I’m standing in Warsaw Western bus station 7th March and I’m soaking in the movement of people.. It’s afternoon and 7-800 people at one time are processing through at different speeds. Its mostly a dignified dance of displaced people, looking for a train ticket, a bowl of soup, a toilet, a clean diaper for a baby, a seat or a piece of floor to sit or to sleep on. Needs are being met all around. A group of well dressed people quizzically hold white cards with the letters JW. Sometimes people talk to them asking for help. Help is everywhere. Inevitably stress is present. In this sea of need a woman catches my attention. She is an African woman with a small baby in her arms. With her, a man my eye tells me is Middle Eastern. The baby is a black baby. I’m just reading normal human information. He’s not the dad and it looks like there’s no Dad on the scene. Maybe the dad had to stay in Ukraine for some reason. Who knows? I still don’t know any further details but this woman is a refugee because of the Russian invasion. She ties her baby onto her back, leaves this Middle Eastern man with her baggage and goes off to sort out a ticket for the train. This man looks calm and reasonable and lovely and trustworthy. She has a look on her face of complete trust. Straight away I am just impacted by the humanity of the situation. He has it under control. She is happy.

I don’t give this another thought until two hours later when I’m sitting in a cafe having a break and this man comes and sits down at the table next to me looking to plug his phone in, to get it charged. I waited until he sat down and then I just projected my voice across to his table and said ‘How are you mate?’. He smiles, we make eye contact he responds that he’s alright. Then I’ll tell him that I saw him earlier with the woman and her baby and that I could see he was helping her and that she trusted him and he shrugs his shoulders with a little smile and tells me that he’d only met her that day and that she’d gone on her way. I told him that when I saw him with her that I knew what kind of person he was. That was the beginning of a new friendship. Hassan is from Iraq. He was already displaced from Iraq years previously because of the war and has been in different places but now he was in Ukraine and had begun to make a life for himself becoming self-employed and having his own customers only just weeks before the Russian invasion.

This is a brief encounter and a few hours later when it’s night time and I come back to the cafe to sort out my hotel he walked in and just casually sat down beside me and started talking to me as my friend. I already showed him what I wrote about my new Nigerian friend Alex. He read it and he started to tell me some of the experiences that he’s had as a young man growing up in Baghdad. He told me that when he was 16 years old he was running across a sports field and a group of his friends where standing up against the stone wall maybe 50m away. As he was running towards them he described very clearly in slow motion what happened. First he saw a very bright flash behind his school friends, then we saw the stones in the wall all moving very fast in all different directions as the blast and the stones hit his group of friends and their body’s flew into the air in all different directions. Then he explained how the blast wave hit him knocking him flying into the air and onto his back. He said when he stood up there were no body parts to be seen just pieces of flesh that were unrecognisable as parts of the human body but that looked like mince meat. Hassan told me this story calmly but with a very determined and passive intensity. He finished up by saying ‘when I cut people open as a doctor now, it has no effect on me’. I’m riveted to my seat listening to this man who has now been displaced a second time by the Russian invasion. I know he must be struggling that his life has been turned upside down for the second time but he talks calmly for 30 minutes non-stop and I’m just listening amazed at his resilience and the fact that in the Western Bus Station of Warsaw, Hassan is looking for other people to help. He has a kind and loving heart that is looking out for his fellow travellers and their needs and he wants to protect them and love them and send them on their way. We talked for sometime. This is the kind of person I will keep in touch with for the rest of my life. I’m so grateful to be able to be here at this time and work together with people like Hassan who truly Know Mercy!