Ukrainian women and children arrive at the train station in Przemyśl, Poland, and are guided by aid workers and volunteers to a nearby safe house after fleeing Russia’s war in Ukraine (2025) | Nancy Richards Farese
In Przemyśl, a small city on the Ukrainian–Polish border, the train station has become something of a moral center. Late one November evening, fluorescent lights glare against steel rails as the night train from Kyiv pulls in late—again. The delay is familiar now. Russian forces bombed the rail line earlier that day, an attack not on soldiers but on the route used mostly by women and children escaping the war.
The men aren’t allowed to leave; they must stay and fight, and boys nearing 18 remain in embattled Ukraine at their peril. The threat of violence for women in transit is real. Many fled with coats, a child’s medicine, sometimes pets.
Inside the station, order persists by design. A single clerk with bright orange hair sits behind the glass. Volunteers in yellow vests wait near the doors. Outside, the cold sharpens everything. When the train doors finally open, “safety” looks deceptively modest: an intact sidewalk, an unbroken building, a place to stop moving.
Relief comes in the form of caseworkers who guide families across the road to a Ukrainian safe house. Women collapse in exhaustion, toys are scattered across the floor, sandwiches and tea are offered without ceremony. The refugees arrive as teachers, nurses, IT specialists, and parents. They are not waiting to be saved; they are waiting to begin again. The work only begins at the station. Ukrainian House, founded after World War II, offers temporary housing, language training, and medical support, and also works with high schools to create arts programs integrating Polish and Ukrainian kids.
As a photographer, I mostly watch—the light, the gesture, the shifting composition as families move from one state of being to another. I am embedded with CARE, one of the few aid organizations still operating on the ground in Poland. I have documented refugee crises before—in Bangladesh, the West Bank, across the Middle East, and Africa.
While standing on that platform, the Russian bombs probing NATO’s resolve feel near, as does the strain—and generosity—of the Polish people. We are proximate, also, to another rupture unfolding in real time: America’s retreat from the foreign-aid system. President Donald Trump’s administration has cut billions in US foreign aid and effectively dismantled the US Agency for International Development (USAID)—the agency that for decades distributed food, medicine, and humanitarian assistance around the world.
CARE was founded in 1945 on a simple idea: the CARE Package. Ordinary American families boxed up tinned food, a warm sweater, a chocolate bar, a handwritten note, and sent it to families overseas whose lives had been shattered by war. The CARE package was an expression of a belief that America could be great by being good. For decades, CARE has carried that idea into more than 120 countries.
USAID followed in 1961, inspired by the Marshall Plan (1948) and a bipartisan conviction that prosperity and democratic governance were the strongest defense against global instability and the spread of communism. Every USAID box bore the words “A Gift from the American People.” For more than sixty years, Congress largely agreed that humanitarian aid was not charity—it was strategy, values, and influence rolled into one.
That consensus has fractured. In 2025, Congress allowed funding for USAID to lapse, forcing agencies like CARE to halt or sharply limit programs designed to prevent poverty from tipping into catastrophe. This retreat comes despite the fact that foreign aid has long accounted for less than one percent of the federal budget. It comes amid familiar claims about waste and fraud that overlook the extensive oversight most aid organizations already maintain. And it comes at a moment when China is rapidly expanding its influence across the developing world, filling the vacuum left by the United States—from infrastructure to media and information systems.
From Washington, DC, these decisions can feel abstract. From a train platform in Przemyśl, they do not. As aid organizations scramble to keep people alive and stable, America’s absence is tangible. Moral leadership, once surrendered, will not be easily reclaimed.
I grew up in the state of Georgia with a familiar story about America—taught in classrooms, echoed at dinner tables, reinforced through decades of travel. America was imperfect, often painfully so, but striving. America was admired around the world as a country that meant something beyond itself.
That story is coming undone. People abroad no longer assume the United States will show up. Increasingly, neither do people at home. We are turning our backs on the idea that generosity and leadership are sources of strength, not weakness.
Meanwhile, in Poland, refugees who are flooding over the border are not detained in camps and detention facilities; they have been welcomed into towns, schools, and community centers. Polish people have given their time, energy, and resources to welcoming newcomers. One friend remembers the line of strollers that Polish moms left at the train station for women arriving with small children. Yet, the reality four years into the war is one of fatigue, tension over shared resources, and increased desperation on all sides.
Most non-governmental organizations have left the region. CARE remains in Poland, building partnerships with local groups like Ukrainian House in Przemyśl.
The calendar has turned to 2026, which completes the fourth year of war, but the Przemyśl train station keeps its own time. On the border of war, another year sharpens the question of endurance: how many winters can a family—or a country—survive?
For Americans, this year poses a quieter but urgent question: Who do we want to be? Watching CARE staff and Polish volunteers continue showing up night after night, despite shrinking resources and political headwinds, the answer does not feel theoretical. The year has changed. The need has not.
The possibility of a new story still exists—in places like this small border town, where human need is unmistakable and human ideals, though beleaguered, still pulse. Reinvesting in foreign aid, restoring USAID’s mission, and reclaiming our commitment to humanitarian leadership would not simply help others. It would help us remember who we are.
