MINNEAPOLIS — It's been one week since Alexandra Sakurets returned from a medical humanitarian mission to the Ukrainian border, but she's still struggling to focus on work.
"We're in a very different world," said Sakurets, who has worked as a nurse for M Health Fairview for 24 years and also owns the Art of Eternal Beauty med spa in northeast Minneapolis. "I feel like I'm really not all the way here. I feel like a part of me is still there."
For most of March, Sakurets paused her many family and career obligations in order to volunteer with the Global Disaster Relief Team (GDRT) at a refugee center in Przemysl, Poland, just across the Ukrainian border.
"This is a bracelet that we were all given to enter," Sakurets said, pointing to the strip of paper still wrapped around her wrist. "I'm keeping mine on because I just can't take it off."
As a native of Ukraine, the bracelet provides a small connection to all of the people she worked to help, and still thinks about.
"We saw all of it. We saw the full gamut of war injuries, or shrapnel wounds," she said. "On the other end, we saw kids were coming out of these cellars that were stuck underground for two weeks with really heavy coughs and pneumonia."
Erdahl: "As you speak to people in the United States, is there anything that you feel like they don't understand, or we don't understand, about the migration that's happening right now?"
Sakurets: "I can make this analogy, let's say there is a war in Minnesota. And we go over to Hudson, Wisconsin, and wait it out. Would I want to wait it out in Ecuador or Kenya or even Paris, France? I wouldn't. I would want to stay in Hudson, on the other side of the river. Wait for the war to be over and come home. I would say 90% of the refugees I met didn't even have a passport. They never had plans on leaving their small towns. These are people who are worried about their crops. Literally, their words were, as soon as it's over I'm walking home because it's only ten miles away."
She even witnessed that type of determination to return home, from one of the few families to escape the atrocities in the town of Bocha.
"This family told me, 'They were shooting right at us. They were shooting at us through the walls, through the windows, purposefully. We were laying on top of our children,'" Sakurets said. "I listened to her and I believed her, and I didn't want to believe her at the same time."
Two weeks after hearing their story, news of the potential war crimes in Bocha is just now making international news. Though Sakurets has since returned home, she is determined to keep helping however she can.
Sakurets: "I'm constantly in touch with my Global Disaster Relief Team to figure out what I can continue doing now. My husband is flying (Wednesday), to Poland, with 100 bullet proof vests."
Erdahl: "You work two jobs, own a business, have a family..."
Sakurets: "Four daughters ages 17, 14, 12 and 10."
Erdahl: "How are you able to do it?"
Sakurets: "You just do. There are things that don't matter in the grand scheme of things, and then things that really do matter. Our kids missed their sports practices and their spring break. That's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. No one is going to remember that or be impacted. I got the leave of absence from the U of M, thanks M Health. In terms of customers at the med spa, I called a few days before I left and said, 'Guys, we have to reschedule your Botox. If you get some more wrinkles on your forehead, that's okay. We can correct that when I come back. I'll see you in a month."
"If this continues, and if my help is needed, I'll go back. When you listen to your inner voice, you know what the right decision is."
For now, Sakurets is focused on raising awareness and donations for her Global Disaster Relief Team, which you can contribute to here. She says they mainly need to purchase emergency medical supplies and medications. As for help on the ground, she says there is a massive need for translators who speak Ukrainian or Russian.
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