Korosten Mobile Clinic: Caring for Families of Ukraine’s Fallen

Korosten: Tired, ‘Broken’, and Still Showing Up

I love working with this team. They are one of the CMA mobile clinic teams, but they also run their own charity based in a church in Korosten, and they are a real light in their community. The church is a hub of constant activity: distributing aid and meals, running programs for internally displaced people, people with disabilities and orphans, military chaplaincy, mobile clinics and more.

Things have become increasingly difficult in their area. The day before we arrived, Shahed drones hit a business in the centre of town and two people were killed, one of them a mother of three.

We arrived in time for me to run a mini workshop on teamwork, leadership and planning for their volunteer team of about twenty people: mobile clinic staff, chaplains and others. It was lovely to see so many faces I knew from previous trips, and there were plenty of hugs. At check-in, one after another said how tired they were. Some said they felt tired and broken. Little wonder. Feeling tired on a Friday night is normal, but where most people would be looking forward to a weekend off, this group was preparing to leave at 6.30 the next morning to run a volunteer mobile clinic. Despite that, they were an attentive, interactive audience, and many said afterwards how timely and useful the session was.

One participant had been at the recent retreat. She pulled out her notebook to show me all the notes she’d taken from my talks and told me how much they had helped her. That was very humbling, and very encouraging.

We tried hard not to put anyone to any trouble. They would not take no for an answer on dinner. They had also turned the upstairs of the church into a lovely little apartment for us and left fruit, tea and snacks in our room. So thoughtful and kind.

They apologised (!) for all the people walking around and through the building. It turned out these were refugees from the Kherson and Donetsk regions who had lost everything and were now living in the church.

A Clinic Where Every Patient Was Grieving

On Saturday we drove two and a half hours out of town to a new clinic location: an old church in a building that had been shifted from Switzerland years ago, complete with toilet signs still in German. For the last few years the pastor, his wife and a chaplain have been turning it into a centre for the people they have served for many years, and it is becoming a lovely place of refuge and care. For today, it was our clinic. We set up our stations inside and the dental van set up outside.

Every patient we saw had lost a family member in this invasion.

An 82-year-old grandmother had lost two sons and a daughter-in-law. She is now raising three grandchildren, aged 14, 12 and 8. “I have to be a mama and a papa for them,” she told me. She was lively and very switched on, but had severe arthritis in her knees and needed help with pain management and exercises. She also needed some hugs. People waiting outside told us later how much those had meant to her.

Another woman had lost her grandson and was struggling to hold herself together.

Another had severe anxiety and told me she felt ashamed that she had been “born weak like this” and had to stay away from bad news, which is not easy to do in Ukraine right now. My translator was also a Ukrainian chaplain, and together we were able to offer her comfort, reassure her that crying is not weakness, and connect her with people in the church who would let her talk without shame.

Another woman had several quite serious medical issues that needed sorting, but was reluctant to make the time. She is a soldier in air defence, protecting civilians from strikes, and she feels that responsibility keenly.

Partway through, one of the older Ukrainian doctors stuck his head around the corner of my cubicle and said, “You’ll have nothing left to talk about with your husband tonight.” He couldn’t quite understand why I was talking so much with the patients. (For the record, Ron and I still found plenty to talk about.)

At the end, the pastor’s wife came to thank us for the care we’d shown. All of these patients, she explained, came from the groups they run for people who have lost loved ones in the war. There are around 200 fallen from this area alone. She said she was surprised to see some of them coming out of our room laughing and smiling. I suggested they were probably laughing at the crazy Australian doctor lying on the floor demonstrating exercises.

Then she asked, wide-eyed: “How is it that you are like a three-in-one: a physical therapist, a doctor and a psychologist?”

It gave me the chance to explain how different our system is in Australia, where general practice involves high-level training in whole-person care, especially rural generalist training. The staff in the room said that in Ukraine, a family doctor can be more like an administrator who simply refers people on to specialists. There are many wonderful Ukrainians working hard to change this, and it is part of what I hope to contribute to through education and support while we’re here.

Quiet Heroes Without Headlines

This couple are one of so many groups of Ukrainians quietly serving without banner headlines or promotion. And they didn’t just jump in because there’s a war. Many years ago their son was left disabled after a bus accident, and they set up support for people with disabilities. In 2014 they began helping people affected by Russia’s first invasion. Now they are serving through the full-scale invasion.

Their son had a best friend who always protected him at school from discrimination. The two were very close. That friend was killed in this war, and his death prompted them to start the support group for the families and friends of the fallen, the same group our patients came from.

Meanwhile, Ron had been helping with set-up and taking every patient’s blood pressure as they came in. Towards the end he had time to talk with Maksym, the chaplain who had organised the clinic and has been getting the centre ready. Maksym has leased space to set up a rehabilitation centre for soldiers and is doing a great deal to support people in the area. When Ron mentioned that we had bought a house in Ukraine, Maksym was completely taken aback. “So you have hope for our country?” he said. “That means a lot.”

It meant a lot to us too. We had wondered whether our house might carry that meaning for some Ukrainians, and hoped it would. It was good to hear it. The church then fed us a lovely lunch.

On the long drive back, we talked for hours with the woman who had translated for me. It turned out she wears many hats. She and her husband are chaplains who travel regularly to frontline areas to encourage soldiers and deliver aid and food, returning to the same places and building real relationships. Many of those places are now out of reach. That’s not so much because the front has moved (in many places Ukraine is pushing forward), but because the “kill zones” or “grey zones” keep widening as drone ranges increase and Russia throws everything it has as far behind the lines as it can. So they do what they still can, including helping the many wounded soldiers and their families now back in the rear.

She told us about finding people living in the basements of their destroyed homes, who refused to leave. The chaplains brought them food and supplies, and then garden tools and seeds, so they could re-establish themselves and provide for themselves again.

She is also a deputy mayor. If I understood correctly, it’s a voluntary role. She never saw herself as a politician, she said, but believes it was God’s plan, because it lets her serve and help more people and have influence from within local government.

Sirens During the Sermon

On Sunday we were served another wonderful breakfast by a woman who serves everyone with love and smiles, while her own brother and son are at the front.

We joined the church service. They asked us to share a little about ourselves, then prayed for us and thanked us for being there. A woman stood up to tell the congregation that her husband had been killed that week, but that the church had surrounded her with so much love and support she didn’t know how she would be getting through without them.

The pastor spoke about the Shahed attack that had killed two people in town. Then the air raid sirens went off mid-service, and he didn’t even flinch. Hardly anyone moved. I noticed Yulia, sitting beside me, check her phone, and her young daughter quietly slip out.

The alerts kept going all day, and all night. Life would be impossible if people ran to a shelter for every one, because they are now so frequent. There is no rest from the sirens in Korosten.

Between services and sirens, the church building never stops: programs running, refugees living and helping, people coming for aid or just for someone to talk to. What inspired me most was seeing refugees who weren’t only receiving help but had jumped in to join the teams helping others.

We walked through Korosten’s famous park, full of monuments and history. Korosten was once the capital of the Drevlians, a Slavic tribe that predates Kyivan Rus, with some suggesting they go back as far as the sixth century. It’s genuinely beautiful, with ducks, granite outcrops, a river and forest. Drone alerts and sirens went off the whole time we were there, and people carried on with their day.