Humanitarian Aid Workers talk exclusively with BTN
At the start of the Ukrainian war, a small team of people came together to form Actions Beyond Words. So far, they’ve delivered more than £1 million of aid to the people directly affected by the conflict, writes Duncan Little.
It’s the stuff which is so desperately need on the ground. In other words, food, water, clothes, generators, heaters, baby care items, toiletries, toys and shelters.
Getting the logistics right would be an impressive achievement for any international aid agency. It’s an even bigger accomplishment when you consider the background of the co-founders who set up Actions Beyond Words is far removed from what you might expect.
BTN is about to start chatting with them (on Zoom). Simon Massey and Travis Goode have just returned from their latest aid delivery to Ukraine. In a truly quintessential English way, Simon is nursing a hot cup of tea.
The steam which gently emanates from the top of the mug seems to be a far cry from the war zone which they were recently operating in. Travis introduces himself with the warm rich dialect of someone who hails from the warmer climes of California.
We want to know their back story. We envisage stories relating to military experience – or substantial aid work spanning decades with one of the big aid agencies we frequently hear about on the news. We’re a little surprised at the response.
From theatre to theatre of war
‘I spent the past twenty years working for an American NGO and it was an organisation that was working with young people improving their self esteem through music, drama and dance,’ explains Simon as he gently takes another sip from his mug.
‘My background was more in the directorial and producer end of it,’ chips in Travis. ‘I was a teacher and an administrator for a performing arts college that was there.’
Travis checking aid supplies for delivery to Ukraine. Image: ABW volunteer.
‘I was also an MC and conductor for shows. Simon was more of the backend logistics of things and I was more of the front end for putting shows together and things.’
And then BTN has a Eureka! moment of realisation. The theatre is actually the perfect background for the work which Simon, Travis and their team undertake.
At a very, very basic level there are so many similarities between the work which Action Beyond Words does today and the work which Simon and Travis did yesteryear.
Theatre production centres around a strong sense of discipline. Curtain up is at a set time. Technical rehearsals are crucial to make sure all works well on the big night. Precision is everything.
A ‘spike mark’ on the stage will be at precisely the same place wherever a performance is being held. That all important taped cross marking the exact spot where an actor needs to stand to deliver their lines – whether they be in London, Amsterdam or Paris.
The set has to be efficiently ‘struck’ at the end of the show and neatly packed into vans before the team head off to the next venue whereupon they safely reassemble it ahead of a technical run through. All precise. All neat. All tidy. Very military.
And then there’s the Health and Safety stuff. Safety curtains. Putting safety first is at the heart of any production, and, of course, it’s a crucial component for work in a war zone.
Adapt. Improvise. Overcome.
And let’s not forget the ability to adapt quickly under pressure. The whole notion of: Adapt. Improvise. Overcome. It’s central stuff to the DNA of theatre production work.
Drama schools are big into improvisation for good reason. It’s that ability to think on your feet. To work your way out of a problem which develops out of nowhere when you’re engaged in live theatre.
In other words, there’s a number of crossovers at the heart of a Venn Diagram where there are overlaps between aid work in a war zone and the preparations needed for a stage performance.
‘Anytime we tell anybody where we go and what are backgrounds are then there’s a surprise in the room. I think there were so many situations in our former work where there are parallels,’ says Simon.
‘We used to change towns every three days. There would be a twenty town tour. We would be on three separate continents and there would be a cast of thirty.’
‘It’s basically the same job just with fewer soundboards, microphones and lights and more cans of food and medical supplies.’
‘But the process and the skills you need are surprisingly similar in terms of what you’re doing and reacting to situations that are ever changing and reacting to things that don’t work properly.’
‘Somebody dropped something and you need to get it fixed as the show must go on as they say. It’s very similar work but in a different space.’
‘We would be in a different spatial environment every day with what was effectively an am-dram corporation and we would be in new venues where we would walk in, adapt to make sure the show would go out.’
‘So, we had to be adaptable and to create something which worked from situations which were often less than perfect.’
Speed of response: oil tanker versus jet ski
And it’s that ability to quickly adapt to situations which is a crucial part of strategic thinking for the Actions Beyond Words team. That ability to improvise.
Think about an oil tanker. It’s great at being able to stay the course over a long distance but not so good if it needs to quickly change track and direction.
