By Wayne E. Rivet

Staff Writer

FRYEBURG — With shiny Polish coins tightly grasped in their hands, third graders were asked by Sheila Donahue to remember this moment when seeing a wrong, they did the right thing.

“Whenever you are faced with a bad situation, remember this coin and remember what you did today,” the Norway woman said. “You did the right thing and helped someone in need.”

It was a closing lesson for Brian Cushing’s Molly Ockett School class as Sheila and sister, Mary Brigid Curtis of Casco, made a return trip to talk with children about delivering their care packages to Ukrainian refugees housed at a center in a border Polish town.

The women spent nine days there working as volunteers as part of the World Central Kitchen operation, which responded a day after Russia launched its attack on Ukraine. Mary Brigid shared a slideshow, giving children glimpses of the Polish town the sisters stayed in as well as snapshots of the WCK operation.

The sisters left Portland via bus to Boston. Their flight normally would take six hours, but due to a strong headwind, the trip reached eight hours. Once on the ground, Donahue and Curtis spent the next three hours driving to their destination. They rented an apartment (in a town the size of Portland about four miles away), and drove to the refugee center — an old shopping mall. There, they received badges and WCK t-shirts.

“We saw a lot of children, mothers and grandmothers. They sleep on cots. They are usually at the center for one to five days until they made decisions where in Europe they wanted to move to. They then would get on buses, along with their cats, dogs and bunnies,” Mary Brigid explained.

The center is three miles from the Ukrainian border.

“We could not see or hear any of the fighting,” she noted.

Sheila pointed out that “refugees are people,” and to respect their privacy, no photography or videos were allowed inside the center. Polish police and soldiers walked the perimeter to make certain no photographing or videotaping occurred.

One student asked how were the Ukrainians reacting to this terrible situation?

“In most cases, they were very sad. We saw mothers crying. We saw children, your age, looking like they didn’t know what was going on,” Mary Brigid said. “They had left their homes, moving to a new country, they didn’t speak the language. They didn’t know where they were going. They were just surviving.”

Sheila added, “A lot of people in their 70s were crying because they had lost everything and probably were not going back.”

The center had translators, who wore bright vests, which on the back side listed the languages the individual was able to speak.

Time at the center is somewhat irrelevant for the refugees, especially the children. It was not uncommon to see kids playing soccer in the hallways at 2 a.m., which the sisters saw working the night shift.

Volunteers — about 100 at a time to run the refugee center — from across the globe were on hand to help these families forced from their homeland by the Russian invasion.

There was a group, Engineers without Borders (volunteers from Israel), who built a children’s playground outside in two days.

Three university students from Poland volunteered every night. A Korean-American, who served in the Peace Corps, came to help. A woman from Russia, who didn’t believe in the war, was also at WCK to help.

There was a group of Italians, who manned a huge tent, which included pizza ovens. They made 1,000 to 2,000 pizzas. One trucker drove back to Italy every four days and picked up 30,000 pizzas already made and brought them back. At night, the group sets up cots in the tent.

The sisters saw support for the refugees throughout the town, be it Ukrainian flags draped from buildings or even a young boy who dyed his hair blue and yellow.

Mary Brigid’s and Sheila’s tasks were to serve food, which was prepared in a kitchen three miles from the center, as well as “deep cleaning” the facility during a two-hour period at night, when the kitchen was temporarily closed.

While hot meals were served three times a day, a refrigerator was stocked with 500 sandwiches, which could be consumed cold or heated with a panini press. By evening, the refrigerator shelves were bare. Fresh fruit — apples, tangerines and bananas — was a popular request by refugees. They were serving roughly 2,000 people.

“Every child that came through the food line was offered a chocolate bar — something they loved,” the sisters said.

WCK has an outdoor serving area, equipped with eight tables.

A typical day for the sisters was to sleep from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Pick up breakfast and go to work. Once their shift ended in the morning, they would spend a little time site seeing before turning in for sleep.

It was an experience the women will always remember.

“Did I have fun? Absolutely. Amazing to see at a time when there is a lot of wrong going on, it was great to be part of a lot of right going on,” Sheila told the students. “There are a lot of really good humans out there. It was exhausting, though.”

“A lot of hard work. Really good work crew to be with, a lot of laughs and fun,” Mary Brigid added. “The refugees were kind, respectful, patient, thankful, family oriented and loved their pets very much. A number of refugees said good-bye to us and thanked us before they left. Poland is interesting. Neither of us had been there before. It’s beautiful. The people are unbelievably friendly and helpful. When I came home, I told my husband our next vacation should be to Poland.”

As a sign of their appreciation for the efforts Mr. Cushing’s student had made to the Ukrainian people, the sisters presented the class with a Ukrainian book and include the message, “To Mr.  Cushing’s third grade class, never forget you made a huge positive contribution to the world with much respect” — Sheila and Mary Brigid.

Unable to bring back Ukrainian coins, the women brought Polish coins. 

“They are not worth a lot of money, but hopefully they mean something to you all. Take one. And let it be a reminder that you all did the right thing,” Sheila said. “Later in life when you need to do the right thing again, you feel the weight of this coin in your hand, feel the strength and even if it is hard, do the right thing again because that is what you and your families did. I want this coin to remind you of — even if it is hard — you do the right thing.”