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11 13 24 FOX31 Anchor Jeremy Hubbard in Ukraine with non-profit Global Care Force
But there's only one feeling like knowing your banker personally, like growing up with a bank you can count on, like being sure what you've earned is safe, secure, and local. There's only one feeling like knowing you're supporting your community. You deserve more from a bank. You deserve an institution that stood strong for generations. Bank of Colorado, there's only one. Remember FDIC. It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku Channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre-based stations from iHeart all for free. Find the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeartChristmas and North Pole Radio. The Roku Channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs, and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeartRadio on the Roku Channel. Happy streaming! If you put aside $0.25 every week for a year, what could you get at the end? A few cups of coffee, maybe? A candle? Or you could get a year of the best reporting from all over the world. Go to washingtonpost.com/bf24 right now. You'll get a Washington Post subscription for $0.25 a week for your first year. This is a Black Friday sale, so it won't last long. Washington Post.com/bf24. Gina Gondek, Marty Lenz on Colorado's Morning News, helping victims of a violent war, stretching on for nearly 1,000 days. Russian attacks continue to escalate in a nonprofit called Global Care Force is sending a team of medical professionals and trauma victim advocates to the war zone in Ukraine to help Ukrainians in small villages where little to no health care exists. Also, traveling with this team, our friend and colleague with Fox31 News Anchor Jeremy Hubbard. He's there to share the stories of those helping provide support to Ukraine. He joins us now here on Colorado's Morning News. My friend, I appreciate you calling in. I'm glad that you're over there seeing what's going on firsthand. Where are you right now? Yeah, we're in a small town just a couple of hours outside of tea right now, where I'm actually at this very moment, standing in a clinic with probably about 40 Ukrainians, all of them looking for medical care. They have no doctors, no nurses at all because their town, basically anybody who's able-bodied and knows anything about medicine has gone off to help with the war efforts, so they're left with nothing. That's where these Colorado volunteers come in to help out. I got to tell you about this woman. We just met in early five minutes ago. She came in here. She's got a very young baby. She escaped with Gondek, an area that is occupied by the Russians, and she came here with the baby and just needed medical help, needed to check up. She's got a 14-year-old child who's still in the war zone that she's trying to get out of there. Making what's going on in Ukraine very real for these volunteers, myself included in fact this morning at our hotel in Kyiv. We were awakened by an air raid warning telling us to get down to shelter. Turns out a couple of missiles had dropped outside of town. They were shot down actually by Ukrainian forces, but it just shows you how real the threat is still here. Jeremy, the Russia-Ukraine war has been coming up on nearly three years now. What kind of damage have you been seeing on the ground as a plate? It's interesting the minute we got to Kyiv, we walked into town and near the city center, there are several buildings that are bombed out apartment buildings. There was one kindergarten that was bombed out and basically just left in a pile of rubble. We saw that right away. It's so wild just driving down the street in downtown Kyiv, we saw several burned up and bombed out cars parked on the road as if any other car that you see parked in Cherry Creek or something, these cars were just sitting there roadside and all of them completely bombed out. It's just a wild sight. Sounds like you mentioned, Jeremy, that these non-profits yourself kind of in the line of fire. I mean, I'm sure the Ukrainians, they must be happy and as you allude to the men of fighting age are not present, so they must be appreciative of any and all resources that we, the US and others are providing at this point. They're elated and also a little bit worried I think because obviously within administration change in January without getting political, they're worried that the American support will wane after the change has come in Washington in January, but nevertheless, this charity global care force, they're not political, they don't care, they're just here to help. That's why they round up this team of doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners from wherever they can around the country. The charity is based in Kansas City, but I'm here with a couple of volunteers from Denver, including a guy Doug Amos from Castle Rock. He's a nurse practitioner, a physician's assistant, sorry about that. He helps with these patients to check them out, diagnose them. Another woman who helps with trauma care, Leanna Stover, she works in Denver. She's here because you can imagine, trauma is really the underlying factor behind so many of these ailments, physical and mental, yeah, they may have a sore joint or hip problems, but really what's going on here is stress from three years of war for all of them. Tell us a little bit more about some of those stories with global care force because on TV, yesterday you were talking to somebody who's been coming to Ukraine, I believe over a dozen times now. I'm looking at her right now, Roxanna Jones is her name, and