A Market That Stops for the Fallen
We went to Shuvar market this week — the biggest wholesale produce market in western Ukraine, farmers selling in bulk straight off the back of trucks. Mountains of fresh produce, more than we could possibly need, but that’s rather the point. Ukrainians preserve everything: pickling, bottling, drying, storing away against a hard season. It’s tradition, but it’s also survival strategy, and standing in the middle of all that abundance, it’s easy to see how deeply that habit of preparing is woven into how this country copes.
At nine o’clock, without warning or announcement, the entire market simply stopped. Every stallholder, every shopper, every conversation — all of it paused for a moment of silence for the fallen. It happens everywhere in Ukraine, at this exact hour, every single day. You’d think you’d get used to it. You don’t.
Settling Into a House With a Bigger Purpose
Back at the house, there’s been no shortage of things to sort out — the sort of unglamorous admin that doesn’t make it into anyone’s highlight reel but eats a huge amount of time and energy. Ihor, who had the house before us, left plenty behind to work through: a hot water boiler with a mind of its own, services to transfer, an immigration office that runs on its own logic entirely, and the particular fun of trying to solve all of it in a language we’re still catching up on.
But there’s a garden full of fruit, vegetables and berries that’s honestly a joy, and a growing vision for what this house could become — not just somewhere we live, but somewhere that can be used to bless others. Ron in particular has been quietly relentless, working through every system in the house to make it as resilient as it can be heading into winter.
Bracing for the Hardest Winter Yet
That word — resilient — matters more this year than most. Everyone here is talking about how this could be the toughest winter Ukraine has faced since the full-scale invasion began. The government is openly warning people to prepare. Ukraine has run through its stock of missile interceptors, and Russia is increasing its use of the missiles those interceptors were meant to stop.
Intelligence suggests that over the coming month Russia will ramp up massive strikes on energy infrastructure, heating and water systems, timed deliberately ahead of winter. Already there’s been a marked increase in attacks on supermarket warehouses, humanitarian aid stores and food production facilities — not military targets, just the machinery of ordinary life. The intent seems less about strategy than about demoralising and destroying.
Some of our Ukrainian friends, worried for us, have gently suggested we go home before it gets bad. We won’t be. We’ll be here to help. It’s a strange thing, being in the relative calm of the west of the country right now — some people here aren’t prepared at all, and others watch that and worry that it’s been a little too easy, too peaceful, for a bit too long. There’s a real sense that some people simply aren’t ready for what’s coming even to places that have been relatively protected until now.
In the middle of all that, there’s also a lot of good, practical work ahead — meetings, planning and preparation for a busy season of teaching, training, mobile clinics and helping CMA develop its programs. Between that and everything still to do at the house, plus my own remote work ticking along in the background, I’ll admit I’m a little tired. Looking forward to some of this settling down. Whenever and however that turns out to be.
Unexpected Grace
And then, in the middle of all that tiredness, something lovely happened. A friend from church asked how things were going, and I mentioned, in passing, how much work we’d been left with at the house. Next thing I knew, another lady from that same circle of friends messaged to say she and a couple of others were coming on Saturday to help clean. I worried — they’re all so busy already — but they insisted they had the time.
They turned up and cleaned the whole bottom floor of the house from top to bottom, and then we had a lovely little barbecue and even better conversation. It was humbling. If I’m honest, I’d struggle to find friends back in Australia who would show up like that, unasked, just because they heard we were tired. That kind of practical love isn’t something you forget.
Preparing to Stay Connected
Part of preparing for winter here means preparing to lose power, possibly for extended periods, so we’ve been setting up ways to stay connected regardless. We’ve chosen an internet provider whose source has up to ten days of generator backup, and we’ve set up a UPS power station at the house to keep wifi running when the grid doesn’t. Ron is checking all the other backups at the house for power and heating so that we are well prepared.
We’re also trying to get hold of as many essential supplies as we can, while we still can — warehouses and postal depots are being hit too, not just power stations. I’ve already had a notification that one of our orders is delayed because the warehouse it was sitting in was shelled. Sure beats Australia Post excuses…?
It’s a small, mundane reminder of how deliberately the ordinary is being targeted.
A Retreat, a Sauna, and a Chan
I spent a couple of days at a staff retreat/workshop for CMA’s annual strategic planning — intense days of work, planning and meetings, but in a genuinely beautiful setting near the Carpathians, all rolling hills and forest, in the very venue where the doctors’ slowdown retreat would later be held. The days were long and mentally draining, but one evening we were given the chance to try the retreat centre’s sauna and chan.
A chan, for the uninitiated, is a traditional Carpathian hot tub filled with pine needles and herbs, giving off the most beautiful aroma. The sauna itself was fiercely hot, and a formidable Ukrainian lady thrashed us both with birch branches —before scrubbing us down with local salt and honey from their own bees. It was, against all odds, amazing.
