INDIANAPOLIS — A few weeks ago, 13 News profiled an Indianapolis man who traveled to Poland to help feed Ukrainian refugees.
This week, we caught up with Brian Rund to talk about his experiences there.
Rund says you don’t have to travel across the world to do something that can make a difference to those fleeing war.
He has only been back in Indianapolis less than a week, but the memories of his time in Poland stay with him.
“What I keep going back to is the scale of the problem there,” said Rund.
Some of the images he captured on his camera are hard to forget.
“It’s the biggest humanitarian crisis in Europe since World War II and it is kind of staggering when you think about it,” explained the Lafayette native.
Rund doesn’t have to imagine what much of the world has only seen on television. He saw it firsthand.
“The kitchen I volunteered at, we were feeding about 10,000 people a day,” said Rund, who worked alongside thousands of other World Central Kitchen volunteers.
“One thing I realized there is how much Ukraine and Poland, in a lot of ways, are like Indiana.” Rund said. “It’s small towns, it’s farm land.”
Rund said Hoosiers don’t have to leave their towns to help.
“Any cash that can be donated is great because that’s really what these organizations need. The ones that are feeding people are buying most of the food locally and, of course, that takes a huge amount,” Rund said.
The 57-year-old Rund didn’t just feed people in Poland. He talked with the people they were helping, as well as his fellow volunteers.
“Their message to me, and I talked to quite a few of them, was 'don’t let the rest of the world forget that this is going on,'” Rund said.
Rund won’t soon forget. He can’t. He saw too much.
“If you believe in democracy and you believe in human decency, you can’t just sit back and let this happen in Ukraine,” said Rund.
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