Worship minister back in Cape following mission trip to help Ukrainian refugees

Lynwood Baptist Church's worship minister Gabe Martinez has landed back in Cape Girardeau after a 12-day mission trip overseas to help Ukrainian refugees affected by the Russia-Ukraine war.

Martinez, with Brandon Bee, a member of his band, Stomptown Revival, decided to go on the trip to help unload food and perform for the refugees, hoping to lift their spirits.

"Helping unload trucks, containers full of food and different kinds of goods and needs. We would help organize those in refugee centers, and then we would perform," Martinez said. "Sometimes we would start in one city, and then we would drive to another city."

Martinez had been on previous mission trips, along with going to Ukraine with a bluegrass group once before in 2017. He met his wife when working with the organization Youth With A Mission (YWAM) to go on a trip to Belarus.

Martinez said he wasn't hesitant to leave for Ukraine until he thought more about how it might affect his wife and 7-year-old daughter.

"It wasn't until I started telling them what I was thinking of doing and hearing my wife's concerns, and that's when we started looking at the borders and seeing how far we'd be and there haven't been any missile strikes in Lviv, which is on the western side of Ukraine, in a long time," Martinez said. "So we were gonna be in Krakow, which was gonna be the closest we were going to be to the border. So, I didn't feel unsafe."

He said although he "didn't feel unsafe," Martinez said he could feel the difference between the two countries when going through Poland and Romania. He said with Poland's previous history in World War II, the country had a sensitivity toward what the Ukranians were going through.

"Poland has this identity of a nation that has been conquered and overcome and brutally destroyed and abused and all the things you can think of as an identity. That's part of their DNA it seems like. So they have a sensitivity for the Ukrainian people. Particularly with dealing with the communist regime that ruled over them," Martinez said.

Martinez said Romania felt a bit different at the time when staying in its capital city of Bucharest. He said with two countries they had a "history of tension" between Ukraine and Romania having to do with "border disputes."

"Romania still had some tension with their neighbors and not necessarily just great feelings toward the Ukrainian people," Martinez said. "Still, when this war broke out, they opened up their borders to the Ukrainians, allowing them to have access to a lot of the same freedoms and benefits that the Ukrainian people are getting, which is, you know, rent assistance and travel with ease."

Martinez said one of the saddening things about watching events unfold was seeing the children in the midst of the war.

"I'm just thinking of these kids that are going to be growing up with this as their identity, this war, and especially I saw a lot of boys kind of being without their fathers, and who knows how long that'll be? Who knows when they'll be able to go back? And I was struck by the challenges that generation is gonna have to overcome," Martinez said.

But even with those concerns, Martinez said the Ukrainian people's resilience was inspiring.

"Probably the resilience of hope. We definitely can hold on to hope longer than maybe we think. I was just struck by something so simple as playing a song for a group of people, can be a healing thing," Martinez said. "It can be a moment of a touch point between people that have maybe very little in common as far as language and culture and yet we're still human."

Through his experience going on the mission trip, Martinez said he hopes to bring more awareness to other churches about the need for missions in Ukraine.

"It's gonna be a long struggle. It seems like not something that's just gonna be a short-term thing. Its gonna be a marathon and so yeah, so that's my goal is to try to bring awareness at least to my church starting there and then branching out is that," Martinez said. "Let's see what happens if people catch the vision for helping the Ukrainian people."