rushing by me. But I'm taking some emergency supplies to my team in Ukraine. So I'm thinking, "Maybe I have to stay here in the United States for a long time and camp here." So I was even thinking, "Well, I have this." And then I started to identify places where I could camp.

There's a lot of abandoned houses in the desert, or campings. And I said, "Well, I could have a shelter here." So I was actually planning to stay for a long time, just in case the United States had been attacked. When I got the internet, I realized then that the city that I was supposed to go to the next day had suffered the massacre.

>> When did you arrive then in Uvalde? >> I arrived the day and a half after the massacre. >> What was it like? What did you experience there? >> Well, I decided that I was going to go and just hang around and talk to people and be supportive to people.

And so I intentionally drove there to stop in the city of Uvalde. I did. There was no organized counseling. You could just go to the main... They had two main shrines for people mourning. So just hanging around there, you always... The whole day, day and a half, almost two days I was there, you always find somebody, because it's a small community.

So there was always somebody hurting. So I would come and talk to them and just share. But what was interesting was that for me, was that I would share with them that I was coming from Ukraine, servicing in the Ukraine. And they immediately connected with me. There was an immediate connection with all the people that I was talking to about their tragedy and what I had gone through.

So I guess my background, my recent background helped a lot. And if I can share experience with it, that I had on my blog the last day that I'm sharing on my blog, the last day I was sitting, just in the afternoon, that was... Wow. That was two days ago.

Yeah, two days, two afternoons ago, I was sitting in the... get guidance. And so that's where I was the last day. And so I was sitting there having my lunch. 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 on a table.

And then a man came in and sat by me. And I had my Ukrainian hat, Ukrainian shirt. So he said he was interested. And I said, and he asked me, "Why did you come? Why did you choose to come? You know, from here, why did..." And then I said, "Well, I decided to come and be supportive." And then I started talking to him about Ukraine.

And then I started talking to him about the massacre of Bucha. But, you know, I haven't cried. I really haven't cried, remembering what I saw in Bucha. And then suddenly, when I... I don't know, just as I was talking, I broke down in tears. I mean, I was crying when I remember about what I had seen in Bucha, but also Chernobyl and Irpin.

I really hadn't had time to process what I've seen in the Ukraine. And so the guy was very nice to me. He was very supportive. He started, like, talking to me. And it felt really good when I was talking to him. So, but I hadn't asked him who he was.

And... Me, and I share my story. And because I share my story, I start crying. I guess I haven't processed everything what I've seen in Ukraine. And so, but he was very supportive. He was... He had... We share with... We share our same principles and Christian faith. So he was incredibly supportive.

And then at the end, I said, when I was starting to feel much better, I asked him, "Who are you? What are you... And what are you doing here?" So I turned things around, asking him. And then he told me that he was the former school principal of the school where the massacre had taken place.

He had gone out of that school for another school, like, just recently. And he said that the two teachers were very close to him, very close friends. Every student that was there. So, and he was almost crying. And, but you know something, it's amazing. This guy, I thought, with so much grief and so much pain, is sharing with me, is encouraging me.

And I guess God, God is the way God uses people. He was using a broken man to help another broken man. That's how God operates, I thought. And so we said goodbye. We both were at the end, of course, we both had tears in our eyes. Wow. What a story.

In the midst of tremendous evil and suffering, it brings into great relief and highlights good and kindness of strangers, the solidarity of a community. And it's always such that painful combination of the grief of horror and of evil, mixed with neighbors, loving neighbors, people encouraging one another. And so even in the midst of great evil, you see good, right?

You see love expressed in the middle of it. Yeah, definitely. I saw a lot of, it's interesting, but there is commonality between Ukraine and Texas. It was that I saw humanity. I saw people with faith supporting each other. I saw people just solidarity, tremendous amount of solidarity. And then I felt almost like if I was in Ukraine, when I see a lot of evil, where I saw a lot of evil, lots of it, but at the same time, a lot of human kindness, lots of it.

So you could see good and evil. I saw good and evil in two places within the period of a month. And that gives me absolute confidence that God does care, because even when there is evil, there is abundance of grace and love. Amen. So now you are, you're shipping your motorcycle and you're going to be heading back to Ukraine.

So as you go forward, going back to Ukraine, does your mission look similar to what it did before? Well, I'm not sure where my team is right now or where they've been deployed. I know they work because originally they were working north of Kiev, but now that the activities have taken place in the east, I don't really, I know they were, when I left, they were starting to plan, doing the planning for getting involved in the occupied territories in the west.

But I don't have much contact with them. They know, I told them I'm coming back and I told them I will be coming and help with training on preparedness and emergency survival. So, but I haven't, I really don't know where I'm going to be deployed, depending where the team is.