In a war zone, things change very, very quickly. You need to be able to adapt to a rapidly escalating situation. In short, you need to be more like a jet ski than an oil tanker. You need to be thinking in a way which allows you to quickly change direction.
‘If you said to me three years ago that I would be ordering body armour or asked me what Level Four plates (body armour) were then I would have said: not a chance,’ says Simon.
‘It was a weird delivery to have and it felt even weirder to put it on and get in the car and being in a city which had been liberated for three weeks.’
Travis and the ABW team deliver fresh food to communities across Ukraine. Image: ABW volunteer.
‘But that background set us up well to have that adaptability, and not to be afraid, for us to say ‘I don’t know but I’ll go figure it out.’’
‘And then utilising those skills which we had to have to build relationships with people quickly to get things done well.’
‘If you’re working as a stage manager, those things are very transferable and it’s those things which have helped us when we’ve been out there. It’s been very much what do you need and what is the most effective way of doing it.’
‘Manage risk as best as we can’
‘We know our limitations and we know what we can and cannot do within the scope of our abilities. So we manage risk as best as we can,’ says Travis.
‘You know that as soon as you cross the border into Ukraine then you are technically in a war zone.’
Their experience of western Ukraine is far removed from the eastern part of the country which shares its border with Russia.
And those are the locations with familiar names for all of us: the Dnipro River, Kherson and Bakhmut. In short, places you really want to avoid.
‘As you go further East, you go past a place called Poltava which is the last place where everything feels normal,’ says Simon. Poltava is to the south east of Kyiv and to the west of Kharkiv.
‘And then you go into areas like Kharkiv and they get hit pretty regularly. We were doing a delivery there just before Christmas and air raid sirens were going.’
ABW’s aid route sees the team deliver aid in Ukraine. Image: Shutterstock.
‘One of our good friends, a house four doors down from him was absolutely destroyed. It’s very real.’
‘When you’re within shelling distance then you’re aware of what’s going on. As you move further east and to the south you reach the extent of our circle, Dnipro, Kramatorsk and Izyum.’
‘The furthest reach we would go to is outer Kherson which is right on the front line. So to the edge of the Dnipro river and back.’
‘Kherson is definitely the place where you want to be in and out.’
‘The situations further east shows the desperation much clearer, the damage is much clearer, I think there are lots of small organisations like our own that have set up in those towns who use their network to move supplies further onward.’
‘So when you’re on that eastern side then you really know about it. It seems to come in cycles. So, when we were there this time, Odessa got a lot of strikes, Kherson is definitely the place where you want to be in and out.’
‘If we’re working in Lviv, Kyiv or Kharkiv then we have body armour in the van with us – unless something is visually kicking off. But, if you go past that point, then you have two plates on – and it doesn’t come off until you get out.’
Basing their planning around the idea of moving aid from place to place, as if they’re moving theatrical sets from location to location, has been enormously successful for the team.
It was at the start of the war where Simon and Travis decided they could put their skillset to good use.
‘I was at home, new baby, fiancé,’ recalls Travis when he first heard that Simon was on the border between Poland and Ukraine helping with the refugee crisis.
‘I had a three month old baby at the time so while I very much wanted to be ‘Okay, honey, bye!’ as I very much wanted to help Simon, she was, like, ‘absolutely not, don’t do that!’’
‘So, I stayed in touch with him and when he came back after 87 days on the border, he slept for 72 hours straight, as he was that exhausted, and then he gave me a call and said there’s a lot going on there and we talked a ton at that point.’
‘The one thing I could do from California was to set the structure for what was going to be a business, a non-profit business based off of the work he’s been doing.’
Finding communities in smaller areas
‘Our focus from the beginning has been to find those individuals or communities who are in smaller towns or areas where they haven’t been getting a lot of the aid that you read about or see on TV that is coming from the big organisations.’
‘So, our goal has been to find those folks in those areas who’ve slipped through the cracks. They still need tons of aid and tons of things. There’s more need than ever.’
‘We’ve found that are more people than ever that need a lot of aid. I think the UN (said) there’s still a million people who haven’t been reached with aid, and, for me, there hasn’t been a whole lot of change from those pockets that we go to.’
Simon and the team are warmly greeted following an aid delivery to a community in Ukraine. Image: ABW volunteer.
Boxer Mike Tyson famously said ‘everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ Various military thinkers and strategists have said the same of the battlefield.
‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’ is a saying often attributed to a Prussian commander. Best laid plans become lost as soon as the firing starts. The same appears to be true when organising the delivery of humanitarian aid.
‘If we make a ten minute plan, or if it’s taken us two weeks to craft then we know what we’re doing and the standing joke is to put that in the shredder because we know that that’s not going to happen,’ explains Simon. ‘We have it as a baseline and we go from there. And that could relate to anything.’
‘That could be the people bringing aid down to us that is coming out of Finland and the truck driver runs out of hours so he’s a day late but that’s now shifted the entire two week plan that had many, many moving parts.’
‘That could be driving back with a sponsor from Japan and the alternator breaks down on the car which is the 93rd thing to have broken down on the vehicle that week – so there’s a lot of things which are outside the scope but we get around.’
‘You’re in the middle of nowhere, the van’s broken down, I don’t speak the language and I need to get myself out of the situation. And how do I do that and not screw over the entire two weeks in the process?’
The ABW team work on fixing one of their vans in Ukraine. Image: ABW volunteer.
The war continues…
Things are looking bleak for Ukraine at the start of March, 2024. The world’s attention is now focused on the growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israel’s response to the 07 October attacks by Hamas.
And yet, Russia’s ‘special military operation’ continues. We’ve just passed the second anniversary of the invasion.
One recent news report centred on a Russian missile strike in the Black Sea port city of Odesa. The attack resulted in the deaths of five people. Many were injured.
The explosion happened a mere 500 metres away from the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. He was speaking with the Greek prime minister at the time of the blast.
’Russia’s not just targeting military targets. It’s department stores. Gas stations. It’s residential blocks. It’s schools and that civilian infrastructure has, in some cases, been absolutely obliterated. It’s terrible,’ says Travis
‘It’s going to take them years to rebuild. If the war ended tomorrow and Russia pulled out completely, it would still take Ukraine ten years to repair the damage that’s been done.’
It’s not just all of the landmines, destroyed buildings and destroyed lives which will take time to rebuild. It’s the divisions created by the war which will also take time to heal – if they ever do.
The size of Ukraine is immense. A quick Google search will show you that it’s 2.5 times bigger than the UK. It’s home to nearly 44 million people. The western part is, well, westernised, while much of the East still shares cultural similarities with Russia.
Statues to its Soviet past litter the landscape, and, perhaps, it’s those internal cultural differences which will pose a significant hurdle for the country to overcome should a peaceful settlement be found.
The complexity of war summarised in a single story
If there was ever a qualitative piece of information which would highlight the difficulties facing international negotiators, aid agencies and the people on the ground then it’s an anecdotal story which Simon shares with BTN towards the end of our chat.
Pausing for thought in Ukraine. Travis reflects during a break in humanitarian work. Image: ABW volunteer.
‘We were about four hours from the Polish border and we stopped overnight in a town and we were sitting in a bar. There was a big group of us. Three vehicles. Ten or eleven of us there.’
‘We were talking about the previous few days and sharing some stories as we were in different vehicles and not everyone knew everything.’
‘We were done with dinner and this guy in his early sixties came over and behind him arrived ten pints of beer. And he said that he had been listening about what we had been doing and wanted to say thank you for our work.’
‘It’s important and it’s a very complex environment. He was a former Russian soldier and when Ukraine split off from Russia, his brother moved into Russia as he didn’t want to be Ukrainian and this guy moved into Ukraine. Their mother lives in Kyiv.’
‘So, every year, his brother would come over to do the whole family thing for Christmas in Kyiv, and he said, from the start of the war, his brother was totally pro the war and said how important it was.’
‘He had drunk all of the propaganda Kool Aid that there was to drink in Russia but he said to him: you come to Ukraine all the time. You spend Christmas here.’
‘And his reply was that their mother needed to come back to Russia with him and the guy asked, well, why?’
‘And he said, well, the Nazis. And so he said, are you saying that Mum is a Nazi? Well, no, he replied, but she’s surrounded by all the others so I think she should come home.’
‘And in that one story, the complexity of what we’re dealing with, and what we’re trying to thread a needle through, just drew itself into the harshest of realities. Because that is just one of millions of such stories around.’
Teamwork in Ukraine is a central part of the Action Beyond Words’ ethos. Image: ABW volunteer.
