Before Kharkiv, there was Kowanyama.
For 25 years, this remote Aboriginal community in Cape York was a second home for Ron and me. Through our charity Out There Kowanyama (now OPT), we, along with the OTK team, ran kids’ camps, mentoring programs, cooking classes, built the public barbecue & picnic and many other community projects— and along the way, Kowanyama became family. Not “family” in the polite, greeting-card sense. Actual family. The kind that gives you a hard time and then feeds you.
So when our work started pulling us toward Ukraine instead, we owed Kowanyama more than a Facebook post. We owed them a proper thank you — and an explanation.
In this short video, recorded after our recent visit for those who missed the in-person session, Ron and I sit down with our Kowanyama family to say thank you for over two decades of welcome, and to share why we’re now spending months at a time in Ukraine — running mobile medical clinics, training doctors under blackout conditions, and standing alongside communities living through the largest war in Europe since WWII.
The setting has changed. The reason hasn’t: showing up for people who need someone in their corner.
🎥 Watch: A Message to Our Kowanyama Family | Thank You & Why We’re Serving in Ukraine
We’re heading back for five months in August, and this time — for the first time ever — we’re asking for support. Not for us; Ron and I have always covered our own way. This is for medicines, fuel, and supplies for the clinics we run alongside Ukrainian doctors and volunteers who are doing extraordinary things on very little sleep.
$5 a week covers it. That’s roughly one coffee, or — if coffee is not your thing— slightly less than a packet of chips.
If Kowanyama could set the standard for caring about people, maybe you can too.
