PHILADELPHIA — When Temple University graduate Dharmik Sheth took off for Poland, deciding in a minute's time to help the Ukrainian refugees flooding into the country, he carried more than bags of soaps, shampoos, and toothbrushes.
He took a Hindu faith that instilled in him the teaching of seva, selfless service, an instruction to treat fellow human beings the same as one would treat the divine.
He also took a bit of the heart of Philadelphia, an image he would share with an exhausted refugee mother and her two young children as a universal symbol of hope.
Sheth, 33, isn't a physician. Or a disaster specialist. He didn't save anyone's life, brought no urgently needed skills or equipment to Polish villages awash in people fleeing the war in Ukraine.
Most days, he carried luggage, the bags and suitcases of women, children, and old men who often had trudged for miles even before they reached the border. That weight he could lift from them. Other days, he picked up trash. And served meals. Or helped people find warm clothing in the freezing cold.
He sang Hindu prayers to the weary, and listened as they sang back their own calls to God in their language.
"I'm just a simple guy, with a kid," said Sheth, who lives with his wife and baby in Robbinsville, New Jersey, in Mercer County.
In the month since the war began, people across the Philadelphia region have risen to the Ukrainian cause, donating money and goods, showing up to rallies, and turning porches and front yards into blue-and-yellow arrays. The Ukrainian colors glow on structures from One Liberty Place to Camden City Hall to the Trenton Makes Bridge.
Sheth felt compelled to physically go to the region, to put his hands into the work of helping Ukrainians at their moment of need.
It began with an 8 a.m. March 3 phone call.
"Are you seeing this on TV?" a friend asked.
He was. They contacted two others.
Sheth made sure the trip was acceptable to his wife, Meera.
He said goodbye to his 4-month-old son, Anand.
"I'm going to try to help people," he told the baby. "In the joy of others lies our own."
By 3 p.m. he and his friends had secured plane tickets from Lot, the Polish airline, on a direct flight from Newark to Warsaw. Airline staffers canceled the check-in fees for two huge bags of donated humanitarian goods.
By 10 p.m., Sheth and his friends were in the air.
"There's so much hurt, and there's so much pain," said one of the group, Yogi Trivedi, 38, a religious scholar and doctoral candidate at Columbia University in New York City. "All you can do is the next good thing."
Sheth grew up in Lawrenceville, N.J., a suburban bedroom community near Trenton. After college, he worked in Center City for PwC, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, and today he's a finance director at Bristol Myers Squibb in Princeton.
His parents emigrated from India. And as he contemplated Poland, Sheth felt the turn of family history. He remembered how his father packed his bags and left to help others when a cyclone hit the east India state of Odisha in 1999.
Sheth would spend 10 days overseas, using vacation time to go.
He knew he would have contacts in Poland through the Hindu faith-and-service organization BAPS, which had set up a camp in Rzeszów to help Indian students caught in the fighting. From there they drove to border camps in Budomierz, Medaka, and Korczowa.
At Budomierz, they met up with a Polish volunteer group who needed help with distribution.
"They had three tents full of supplies, but no one to distribute," said another in the group, Bhagwatprasad Patel, 34, a University of Pennsylvania graduate who lives in Edison, N.J.
Sheth told the Polish volunteers, "We're here from the U.S. We can help with anything, take out the trash, make tents, whatever you want."
Sheth learned that for refugees — Poland has drawn nearly two-thirds of the 3.3 million who have fled — crossing the line was not the end of their journey. Reaching the actual camps required refugees to walk nearly another half-mile.
He started carrying their bags.
At one point he saw a woman outside a tent, playing a guitar and singing Polish prayers, an effort to introduce normality into chaos.
Sheth asked, "Do you mind if I sing a prayer in Hindi?"
She didn't mind. He sang, "Bedh voh to Kisime nahi dekhta, chahata he sabse rahe ekta! Man usiki karo prathana...."
It means, "God sees everyone as equal and wants everyone to maintain togetherness and harmony — pray from your heart to God."
She picked up the words and sang with him.,
One woman told him she had walked nine days to reach Poland. The camps hold mostly women and children because men aged 18 to 60 are banned from leaving Ukraine.
In the Budomierz camp, Sheth realized he was being followed by a boy who was maybe 15. The young man didn't want supplies — he wanted Sheth's empty bag. He said he needed it to lug the belongings of his mother and grandfather, needed to step into the role of his absent father.
"I don't want them to carry," the boy explained. "I want to carry."
Sheth asked the boy's grandfather, "Are you happy your grandson is now safe?"
He answered, "I'll be more happy if all of Ukraine is safe."
A 68-year-old woman at Medyka needed two canes to walk herself out of Ukraine. She had a phone number for her son in Canada. Sheth contacted a friend from Toronto, and they helped mother and son connect.
Friends reached out to Sheth from the United States. How can we help? Sheth told them: Tell people here that you care. Create a small video, and send a prayer or a wish. We'll share it.
Thousands of people soon posted or commented on #PrayersForPeace.
In Budomierz, Sheth met a young mother, Ileena, who had traveled with her 2-year-old daughter, Paulina, and 7-year-old son, Evan.
Sheth and his friends agreed to watch the children, so that Ileena could phone her mother and say they were safe.
She and the Americans shared no common language. But Sheth flashed on a memory from Philadelphia — the statue in LOVE Park.
Using his foot, he drew the outline of a heart in the dirt. The mother drew a second heart. One of the children drew a third.
"The least we could offer," he said, "was love."
