When Russia invaded Ukraine again Ukrainian refugees flooded into Poland, some 4 or 5 million to a relatively poor country of 40 million. The sheer scale was overwhelming. We felt useless but wanted to do something. We started volunteering at a local centre which was setup by Chefs for Kids.

We soon found that, due to the speed of the situation, the mobilisation of the Polish populace was largely civilian driven. The government just didn't have time to set everything up so quickly.

This meant that most of the volunteers had little experience in this exact scenario. Chefs for Kids is an NGO that usually works with children and the sponsors of the aid centre were the local football team, Jagiellonia, and a hotel.

Initially the supplies we received at the centre were largely second hand clothes and basic foodstuffs. Due to my stellar Polish and Ukrainian (minimal and none respectively) I was relegated to sorting the clothing. I have little experience with childrens clothing. There was a lot of childrens clothing. I learned Children's clothing has several different sizing methods around the world and the world had certainly stepped up in supplying these clothes.

Our boxes for sorting were based on one sizing style. This made for very slow sorting.
Is a Canadian 3 the same as a Polish 102?
Then of course different manufacturers have different actual sizes within their own local sizing scheme.

I am a database guy so I wanted to optimise my method of sorting clothes for the kiddies on a metric of items / minute. This meant either taking over the world and forcing retroactive standardised sizing on everyone with each company having to go relabel all the clothing they had put out into the world. Seemed like a lot of work.

My other option was assuming that kids with the same size shoulders probably wear the same size clothes so I started dumping clothes into "same shoulder width" with about 2 cm gradations for each pile Then I just hunted through a pile to find one piece of clothing with a label and legible size that kind of matched clothes in a box with Polish sizing.
I achieved a pretty good routine and sorted many boxes of teeny tiny clothes.

Then I realised that a lot of people don't know that trick. I didn't know it a month ago. Or any other skills for disaster relief for that matter. Ewa and I chatted. Ewa has been doing other things and also learning new tricks. There are a lot of people doing good things or offering their time but there are few templates for tasks / skills none of us have.

We figured that humanitarian disasters are not likely to become less frequent and that people in general want to help. We have a lot of friends that owe us favours (and for some reason still like us). So we figured we would spend time working with people that do have experience in one area and learn from that group of people whilst promoting their NGO / Charity / Project and hopefully helping with the skills we have acquired.

And here we are.