Retired Tri-City immigration lawyer volunteers, fundraises for displaced Ukrainians
Tom Roach knows travel well. After all, the retired Pasco-born immigration lawyer has been to 71 countries and counting.
So after Russia began a full-force invasion in Ukraine earlier this year, Roach knew he couldn’t stand idly by.
On a sudden whim, he flew out to the neighboring Balkan countries, where Ukrainian families continue to arrive in droves, to try and help with the war relief effort.
“I’m retired, I thought I could help out. That was my motivation,” said Roach, 72, who now lives in Seattle. “I tried to get something lined up before I left to come over here, and that was virtually impossible. So I just came over.”
He said he thought he’d be able to quickly find volunteer work — “peeling potatoes” or serve some meals, he said.
“Everybody’s kind of flying by the seat of their pants, so it took me a while to land and I finally did find some things that were helpful,” he said.
After three weeks volunteering in Romania and Moldova, Roach fund-raised a school program for displaced Ukrainian children and he hopes to highlight two organizations he feels are doing exceptional work with refugees.
Summer learning
In less than 24 hours, Roach fund-raised $4,250 for two teachers to teach 51 Ukrainian students displaced in the small Moldovan town of Hincesti, where 4,000 permanent residents have welcomed 130 refugees.
Roach communicated the need through an email list of 257 family members and friends, mostly from the Tri-Cities. He named his dispatches “Notes from Moldova.”
The program will be organized by the Salvation Army.
“It was incredible the super generous response I received from those of you I asked back-channel to help,” Roach wrote in a June 26 dispatch.
Roach said this is important because there are more than 100,000 Ukrainian refugees displaced in Moldova — and tallies now total more than 8.4 million, or one-fifth of the nation’s total population, have left their home country for neighboring European nations. The need for relief and food is high.
He also helped prepare produce and bags of food for distribution at food warehouses.
“I spent most of the week at the Moldovans for Peace warehouse. As it turned out, I was the only ‘foreigner’ there the days I was there, except the Ukrainian refugees that were also volunteering,” Roach said in a recent dispatch. “They said over the four months they have been open they have had volunteers from Sweden, Germany, Israel & a few other places, but I was the only American they had seen.”
Moldovans for Peace is a nonprofit organization that was founded just shortly after the start of the invasion.
“Their lives have been destroyed,” Roach said of the Ukrainians he’s met. “The needs are catastrophic.”
‘They want to help’
Most of the Ukrainians that Roach has been volunteering for come from the Odessa province in Southwest Ukraine. The area has been under intermittent shelling, he told the Tri-City Herald, though not quite as hard as other economic and political centers, such as Kyiv.
“People in the Tri-Cities, they want to help,” he said, pointing to the school fundraiser they cobbled together.
For those who want to donate to Ukrainian war relief, Roach said he’s narrowed his list of philanthropic causes down to just a couple: Friends of Moldova and Caritas, the Catholic Church’s humanitarian assistance agency.
