Awangarda Foundation
Our Volunteer's Story
Our volunteer, Tom, traveled from Canada to Ukraine to support us on the frontlines. We are deeply grateful for his courage and dedication. But Tom is more than just a skilled nurse - he brought with him a positive spirit and cheerful energy that lifted those around him, reminding us to find lightness even in difficult times. Thank you, Tom.
Driving an ambulance across Ukraine in the middle of the night was not on my to do list. But somhow I found myself doing exactly that.
It wasn’t my first time in the country. I’d been to Ukraine before, travelling as far east as Kharkiv and passing through some of the most broken places in the country. To name a few: Irpin, Bucha, Shevchenkivskyi, Saltivka. Streets hollowed out, buildings gutted, whole areas rendered unrecognisable.
Because the skies above Ukraine were closed, I have had to go through Poland. My route took me through Oświęcim, the site of Auschwitz. In retrospect, the parallel was hard for anyone to ignore, one empire’s industrialised killing and another’s systematic attempt at erasure. Different century but the same cruelty. In some photos, even I couldn’t tell if they were from 1943 or the present. And that blurring of time says enough.
You might think I’d leave Ukraine with nothing but fear and pity. But no. Ukraine has a habit of surprising you when you least expect it. Everywhere I went, people offered kindness and carried on with a stubborn sense of normal life. I distinctly remember seeing a man frying varenyky in his apartment while the neighbouring flat was just a hole in the wall left by a rocket. Was that bravery, resignation, or just dinner on a Wednesday? Didn’t matter. It was life, carrying on because stopping isn’t an option. And that is the version of Ukraine I have come to know and love.
As I waited for hours in the queue to leave Ukraine, I knew I couldn’t reduce what I’d seen to a set of holiday snaps or some grim story wheeled out at parties. That would have been unfair to the people I’d met, and dishonest to myself. It was clear then I would put my training to work next time. And that was the path that eventually set me onto Donbas.
Little did I know, when I first connected with a member of Awangarda before even setting off, barely a season of the Great British Bake Off would air before I was brought back to Ukraine — only this time in camo, boots, and carrying a trauma bag large enough to look like I was about to restock a Żabka.
We assembled as a team along the way, the Kharkiv steppe stretching out before us in a pastoral sunset of colours that would’ve been called idyllic in another life. But the view didn’t last. The further east we went, the more often the scenery was punctuated by anti-aircraft guns welded to the backs of battered pickups.
We crossed the Donets under cover of night and drove into Donetsk’s fortress belt. The place we would call home for the time being was almost identical to the housing estate I grew up in: the same peeling wallpaper, the same weary smell of concrete that had long since given up, and the faint note of mould lurking in the corners. In its own bleak way, it almost felt like going home.
It was only hours before I was shaken awake by a Shahed. or “moped,” as the locals call them. The noise is unmistakable: a cheap two-stroke engine buzzing above your head, except this one carries explosives instead of a biker wrapped in lycra. It loitered directly above my building before striking something nearby. The rest of the night was a rhythm of anti-aircraft bursts and distant explosions, each one shaking the building ever so slightly, like an uninvited reminder that someone wants you and all your neighbours dead.
Daylight didn’t bring peace, only variation. Shelling gave way to air alarms and missile warnings that howled through the day. Telegram lit up with casualty updates, photos of the strikes from the night before. The kind of reports that rarely make it into headlines abroad. Too gruesome, or perhaps too routine. By nightfall, I rotated into my first shift on base.
The base I worked from was old and felt more like a bunker than a workplace. Cold, dim, and sometimes without water or power. I was told sewage occasionally backed up catastrophically - a grim reminder that not all battles involve artillery. Aside from being an impending public health disaster, the base was also time capsule of sorts; once inside, you lost track of the hours, numbed to what lay just a few miles away.
And yet in that bleakness were moments of absurd comfort. A suspiciously tasty pot of borscht. A pallet of Volya Morshynska stacked taller than me. And the moans of my bunkmate being demolished in CS:GO by his bunkmate next door while outside artillery tried to do the same to us.
In keeping with tradition, I was eventually introduced to Donbas Uno. I hadn’t played Uno in well over a decade, so naturally I was utterly annihilated by a middle-aged Ukranian radio operator, who claimed to be just as novice. Truth is, though, he stuck with me more than the game did. He was the sort of man you wished you’d met in a pub, not in a war. The kind who carried the quiet authority of age, equal parts fatherly and kind, and whose presence felt welcoming even here on the frontlines. His English was broken, my Ukrainian worse, and yet somehow we understood one another well enough. Every exchange seemed to end in laughter, whether at his fractured sentences or my mangled grammar, the absurdity of it all cutting through the gloom like nothing else could.
