(crowd chanting in Ukrainian) (somber music) - [Alex] I was in disbelief.

- A year ago, Ukrainians from Kyiv to Mariupol woke up to bombs dropping on their country.

(somber music continues) - Somewhere in a different part of the world, someone's hungry, someone's dying from not having any water, starving, cold.

(somber music continues) The government does not help too much.

They can't.

The country's at war.

It's all on people, y'know, like us.

- In Pittsburgh, we decided we cannot just sit.

We're gonna do something.

(somber music continues) (church choir singing) So good to be in the House of the Lord with you today.

This is House of Prayer for All Church.

It's a Slavic Christian Church.

A lot of our members, they have family members who live in Ukraine and they started, y'know, expressing their suffering.

We decided not just simply donate some money, what we wanted to do, we want to make sure that the help that we were giving goes to the right resources without middleman.

(couple speaking Ukrainian) One of the brothers in our church, he runs a trucking and shipping company.

He had a certain idea how we can potentially do it.

We made a decision and decided to go for it.

- [Stepan] I remember this one, yeah, yeah.

- [Oleg] It's about this!

- And this is the first container, what we packaging.

Did you see what we have now?

- I mean, it's amazing.

We're blessed, we're blessed.

- Almost one year ago when the war started, we came to the point to help them and we started to collect what they needed.

We thought about sending only one container to Ukraine, but we actually sent five containers already.

- After containers were shipped in New Jersey, they arrived in Poland.

And so from Poland, we had a team of people who were affiliated with the church who are there.

(man speaking Ukrainian) They were our local support in Ukraine and they were able to get the drivers who would take the containers and bring them to Lviv.

It's a city in Western Ukraine.

We had a hub, like, a warehouse, and the church was able to get the space so we could send our containers there and where basically was the headquarters for a humanitarian mission.

We were just so blown away by how many of those contributions were so tenderly wrapped together with the little love messages and just supporting, encouraging messages for people in Ukraine.

- This one is for one family.

- For one week.

- What's included, like, five, six kilos of oil, cookies, you know, rice.

- To approximate the amount of all the medical equipments and food and clothing that was donated, it would be well over $250,000.

(tranquil music) We got an invitation from the pastors of the church and they just wanted us to be in there and just basically see what kind of difference it made in the lives of people.

- Yeah, I remember this picture.

This was in center of Mykolaiv, exactly in the middle, downtown.

That's what it's looking like now.

It's been a long time since I've been back to Ukraine.

They love putting a face to "where's this from?

Who did this?"

(church choir singing) - Well, we asked them to share some of the story, it was some of the most horrific stories about their children and about their families being separated and I think it does leave a deep, deep impact.

- [Man] Everybody's windows have been busted.

Rooms collapsed.

Not a single location where it hasn't been affected.

(gentle music) - As the scripture says, "for us, overcome evil with good".

We decided to practice, to turn this around and use these emotions to overcome this evil by being extra and generous, extra helpful, to come out and do something with your arms that can impact in a positive light the life of those people who are suffering right now.

(man speaking Ukrainian) - Hopefully it'll be over soon, but until then, we will always keep doing our part, keep helping out, little by little.

(gentle music) (music fades)