Caring for the Carers
Not long after, we headed to the actual event: the Medchangers slowdown retreat that CMA runs to help Ukraine’s health professionals rest and heal. It’s a wonderful initiative — caring for the carers. Unlike in many other countries, doctors here don’t earn high salaries; in fact, relative to cost of living, Ukrainian doctors are among the lowest paid in the world.
On the way, we picked up our friend Davyd, a surgeon travelling to camp overnight from Dnipro. (You can read more about him HERE and HERE ) Trains are regularly targeted by missiles and drones now, so as a safety measure, every air raid alert means passengers get off and move away from the train until it passes — some journeys are delayed by up to a day as a result. Shortly after his trip began, Davyd messaged to say they’d already been stopped, waiting out an alert. Thankfully it was his only delay, and we were able to collect him and get to camp on time. As he’d left his home city, it was being bombarded by missiles. People were killed that night.
We talked a great deal on the drive to camp. He told us that a lot of families simply can’t afford surgery anymore. He told us about a boy Ukrainian news had reported on, whose mother works in a bakery but hasn’t been paid in three months, so she sells milk and vegetables from their small farm instead. The boy would travel between villages helping her sell it. That’s what he was doing when he was hit by a drone.
Davyd is a neurosurgeon, and as he told it, doctors here are among the lowest paid in the world relative to their training and responsibility. He works extra shifts just to pay for his own surgical equipment, and tries, where he can, to take a lower fee in his private clinic for families who can’t afford care. Not always possible. But he tries.
Stories From the Camp
The camp itself was in a beautiful setting, and Davyd, for one, was looking forward to some real time in the forest — some green time, as he put it. Clinic teams had come from all over the country. One group told me they aren’t far from Kyiv, so they hear explosions constantly and take the occasional hit themselves; they were simply glad of the peace and quiet, however brief.
Another group told me it’s been terrible where they are — bombs hit their hometown daily — but their work matters, so what else is there to do. One of them thanked me for praying for her son, who’d been mobilised into the army but placed in a role slightly less dangerous than infantry, which was what she’d feared most. Another family, doctors with beautiful kids, had told me earlier this year they’d had to move out of their home after horrific Shahed attacks on their town — every petrol station in the region had been bombed. They moved temporarily to his mother’s nearby village so he could keep commuting to work. But now FPV drones can reach even there, and he told me his teacher had been killed by one: as the drone approached her car, she and her family jumped clear, but she fell to the ground and the drone hunted her down right there on the road. He said it so plainly. He said it’s happening more and more. They told me, too, about the dangerous journey it had taken just to get to this camp.
I spoke with a dentist at camp who told me how encouraged he is by the foreigners who come to help. He said that sometimes, when your mind is struggling, you start to wonder — are we even on the right side of this, is it right to keep staying? It weighs on people. But he said that people like us showing up gives them encouragement, and it also gives their country encouragement as it strives to change and leave behind its Soviet-era legacy of corruption.
I caught up with a young woman I’ve worked alongside on mobile clinics before. She told me she’d gotten married in April, and I congratulated her, then asked whether I’d get to meet her husband when I next joined their clinic. Her English is limited, so instead of answering, she simply shook her head and showed me a photo on her phone — her husband, in army uniform — and hugged me.
At the official opening of camp, we held a moment of silence. A young doctor, who’d volunteered as an army medic and had been a participant at last year’s retreat, brilliant and generous and loved by everyone who knew him, was killed in July 2026. It shook this whole community. He was only twenty-six. And it was only towards the end of the camp that we realised the lovely young man we’d been talking to was this doctor’s brother – and was a discharged war veteran himself.
I gave some lectures at the camp and received some genuinely lovely, encouraging feedback. One student, from Kharkiv, told me she first got involved with CMA and Medchangers because she’d heard me speak in her city, loved it, and went looking afterwards for more events and membership. You never quite know which room, which sentence, plants something that keeps growing long after you’ve left. She continues her last year of studies in Kharkiv. A city that almost entirely operates underground now as it is under constant attack day and night. Indeed it was only a few months ago that a student at this very same university was killed by a Russian attack one day before her graduation as a doctor…
What This Work Costs
Between the market, the house, the retreats and the camp, this has been a full and heavy fortnight — full of small griefs and small graces sitting right alongside each other, the way they always seem to in Ukraine. It costs real money to keep this work running: the mobile clinics, the training, the retreats that let exhausted doctors like Davyd catch their breath before winter closes in. Every dollar donated goes directly to that work, not to us — neither Ron nor I take a salary from Only Passing Thru, and this deployment is entirely self-funded on our end. Importantly we also direct the money where you want it – if you want to support medical missions or aid we don’t direct your funds to doctors camps and vice versa. It is your money and your choice.
If you’d like to be one of the people standing behind Ukraine’s medical carers this winter, our 200 Heroes campaign is the simplest way in.
