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An Indian Catholic nun and her associates are working round-the-clock to help stranded students and others fleeing war-torn Ukraine.
“God is using me to save people from death in Ukraine,” said Sister Ligi Payyappilly, the 48-year-old superior of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Saint-Marc in Ukraine.
Payyappilly, who is Indian, and 17 sisters of her congregation are giving shelter and food to the distressed students, besides helping them cross the Ukrainian border to escape to countries including Hungary, Ro-mania and Slovakia.
“Being in Ukraine for over 20 years, I have a lot of contacts and networks that helped me carry out this mission so far,” Payyappilly told GSR by phone after midnight March 3, just before her scheduled two-hour sleep. Her convent is in Mukachevo in western Ukraine, some 480 miles southwest of the national capital of Kiev.
People helped by Payyappilly’s team profusely thanked the nuns.
“We never thought we would be alive now,” said Vignesh Suresh, a third-year student of medicine who hails Payyappilly as “God’s angel who came to help us when we were totally lost.”
Speaking to GSR en route to Bucharest by train, Suresh said he and 45 other Indian students were stranded at the Polish border for 15 hours when Sisters Payyappilly and Christina Tymurzhina, a Ukrainian, came to help them.
“The sisters took us to their convent in their vehicles, hugged each of us with their love and warmth, gave us food, a warm hall to sleep in and escorted us in the morning to cross the Romania border,” Suresh said as his friends slept on the train.
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