Then came the first callout.
“Sixty seconds, bunk to ambulance,” they said. I pulled on my plate carrier, snapped on my helmet light, and stepped into a night lit briefly by an orange fireball in the distance. The smell followed, a cocktail of ammonia and gasoline that clung to the air. A munition dump fire, someone later told me.
My driver took the wheel with a style best described as Lewis Haimlton minus the seatbelt laws, and we tore down the road toward the stabilisation point. Overhead, the drone detector chirped like a demented smoke alarm. Phones stayed buried in Faraday bags, though that hardly mattered, if you can see a drone bearing down on you, you’ve already lost. Latest intelligence reported the presence of fibreoptic drones in the area, the sort immune to jamming. Was someone tracking us in the dark? No one knew. All you saw were muzzle flashes in the distance and suddenly paranoia looked exactly like caution.
The stabilisation point was a concert of organised chaos. At one end, an agitated patient fought sedation while at the other, radio operators sat stared intensely at their screens. Explosions interrupted the rhythm like stray notes in a score, but the music continued without pause. Each person knew their role, and they carried it out with a kind of precision and professionalism that was hard to forget.
Unlike earlier phases of the war, most of the injuries today were shrapnel. Some stumble in with metal still lodged in them. Others are carried, fading by the second. My patient needed damage control resuscitation. After a terse handover, he was ours.
On the way to one of the last functioning hospitals, chaos began to unravel. Waking up from high-dose ketamine isn’t pleasant at the best of times, I’ve seen enough of it in the recovery room in my day job to know, let alone after surviving a drone strike in Donbas. Since my Ukrainian was about as fluent as small talk at the bar, I gave it a shot anyway. The patient unclenched his fist slowly and gave me the sort of look you’d expect if I’d just suggested tofu tastes better than kielbasa. It was the kind of stare that left no doubt about what he thought of me: a Chinese guy in kit, speaking Ukranian badly enough to offend his own ancestors. And then he laughed. I laughed too. Maybe it was my accent, maybe the absurdity of the scene , or maybe it was the ketamine. Who knows. At the hospital, we handed him over, cleaned the ambulance, and reset for the next run. Rinse, repeat. There are countless stories like this from other Awangarda volunteers to tell.
My seniors especially, who have seen far more than I, could easily fill an afternoon with them , and their stories make mine sound about as gripping as waiting in line for coffee at a McDonald’s or the checkout at Biedronka.
But the truth is, not every story needs to be told. Some stay with you precisely because you can’t put their weight into words. And it feels right to close my first piece not with another account from the field, but with the harder questions that linger, about what truly compels people like me to volunteer at Awangarda, and what one person can really do.
Like my American teammate wrote in her own article, she too was called reckless, delusional even, for coming here. But when you find yourself among people who don’t hesitate to risk their lives for others, those words lose their weight quickly.
Back home, it’s all too easy to sink into the fatalistic comfort of believing you’re just a cog in a vast, grinding machine, and that nothing you do really changes anything. Out here in Ukraine, it feels different. When you put your training, your hands, your judgment to work and see the result in front of you: a pulse steadied, a life pulled back from the edge. This difference is immediate, tangible, undeniable.
Perhaps, like me, some of your peers may never fully understand why we gave our time and energy to Awangarda, or why we would venture so far outside the routines of ordinary life and step willingly into danger. But our patients understood it. And so did my friends in Ukraine. For me, that understanding was enough. And yet it was also the heaviest thing to bring home, the knowledge that you could make a difference, and the grief of knowing how much would always be left undone.
I won’t pretend individuals win wars. They don’t. The politics, the complex history, the generational trauma, and the sheer weight of it all, no one person can carry that, let alone fix it. When I came home, I told almost no one where I’d been, and months went by before the subject even surfaced. For many, reading this will be the first time they learn it at all.
Though my part was small and forgettable, but what Ukraine gave me in return is something I’ll carry for the rest of my life. I learned more here, in the space of days, than in years elsewhere. Not lessons you write neatly in a notebook, but ones that seep in, but ones that bleed through from rubble, from an ambulance window, from the stubborn endurance of people who simply refuse to stop living.
For that, I’ll always be grateful to Awangarda for letting me play a tiny part in its important work in Ukraine.