Oswego resident delivers community donations to Ukraine, spends 12 days supporting refugees

Oswego resident Rene Koehler recently spent 12 days in war-torn Ukraine. providing aid and support to war refugees in an abandoned Soviet hospital.

Koehler works with Crisis Response International, a Christian relief organization that deploys teams of volunteers to areas in crisis globally.

Koehler is from Sugar Grove and has lived in Oswego for 15 years. She has been responding to disasters since 2010 with organizations like the Red Cross and CRI.

In March, she collected thousands of donated supplies for Ukraine from hundreds of Fox Valley area residents. Mercy Flights, donated transportation and volunteers helped get her and her supplies to Ukraine.

The donations she gathered filled 28 40-inch duffel bags. She remembered, at one time, thinking six duffel bags would have been a lot.

Koehler reached out to Lisa Lieser, a woman she knew who worked at the Aurora Municipal Airport, and told her she didn’t know how she could bring everything by herself, or how she would afford the fees for 28 extra bags to New York and Poland. The woman’s husband, unbeknownst to Koehler, is the CEO of Revv Aviation, Guy Lieser.

The next day, just 72 hours before her deployment, a Mercy Flight was ready to take her and her donations to New York, courtesy of Revv Aviation.

Koehler said the way Revv Aviation stepped up and made it happen was amazing. They coordinated everything, got flight plans approved, provided a King Air 350 private jet with all the seats removed, and sent her off with a pilot, co-pilot and 28 bags to New York.

Upon arrival at JFK International Airport in New York, her CRI team was there to help transport the donations.

Koehler and her team took a less luxurious flight to Krakow, Poland where they found the team they were replacing very ill with COVID-19 and intestinal viruses. After two days of quarantine, the ill team got flights back to the U.S., and Koehler’s team was told that they were no longer going to be stationed in Poland, but in Ukraine.

Koehler’s group was part of the fifth wave of CRI responders deployed to Poland and Ukraine. The organization is currently on wave 12.

Once in Ukraine, the donations were sorted and distributed to hospitals, refugee centers or to the front lines depending on the supplies. They transported responders and donations into and around Ukraine in vans driven by hired locals.

CRI had secured an abandoned Cold War-era Soviet hospital in an undisclosed city for the safety of the responders still stationed there, three hours from the border near Lviv.

Koehler said the hospital was meager with cold hallways, but each family was grateful to have their own room and facilities. She said there were gates with rolling barbed wire, paint peeling, vinyl curling up from the floor, and light bulbs hanging precariously.

“I packed more coming to Poland than these people had with a family of four or six,” she said recalling her first time seeing the refugee families’ rooms.

The hospital housed Koehler’s team and 170 refugees. She said some seemed to be sitting and waiting because their husbands were in the military fighting, some were looking for a plan, and a few came through just for a day, but most of the families had been there for at least a month when her team arrived.

Koehler said that many of the refugees they housed were women and families who pushed west when fighting started with nowhere to go, trying their best not to separate.

She said many were very dependent on communication with their husbands, who were fighting, and feared that if they fled into Poland, they would lose all communication with them.

“They were all of the same heart and mind,” Koehler said. “They had all experienced loss.”

Refugees staying at the hospital were paid to cook, clean or translate, as a way for them to help and make money. Food was served out of a hospital room, made with slow cookers and hot plates, which limited the capacity of people they could shelter.

Members of her team discovered the hospital’s kitchen and made it their mission to get it functioning again, hoping it would allow them to house 70 more refugees.

The local building inspector helped them get the water running, took them to local restaurants where they could buy used appliances and even found old Soviet spark plugs for them at a flea market.

A makeshift pharmacy was set up in one of the hospital rooms, filled with donations and medicine from local drug stores.

They set up a barber’s chair where a team member who worked at Sport Clips gave haircuts. Koehler said the barber’s chair turned into a place of comfort where some of the most memorable conversations took place.

Koehler said the sense of dread was generational. She recalled a young girl who had come to sit in the barber’s chair, who asked to pray for her mother, that she find a way to make some money and get to safety.

Among the refugees Koehler met was a woman with shrapnel in her shoulder and another who escaped with her daughter on one of the last vehicles out of Mariupol’ before bombs struck.

Koehler said luckily, the closest they came to trouble was when a nearby train station was struck by bombs shortly after they visited. Other than that, the most they had to endure was the nightly air raid sirens.

She said the first couple of nights were harrowing, waking up and collecting her belongings and retreating to shelter, but eventually they slept through it.

Koehler said she was quoting the founder and director of CRI, Sean Malone, when she said, “If you are worried about your life more than you’re worried about serving, this is probably not the deployment for you.”

She said to be effective in a place like that, you have to have a real sense of purpose.

Koehler and many others at the camp chose not to tune in to the nightly news of the war efforts, but she said the refugees did not think the war was going to end soon.

Koehler said the deployment expanded her world view, being her first time responding overseas. She saw that no matter what forced you to leave your home, whether it’s a tornado or war, it’s the same feeling.

“It’s total loss,” she said. “They are all on the same rollercoaster of emotions.”

Koehler said she would love to go back but it is currently too costly. All donations to CRI go to those directly affected, so each responder must fund their own transportation.

“I love that about them,” said Koehler. “You know, when you donate, exactly where your money is going.”

Since the first wave of responders, fuel shortages have raised the cost of flights from $1,600 to $2,300.

Koehler said one of the best things about CRI is that anyone can become a responder or help however they can. Currently they are looking for volunteers with medical training and emergency responders to join their efforts.

Those who wish to contribute can give monetary donations to defray the cost of transportation or send donations from the list of most urgently needed items on CRI’s website to their base camp located at 2494 Camp Jaycee Rd. Blue Ridge, VA 24064.