she's a nurse. She's been volunteering in Ukraine with this organization since the very beginning of the war. She's been here 15 times, and basically she comes here and helps organize the teams that go from village to village and to provide this medical care, so she's crucial to the effort here. There's so many of that. The people who do that, and the interesting thing is these volunteers, they have to raise their own money to do this as part of the model with the charity, so they got to raise six grand from friends, colleagues, whoever, just to have the privilege of coming here and volunteering their time and their skills, so this clearly is a passionate labor of love for all of them. Who else would come here under the threat of missiles and air raid sirens and having to pay your own way, essentially, than people who are really dedicated to making others lives better? Jeremy, if I understand, obviously they're taking care of those that are affected and impacted by the war, literally in that sense, but I'm imagining there's just regular normal care that people need that maybe have underlying conditions and ailments that they aren't availed to have medical care at this point because of the conflict going on. Well, yeah, honestly, Marty, that's been the biggest part of what they do here. This is people who have hypertension, who have diabetes, who need to take heart medicine or whatever, and they can't because they don't have medical doctors here anymore. The pharmacies close, the hospitals close, they have zero medical care or mental health care at all, and that's where this charity comes in, and so that's what's so fascinating about what they do. It's the stuff we forget about in our profession. I think I always say that in news, whether TV, radio, newspaper, whatever, we often intersect with people on the worst day of their lives, but so little is followed up on. We don't know much about them, about what happens after that, whether it's a shooting in Aurora or a war half a world away, and so it's fascinating to get to be an eyewitness here to what happens after the stories stop appearing in the headlines, even though they should still be the front and center because of what's going on here. It's still the threat is still so ever-present. One other note, if I could just real quickly, I said that they have plenty of people who volunteer, but actually they have another mission coming to Ukraine next month. So if any doctors, nurses, physicians, assistants, and then are listening who want to be a part of this, you can go to their website, globalcareforce.com. You could volunteer and you could be here in Ukraine within just a few weeks helping out. Jeremy, real quick in wrapping up with you, we've talked a lot about the physical devastation that's very much apparent there, but talk about the emotional piece. What is being done in order to try to help uplift those, show some positivity, maybe some glimpse of hope for some of those living in Ukraine right now? I think the biggest thing is this trauma care expert, we're traveling with Leanna Stauffer of Denver. She's actually in a room right now probably 50 feet from me talking to a woman who has gone through the trauma of war and I think that a lot of times they don't have time to verbalize that. Any mental health practitioner here in Ukraine probably doesn't have the capacity to help others because they too are suffering trauma and stress and so to have an outsider come here and help in some objective way where there are only purposes to try to make life better. It's got to help exponentially and I think if most wounds are visible with these are the unseen wounds that everybody in this country is dealing with right now has for a thousand days. We use words like hero, compassion and courage sometimes too often without understanding the meeting. Jeremy, I think what you're seeing and you covering this and reminding us that these things are going on in other places, the world really reveals that many people, people in our own backyard here in Colorado have all those, all those kutramans and all those, those gifts. So I appreciate you coming on with us to highlight those and talk about what you're doing over there. Yeah, you bet. Thanks for having me. It's really an honor. I really appreciate it. Fox 31 news anchor, Jeremy Hubbard reporting live from Ukraine. There's only one feeling like knowing your banker personally, like growing up with a bank you can count on, like being sure what you've earned is safe, secure and local. There's only one feeling like knowing you're supporting your community. You deserve more from a bank. You deserve an institution that stood strong for generations. Bank of Colorado, there's only one member FDIC. It's beginning to sound a lot like the holidays. The Roku channel, your home for free and premium TV, is giving you access to holiday music and genre based stations from iHeart all for free. In the soundtrack of the season with channels like iHeart Christmas and North Pole Radio, the Roku channel is available on all Roku devices, web, Amazon Fire TV, Google TV, Samsung TVs and the Roku mobile app on iOS and Android devices. So stream what you love and turn up the cheer with iHeart Radio on the Roku channel. Happy streaming! If you put aside 25 cents every week for a year, what could you get at the end? A few cups of coffee maybe, a candle, or you could get a year of the best reporting from all over the world. Go to washingtonpost.com/bf24 right now. You'll get a Washington Post subscription for 25 cents a week for your first year. This is a Black Friday sale so it won't last long. Washington Post.com/bf24.