My name is Ethan Perelstein. I was born and raised in Flagstaff where I lived until I moved across the planet to Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria, 18 months ago.

Aside from the language barrier and other culture shocks that come from moving to Eastern Europe, Blagoevgrad is a very comfortable fit for me. It has a population of 75,000, the trees turn yellow and red and orange in the fall, and it’s on a mountain; the closest ski slopes are a half hour drive from downtown.

I moved here to attend the American University in Bulgaria, a liberal arts school with a student body smaller than Flagstaff High School the year I graduated. The students here are from 46 different countries; no two of my professors are the same nationality.

On Feb. 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered troops to invade Ukraine. About 25 of my friends and classmates here are from Ukraine. I spent that day running around our small, five-building campus. I wanted to find Ukrainians I knew or had classes with. I wanted to give a hug, handshake, kind words, something.

Since the invasion began, Anastasiia and I talked about it a lot. I think we shared a frustration that while war waged in a country whose border is so close by, all we could do was show solidarity. Well, for me it was just a frustration. For Anastasiia it was home. It was personal. Her family was still in Ukraine and she was stuck on campus with no way to help.

We were on the Ukraine-Poland border for 10 days. Ten days of hard work, long travel, and little sleep. Every day Anastasiia was on the phone trying to coordinate the travel to get her mother and her two sisters out of Ukraine. She was on the phone with her mother or with a bus driver or with family friends to try to get her family to safety. Russian forces were gaining ground in the east, getting closer to her home.

Our volunteer center was in Cieszanow, a city in southeastern Poland. The center was an abandoned factory occupied by volunteer organizations as a base camp for humanitarian efforts. I’m not sure that they had permission to use the building. When the war started, Polish citizens and international volunteers decided that they needed to help. One of the volunteers called it productive anarchy.

We spent a lot of our time unloading trucks from Ireland, Germany, Spain, Poland. We delivered food, clothes and medicine across the border. It was hard work. At night we stayed about 5 km outside of town at a cultural center. I slept on the hardwood floors in a concert hall with 30 of my closest Polish friends. There was a lot of snoring in a room designed for great acoustics, so I slept with earplugs. Maybe it was the earplugs, or maybe I was just so tired from the day’s work, but I didn’t hear the shelling the night that Lviv airport was bombed just 20 km away across the border.

After my lunch break one day, a family from Germany arrived with two minivans full of donations. They had gotten up at 4 am on a Saturday to drive across two countries because that’s what they had. That’s what they could do.

One night the volunteer coordinator sent Anastasiia and me across the border with the medical team. I have some basic first aid training, and Anastasiia speaks Ukrainian and Russian and and translated. Not many people were crossing that night. We didn’t have any refugee patients, but soldiers came in and complained about a runny nose or chapped lips from the relentless wind and cold. Anastasiia called me out for chuckling at the idea of the soldiers coming into the small medical trailer with a Kalashnikov assault rifle strapped across their chest to ask for chapstick or nasal spray. “They’re still people,” she said.

During my time there helping, I had so many emotions–anger, confusion, grief, guilt. I still have them. I also felt that in some small way I didn’t have any claim to those feelings. For Anastasiia, she was fighting for her country. For me, I was just in the neighborhood. Doing what I could.