A COMMUNITY champion from Kirkby Lonsdale is risking his life touring war-torn Ukraine feeding displaced refugees from mobile pizza vans.

Jozef Mycielski, who is half-Polish but lives near the market town, has just returned from his latest trip Ukraine with Sedbergh headmaster Dan Harrison, where he has been volunteering for Siobhan's Trust, a Scotland-based charity that operates five mobile pizza vans to feed displaced Ukrainians in the country.

Jozef plans to embark again on November 24, but has praised the 'off-the-scale' response of his local community in supporting his efforts, through donations of money, clothes, warm blankets, and other useful items:

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"I first went in May, when my cousin in Poland, who is an army reservist, asked if I could help get some much-needed supplies over to the Ukrainian border the next week, so I approached Sedbergh School, who did two collections, and it went from there," said Jozef 

"On the next trip I met David Fox-Pitt from Siobhans's Trust - it's with him we've been visiting Ukraine and that's where I was last week."

"Taking Dan (Harrison, of Sedbergh School) was a game-changer in terms of how he can tell parents and other schools what we're doing.

"When we park up our pizza vans, the kids are shell-shocked, women and the elderly are nervous, so we write messages on footballs and hoof them out the back of the pizza van.

"We start off, before serving, giving the kids sweets and cuddly toys, while we're setting up the van.

"We play music, get them singing, dancing, so it really draws them out.

"We're helping about 5,000 a day, but there are 6 million, but then I thought, we have to do it family by family, kid by kid, granny by granny. 

"We're trying to raise funds for a sixth pizza van now, which we'll call the Wolf, the Sedbergh logo, as Sedbergh School is fronting it, so it will have a local identity, so we're fundraising for that locally and through Justgiving.

"We had a donation that really moved me, of £3.40, which was a child's pocket money, and that hit me more than any other donation we've had, because that in effect has fed seven people, and he cleared his moneybox for that just before Christmas.

"Everything we hold dear, is what the Ukrainian people are losing every day."