It is one thing to watch the news on TV, to have numerous Facebook posts shared with you, to watch the Internet news and various TV reporting. Today everything is so “out there,” so different from Sergei’s and my younger years. But when Sergei and I spoke on Feb. 20, and he told me that his son, a neurosurgeon, had been manning a medical tent at the Maidan and that his son was in tears, I knew things had really worsened. Sergei himself had been manning such a medical tent for weeks before. His son told Sergei of the brutal snipers killing dozens of unarmed protesters and his painful witness to the death, helplessness, and agony, with hundreds of others injured. To hear Sergei ask for my prayers and those of my family … well, I cried, too.

How Ukraine Became Important to Me

In April 1996, long before the ACEP International Section launched the Ambassador Program to facilitate international emergency medicine collaboration worldwide, I made my first trip to Ukraine. My wife, Catherine, and I had experienced a spiritual awakening, and our church was sending a family to live in Vinnytsa, Ukraine. The link was a family having moved from Vinnytsa to Franklin, Tenn., and sharing with their new church in America, where my wife and I are members, the needs of Ukraine as the nation was emerging from the Soviet era as a newly independent nation (as of 1991). I distinctly remember stepping off the airplane in Kyiv that first trip and feeling like I had landed in enemy territory, not because of the people—they were warm, although initially guarded—but because, after all, my sixth-grade class was repeatedly marched to the fallout shelter because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. So going to a part of the former Soviet Union was a mixture of anticipation, excitement, and some concern.

But my concerns were replaced by warmth when I met Sergei and his family. Over the years, Sergei has met my family, too, and visited our home. He is a graduate of Pirogov Medical University in Vinnytsa, and was the first surgeon in Vinnytsa Oblast to agree to operate on known HIV-positive patients. Since we first met in 1996, he has developed a strong outreach to poor patients and HIV-positive patients and those recovering from alcohol and/or drug addiction.

We had both had a spiritual awakening not long before we first met. He was born in 1949 and I in 1952. We were “Cold War” kids. He had been a leader of the Communist Party medical wing in Vinnytsa Oblast. I was a kid who grew up in a GM family, moving often until I settled outside Detroit in the early 1960s. Then I went on to university and medical school and to a relatively wealthy existence compared to Sergei’s. Could we have been more different? What were the odds that we would become best friends?