It could be Krakiv, it could be many people, but no, not on the cities. No, no, we, we, they usually go near, near where the action is taking place and they make themselves available for refugees or people in need of assistance. So they are behind the, they're, they don't, they, sometimes I hear that they have gone behind the lines to rescue people.

So they're very protective of me, so they wouldn't let me go behind the lines. I had intended to draw out one more story from you and it has to do with the interaction between two areas, both in crisis zones. So while you have been in Ukraine, you've continued to be working and involved in Christian ministry in prisons all across Venezuela.

I think we can talk about that now. And so there's been this amazing juxtaposition where, and again, if I, if I share any details that we shouldn't share, then of course, just let me know. But over the last couple of years, one of the things that has happened remarkably with some of your work and, and the things that we've been involved in is that opportunities for Christian ministry have opened up again in many Venezuelan prisons.

And so you've been involved in coordinating and organizing a more formalized ministry effort in, in these prisons. And so I've seen pictures of prisoners in Venezuela gathering together to pray for those in Ukraine, and you've shared with Ukrainians and they're turning around and seeking to be an encouragement and pray for those in Venezuela.

And I just think that's a remarkable story. Share a little bit about that, please. Well, we have definitely been blessed our ministry in Venezuela. We have access to six, seven penitentiaries now, and the churches that we have encountered us are completely alive. Like one church has 3,400 members. Another one has 2,000, over 2,000.

There is 38 churches that we now support indirectly. And also we're doing the gardening projects there. So we have, we have a lot of input and a lot of presence in different prisons now. So we are now currently serving to almost 12,000 inmates. And we have, we intend to, we go there every three, two to three months, visiting all the prisons, supervising our garden projects.

We provide employment to probably at least 300, 400 inmates in our gardens. So the ministry has grown considerably now. I hope it to go back when I, when I came back from Ukraine in August, and just continue supporting the ministry, the prison ministry. One of the things that happened was they said, when I told them, because we had a board of directors that I would call.

So the inmates had vigils and they took my cost as their cost. And so they were like, outpouring of hundreds, thousands of people praying for me. And they would send me pictures of their prayer meetings. And literally you see five, 700, a thousand inmates gathering in, in, in soccer fields, baseball fields, basketball courts, and saying, "Neri, Pastor Neri." They call me Pastor Neri.

"Pastor Neri, we're praying for you every day." So it was basically this, my, my mission brought a lot of unity in, in, in the prison ministry and the cost. So they, they're very supportive of what I'm doing in Ukraine. And of course, when I show pictures of the, of the inmates in, in Ukraine and all of them praying for me, people are really, really encouraging.

- Wonderful. I thank you for coming on and sharing your stories. And it's my hope that we can take the lessons and be prepared for ourselves for some of these horrific disaster scenarios that you've described. And most importantly, so that we can be on a solid foundation to be able to help others who may not be prepared when, when this happens.

Whether we face the disaster of the loss of a child or the loss of a friend in a, in a horrific massacre, or whether we face a war zone or an economic collapse, we want to be prepared to be positioned so that we can help our community and be in solidarity with those around us.

- Yes. Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate that, Josh. - My pleasure. Thank you for coming on. And that brings us to the end of today's interview. If you are interested in more of the adventures of today's guest, you can find more information at creativephilanthropy.blog. Creativephilanthropy.blog.

It's been a great, you can keep up with, keep up with his writings there, with his travels there, et cetera. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much for, for contributing. By the way, you'll notice, a long time listeners of the show know that from time to time I've done various fundraising things.

I've reported on some of the stuff happening in Venezuela. I've often taken some of the old episodes off of the feed and been somewhat cagey with details and whatnot, simply because of the sensitivity of it. But this audience has single handedly done a tremendous amount of work. Last year, or I guess two years ago, I raised a significant amount of money.

We've purchased a truck and a truck and some other equipment for some of the, the relief workers and missionaries and relief workers working on the border. We've taken in significant amounts of food into Venezuela. Also started, you heard him allude to the garden projects, have a significant number of garden projects.

And I've actually, it's opened up to be able to have a platform to do far more than we thought in the past. So at this point in time, we can actually do some of the work there in the prisons, can meet officially with permission of some of the officials, et cetera.

So it's been a great, a very productive time. And I want to thank you for all of your involvement in that. Thankfully, I think most of us don't live in these disaster zones. I think thankfully, it's not a deep impact to on a daily basis to most of our lives, but we still need to learn from those who are going through them.

And may our hearts be touched and may we have opportunities to minister to those who are in need, open our wallets when possible, et cetera. Thank you for listening and I'll be back with you soon.