Samaritan’s Purse opened an outpatient clinic just outside the train station in Lviv on Thursday and has already treated its first patients.
Some people have evacuated so quickly they left their homes without their medicine -- and by the time they made it to Lviv they were in desperate need, Mark Agness, an emergency room doctor from California, told ABC News. Pregnant women and newborns are also common.
"That’s why we do this … it’s really the parable of the Good Samaritan. Help thy neighbor -- well they’re my neighbor," said Agness.
Chelsea Musick, a nurse from Iowa, has been with the organization for years and said working in Ukraine is different. Unlike other humanitarian disasters, this was entirely man made, she said. She described the patients she’s seeing as having a "haunted" look in their eyes.
Samaritan’s Purse is also building a large field hospital, which they expect to be operational by the weekend, in the parking garage of a local mall, a few minutes away from the train station. The hospital will have enough room for 15 surgeries a day and will be able to increase beds as needed.
The operation is primarily funded by individual donors from the U.S., the organization said. Two airlifts of supplies have already been coordinated from the U.S.
-ABC News' Irene Hnatiuk, Maggie Rulli and John Templeton
