Kingston, Ont. man returns from 7-week trip to Eastern Europe, including Ukraine

A Kingston man is back home from Ukraine where he was helping with humanitarian aid.

Oren Nimelman left his job in corporate sales to help with refugee efforts in the war-torn country. The reason for his trip was simple: a chance to give back.

“My family’s Jewish. My father’s side was in Europe before World War Two. Someone helped my grandparents — one before and one after the war — and I thought maybe I’d have a chance to pay it forward,” Oren Nimelman said. “So I thought I’d go.”

Nimelman spent almost seven weeks overseas, first in Poland, then in Lviv in western Ukraine. It was there that he independently helped organize and distribute humanitarian aid.

“For the first third of the time I was in Eastern Europe, I was working more directly with refugees,” Nimelman said. “So early on I spent a little time helping out with the medical team at a train station in Poland.

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Later on, I found a niche helping with logistics and supplies for aid mostly connecting supply and transportation Poland and westbound from there with transportation and distribution in Ukraine and going east from Lviv.”

It wasn’t all doom and gloom in Lviv where Nimelman was.

1:27 “Pitch-In Week” in Kingston, hopefully means a good spring cleaning.

“You get reminders of what’s going on. There was a curfew. It was 10 p.m. when I was there. It went to 11 p.m. when I left so I missed the extension of that. You get air raid sirens every now and then, and anywhere you check in, they let you know where the bomb shelter is,” Nimelman said.

“Nothing hit close to where I was. There were very few airstrikes while I was in Lviv. Lviv, other than those little reminders, is relatively normal, but you get a lot of refugees that flow in from other places where it is less normal,” he added.

Nimelman continues to help those in need only now it’s remotely from here in Kingston.