Couple helps people get school and medical supplies, food, toys and more

Tue, 10/31/2023 - 8:45am

SUSAN JOHNS

Westport Island’s Damian Sedney at the Ukraine border station: “It took almost three hours to process us, our two eight-ton trucks, our large van and a trailer. All vehicles were filled with supplies.” Courtesy photo

At a stop early in the recent Ukraine trip. Courtesy photo

Damian Sedney said this boy died in a bombing a week after Sedney met him at a school in Ukraine. Courtesy image

At a stop early in the recent Ukraine trip. Courtesy photo

Damian Sedney said this boy died in a bombing a week after Sedney met him at a school in Ukraine. Courtesy image

“God help the children of Ukraine,” Westport Island’s Damian Sedney said. Sedney, telling Wiscasset Newspaper about a nonprofit he and wife Katrina have started for Ukrainian relief, was sharing a photo of a boy he met at a school in Kharkiv.

“We were giving new school backpacks to his class. He was very curious and talkative. He was killed by the Russians one week later, with his grandma as he slept in his Spider Man pajamas in their flat,” Damian said. He returned from Ukraine about a month ago, after helping deliver food and other supplies. “My Polish colleagues asked me to join them on (a) delivery journey to Kharkiv, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Luhansk, etc. and orphanages in western Ukraine.”

Deliveries have gone on weekly for a year and a half, he said. “We have partnered with mostly Polish NGOs (non-government organizations) that have the trucks to deliver our supplies to Ukraine. All of our purchases are made from Polish and/or Ukrainian companies based in Poland or Ukraine. I have many online purchasing accounts with these international companies,” he explained.

The couple, married 42 years, have lived in Westport Island five-plus years after about 20 on their farm he managed in northern Vermont and their multiple kayaking trips to Midcoast Maine. Damian is of Polish descent and has a lot of cousins in Poland. “So as soon as Russia attacked Ukraine, I was talking with them about what their response was going to be,” and they told him a priest had started a program in the family’s ancestral parish there. Damian said the priest sought donations of food, supplies and money. “He would drive a van-load of supplies deep into Ukraine about every week.”

Damian went to Poland for five days in March 2022 to learn about the program, including what items the church was buying, how many and which brands. He got a feel for the operation, came home and set up online purchasing accounts with many Polish manufacturers and distributors, and then started buying products for that church in Poland to take into Ukraine.

The couple were using their personal funds, going through thousands of dollars. “We decided we were going to run out of money and this (effort) was going to end if we didn’t broaden our sources of funding,” Damian said. So he founded the non-profit, NGO charitable 501c3 foundation Refugee and Displaced Persons Aid Corp. and started a website for it, www.helpeasternukraine.org. Katrina helps on the bookkeeping.

The priest who started the church’s relief program was reassigned elsewhere in Poland so could not longer work on it. “So I found some other partners that he had previously been aligned with, to do the same sort of thing,” Damian said. Four months into supplying them for the deliveries that were continuing, a spot opened up on one of the journeys and Damian took his colleagues up on the offer to join them.

“I said, ‘Sure, I’ll go.’” He did, paying his expenses personally, not out of the foundation’s funds; and he used the couple’s frequent flyer miles. Katrina was against his going but accepted it around the time he packed a bullet-proof vest, he said. While apart, they spoke mostly via Facebook or email.

“I was worried the whole time, but he was communicating pretty closely,” said Katrina, retired from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “I feel like he was doing a really good thing,” she said of her husband’s recent trip delivering donations around Ukraine. As for her involvement in the foundation, she said it feels good to help, and to feel something besides helplessness about the war. “We feel like we’re at least doing a small part.”

First up for Damian on the recent journey was Kolobrzeg, Poland, where he helped colleagues buy more supplies. They packed three large trucks and a trailer and left for Ukraine Sept. 24; and went to orphanages in western Ukraine and gave out toys as well as backpacks full of school supplies; the children put on skits of poetry and song, including long, patriotic Ukrainian songs.

“It was extremely emotional. In western Ukraine, the people have not experienced the war day to day like they have in eastern Ukraine, but still there have been some bombs, so the children and their teacher, everybody is living under this cloud of whether Russia’s going to bomb (the area) again.”

The delivery group then drove about 15 hours across the country and spent the next few days in eastern Ukraine delivering food and other supplies, including medical supplies to hospitals in Kharkiv that had requested them. Also receiving deliveries were medical units on the front line; and schools. In this part of the country, “You can feel the war. We heard the bombs all the time,” Damian said. “There were air raid sirens and we had to go to bomb shelters.” It is a minute by minute threat, he said.

“I didn’t think about myself too much.” Sleep was hard and after an air raid siren it was hard to get back to sleep. “But my situation was nothing compared to the Ukrainians ... When you walk on the sidewalks in the city of Kharkiv, no one will look at you. Everyone looks away, and nobody smiles. And nobody says hello. It’s a very eerie sort of existence” due to the constant bombardment; and the people who have stayed there are trapped by the war and a lack of money to move, so no one he talked to was expressing hope, he said.

So far, the Refugee and Displaced Persons Aid Corp. donors have mainly been family and friends. They have been extremely generous, Damian said. He said about $50,000 has been raised. “We would love to have more people contribute.” He said the nonprofit buys requested, not random, items; and no one at the foundation is paid anything. “So every single cent goes directly to Ukraine.”

Donate at www.helpeasternukraine.org

He expects the work to continue “until the war is over” and beyond, since he said the need will remain during rebuilding.