Since March, Owen Pomana has been a part of four relief aid and rescue missions into Ukraine. Video / Owen Pomana
A Kiwi pastor has so far spent close to six weeks risking his life while helping Ukrainians find safe havens in the war-stricken nation.
Owen Pomana is currently on his fourth relief aid and rescue mission in Ukraine after joining forces with his friend Tony Anthony, co-founder of The GreatCommission Society organisation.
Together they are a part of a group that just yesterday relocated over 100 Ukrainians from a Mariupol hot spot and to safety - he said the families they encountered were traumatised, scared and hungry.
They will travel to at least four other hot spots over the seven-day trip to get more Ukrainians out of the besieged city and to deliver tonnes of aid supplies to shelters.
Owen Pomana has already spent six weeks helping families in Ukraine and he doesn't know when he'll return to New Zealand. Photo / Supplied
"There's a heap of people waiting for us in these locations, I'll be happy to get anybody out," Pomana told the Herald while en route to a hot spot.
The hot spot locations include Kharkiv, Chernihiv, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhia and Dnipro and they are using a large convoy of vehicles, including seven 55-seater buses, to carry out the mission.
The journeys to each have been treacherous. Along the way they have encountered lots of checkpoints, heavy military machinery and weapons and Pomana said they even saw rockets being fired one evening.
"All of a sudden it's like a game of chess, you're all little pawns going out to defend and the possibilities of not coming home are tragic.
"We just hope that they don't rocket our convoy, there'll be so much of us and we'll be marked. We're just trusting god really that we can get in and they can show compassion and mercy to us helping people," said Pomana.
Owen Pomana (left) has teamed up with friend and co-found of The Great Commission Society Tony Anthony. Photo / Supplied
This is not the first extraction trip Pomana has been on into Ukraine; prior to the trip he is on now, he was working with a group of pastors out of the capital Kyiv.
They were driving vans into regional areas of the city, such as Chernihiv and Kulyhivka, and that had been bombed, to rescue families and to take them back to safe shelters within the city.
Speaking to the Herald from Romania while in between trips, Pomana said if the war was happening in Auckland the fighting for example would be taking place in Manukau.
"The main part the city [Kyiv] is intact but when you go out into the regions, some of the places we've been too, it's all destroyed."
Ukrainians queue for supplies in Kyiv. Photo / Supplied
To carry out the dangerous extraction work Pomana said teams really needed body armour and bullet proof vests, and he called on New Zealand to help.
"I've been contacting Ron Mark for the past two weeks because I knew New Zealand were sending over body armour and I wanted to see if I could get 110 of those vests for the work we do but he kept hitting the wall because there's just so much red tape," said Pomana.
He said they also needed a lot of food and medical supplies - especially tourniquet bands.
Pomana had already been able to give out over $35,000 that was donated through his ministry Humanity NZ.
Some of that money went to a church in Romania that was taking in 100 fleeing Ukrainian families.
Pomana spent five days with the church helping to set up the refuge and said they required 15,000 euros every month to feed the families.
Volunteers help to load supplies into buses. Photo / Supplied
Asked what motivated him to go into the eye of a war, Pomana said he couldn't just sit around and watch.
He was in Singapore, in between business trips, when the war erupted between Russia and the European nation.
"I was watching the news and I watched these woman and kids and saw the frustration on their faces and I thought I don't want to sit here in Singapore and do nothing," said Pomana.
He decided to make a few calls to friends to see if they had connections with anyone in Ukraine. Soon he was linked up with a group called European Initiative and he headed with them to Budapest.
He spent nine days with the organisation collecting and delivering aid supplies from the Hungarian capital to a disabilities hostel that had been repurposed to be a shelter in Uzhhorod - a Ukrainian city that sits close to the border of Slovakia.
"We took in food, medical supplies, formula, blankets anything to do with whatever we could get in," said Pomana.
Pomana was unsure of when he would return to New Zealand - even after he wraps up his work in Ukraine, he plans to go on to Tajikistan to work with a friend rescuing and helping trafficked woman from Europe and Tajikistan.
From there he would then go on to Syria and Iraq to help trafficked Yazidi woman.
Those who want to contribute to humanitarian aid efforts in Ukraine could get in contact with Pomana at owenpomana@icloud.com or through his Facebook or Instagram pages - Owen John Pomana.
