An Army veteran and community councillor has spoken about her experience of travelling to the Ukrainian-Polish border to aid refugees. Hannah Jarvis, a community councillor from Abergavenny, went to the border to help a charity deliver medical aid and plans to return to continue the effort.
Hannah, a community councillor in Llanfoist Fawr and Govilon as well as Office Manager for a member of the Senedd, has worked with charity Bridge to Unity to fundraise and gather medical equipment to deliver to take to the Ukrainian-Polish border to Zintegrowana Sluzba Ratownicza (ZSR), a not-for-profit organisation based in Poland. She served in the Welsh Royal Regiment for 12 years, serving in Iraq in 2007.
"I have a bit of experience with this kind of thing, having served, and more recently last year with the evacuation from Afghanistan, I helped some interpreters come over with Bridge to Unity. We helped people come over and sent aid out and we helped people when they were over here set up with the local authorities, so things like housing, jobs, English language lessons and that type of things," Hannah told WalesOnline.
Read more: Ten thousand people in Wales have offered to have refugees from Ukraine come and live with them
"That's how the charity formed. More recently, we've turned our attention to Ukraine. We're still helping Afghanis, but we're now involving ourselves with this."
Hannah travelled out with the charity at the beginning of March, travelling to Krakow to drop off medical aid. Hannah and other volunteers were then driven down to the border by the charity seeing one of the holding points for refugees.
"There were thousands of them crammed into this old shopping mall type of building. We had a look at the actual border which was just watching people come in in coaches, walking over. There was a lot of barbed wire barriers and soldiers. The real shocking thing in the holding point was just an expanse of camp beds with thousands of people on, not knowing what their fate was going to be," Hannah said.
With Bridge to Unity, Hannah fund-raised and bought medical aid, including bandages and defibrillators. Their JustGiving page has raised over £35,000 so far.
"I think the worst thing was seeing the condition of the people who were arriving. They were all in a pretty bad way, but some people were exhausted and dehydrated. Some children hadn't had treatment for things like cancer or diabetes for a couple of weeks and they were virtually on the verge of collapse and had to be bundled straight into an ambulance and rushed to hospital," Hannah said.
"That was awful, awful to see, and the sheer numbers - I've never seen anything on this scale. Thousands of people who have lost everything overnight and some who were in extremely poor health. It was horrible to see."
The crowdfunding led by Bridge to Unity has resulted in the purchase of an ambulance for ZSR. Hannah plans to return with the charity to the border and will be driving out next week with kit to bring. She added that some volunteers will be flying out and sleeping rough for a night with refugees.
"It's going to be about -6 degrees [Celsius], so we wanted to do that to bring awareness really, and draw attention to the cause and our fundraising," Hannah said.
"There's no easy fix for this, this is a long term problem and it's going to take help and cooperation from other countries to solve it. They're going to need an array of things in the short term, but we need to remember whatever happens, many of these people don't have a home, a job, and in some cases a family to return to and they need every bit of support we can give to them."
If you would like to donate to Bridge to Unity's JustGiving page, click here.
