Alison King says she has never seen devastation like that which she is encountering Poland, the country which has become a refuge for more than one million Ukrainian refugees.
After Vladimir Putin's Russian army began its invasion of Ukraine, Alison, a 60-year-old woman who lives in Thornbury, left her life in the Westcountry behind temporarily to travel to eastern Europe. Since then, she has been helping the people of Ukraine in their time of need - and she says the experience has been sobering. "The hopelessness of it is just heartbreaking," she told Bristol Live.
She arrived in Poland on Saturday, March 5, and has been doing everything she can to help people fleeing the conflict. After setting up an online crowdfunder, which has raised around £1,500, she flew to the country and started driving to its border with Ukraine to offer her help to anyone who needed it.
She has been transporting people into Warsaw, the capital of Poland, and paying for them to stay in hotels until the end of this week - all she can afford. And she says that some of the stories people have told her are like nothing she has ever heard.
One woman, a teacher back in her own country, told Alison that she fled Ukraine with the equivalent of £45,000 in cash. But when she arrived in Poland and queued for seven and a half hours to trade that currency in, she was offered the equivalent of £150 for it.
Alison says the scenes in Warsaw have been heartbreaking, with hundreds of Ukranian people there having nowhere to go. "Where do they go until somebody can get here to help them? If you came to Warsaw tonight now and you walked around the stations, you'll see babies sleeping on the floor. I'm telling you now, it's snowing and it's fricking cold, and they're just under railway arches".
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One woman Alison has met spends her nights making food for people who have congregated around Warsaw Central, the city's primary railway station, but when she hands it out in the morning, all of it is gone by 9am. Alison has been helping with these efforts - every day she goes to the supermarket to buy food and essential items to donate to the refugee centres.
One day, while she was making food at one of the centres, a Ukranian woman received a phone call to tell her her home had been bombed and it was gone. But Alison also said that many people don't receive any communication at all, which can be frightening for them when their family members have remained in Ukraine.
"They've lost their homes, they've lost their husbands, fathers, boyfriends," she said. "They can't get in touch because there's no signal, the internet has been taken down in Ukraine, so basically they don't know if they're dead or alive."
Even more troubling than this have been stories from the border, where people queue for up to 27 hours to get on a bus to Warsaw. Alison has heard of children going missing there and never being found again, while some refugees have also been robbed.
She says there is nowhere to sleep on the border, with people instead huddling around fires. And those who have arrived with suitcases full of clothes are given black bin bags, and told anything they can't fit in there must be left behind.
She has seen Ukranian people arrive at the border with their children, only to leave them, turn around and return to Ukraine so that they can fight against the Russian army. Alison says that being faced with the consequences of Putin's invasion on a daily basis have left her saddened and confused.
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"Perhaps I'm being a little bit naïve because I'm sure there's things like this all around the world which are going on, but I have to say there's no need for this whatsoever, no need. And it's not even about the fact that people aren't trying - everybody is trying in their own way, but what is this going to achieve? I can't figure it out."
However, she has managed to help some families, and has so far been able to pay for hotels in Warsaw for multiple refugees. Some of these are mothers with young children, while some are elderly people.
She has paid for accommodation for a woman and eight year old son, another woman and her three children who are aged nine, six and three, and a grandmother who met a mother and her three-year-old son on the border. These families have places that they wish to travel to, where they have relatives who can look after them - one family wants to go to Lithuania, while another has relatives in England and wants to travel here.
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But Alison only has funds to house them until this coming Saturday, which is also the day that she must return to England - and she is saddened that she cannot do more. "I've managed to help I don't know about the food and stuff that I've taken to the border, which everybody's contributed to, but I can actually say so far there's 13 people that I've done the best I can for.
"But it's not even a scratch on a scratch on a scratch on a surface. What can you do? You've got to do something."
You can donate to Alison's crowdfunder by clicking here.
Read all the latest Ukraine news by clicking here
Read more: Teacher helps Ukrainians by booking Airbnb that he never intends to use
Also read: Four British soldiers may have gone AWOL to fight in Ukraine
