I invite you into the process of creating a book, and discovering together something astonishingly valuable where almost no one is looking.
Are you a foreigner living and doing non-military volunteer work in Ukraine? Do you speak (some) English? Then it would be an honor to have a conversation with you!
Contact us, please, if you feel like having a friendly chat: ukraineeffect@protonmail.com
What is the Ukraine Effect?
While you are reading this, thousands of foreign non-military volunteers are living in Ukraine and helping the country, giving their time and energy freely, gladly, and without wanting any financial reward. There is something very important to learn from these people — important for all human beings. There is a surprising and unique, seldom researched or even noticed, truly inspiring psychological phenomenon blooming in good health, hidden under the daily news covers depicting the numerous horrors of the war. There is something happening quietly with many of these volunteers, something complex and beautiful and elementary human that the whole world should know about. It’s not just heroism, not just proactivity, or taking action before action is coming to your country and taking you. This is a one-of-a-kind, hidden goldmine of information regarding the million-dollar question: how to be truly happy?
What is the purpose of this book, and who is it for?
This book is going to resemble more a report on scientific research, its findings and the possible implications of those—than classic storytelling. Its purpose is to dig deep into the details of wartime Ukraine’s foreign, civilian volunteers’ everyday life, experiences, knowledge, and personal changes, to know as much about the unique phenomenon of “the Ukraine Effect” as possible. What the effect actually is? I’m not sure. But I have a hypothesis I would like to test while having friendly conversations with the actual quiet, humble real heroes of this story: the volunteers.
I guess, due to a fortunate, not consciously created alignment of cultural and personal factors, there is a surprisingly complex combination of circumstances that creates a truly one-of-a-kind inner climate in many of those people. And something grows out of that inner climate that — after decades of doing and researching volunteering in many countries, being trained in psychology and cultural anthropology, and writing a thesis about the topic of volunteering — I never saw before. It is a pattern showing its colors again and again: it captivated my attention while I was making interviews with the volunteers about something completely different. This book honors the volunteers while investigating a phenomenon I have only found here and now, although I was looking for it for decades without realizing that.
The audience is potential or current volunteers who would like to understand the “how to and how NOT to” of this activity better, humanitarian and social science professionals and buffs, policymakers, NGOs working with volunteers, and most importantly: anyone who is interested in the evolution-based building blocks of long-term well-being, and how to get as close to it as possible.
What will be in it?
- Clippings of interviews with the volunteers, organized by topics, and depiction of their life and activities as I saw it while spending time with them.
- Interviews with scientists and experts of different, connected fields (psychology, cultural anthropology, human ethology, psychiatry, neurochemistry, etc.), searching for the explanation of what was captured by the interviews.
- A thorough collection of the scientific and practical limitations of the value and applicability of our findings.
- A summary: if there is really something unique going on here, as I think there is, then a conclusion drawn by experts of different fields about what is really going on that is worthy of scientific attention, why and how it is happening, and how it can be reproduced without a war raging around us.
How did the idea come?
In the summer of 2025, my husband and I came to Ukraine as two freshly qualified journalists — he with a camera, I with a notebook — to write a single article about how to, and how not to, volunteer in a wartime country. As I listened to the stories of the volunteers a pattern kept surfacing — something subtle, quiet, but unmistakably important. On our way home, crossing the Carpathian Mountains, we agreed to come back and write a whole book. Because this… whatever it is, is alive and kicking, showing the world something profoundly important, even while the world seems to see nothing else but flames, ruins, wounds, and corpses.
Who are we, and how is that connected to the topic?
Mark Antal, my husband, is a photographer, freshly qualified photojournalist, and he’s in charge of the audio and video technology of our work. I’m Patricia Lazar, also a freshly qualified journalist. But that wouldn’t be enough to be captivated by this extremely rare, unique orchid of human life-patterns that we just stumbled upon in Ukraine. I earned my psychology degree from the University of East London and wrote my final thesis on the topic of volunteering. I’m also trained in cultural anthropology, studying the science of how real-life environments shape human character at the University of Miskolc.
My practical, down-to-earth nature was fascinated by solution journalism, a genre of journalism that focuses on tried-and-true recipes of positive change that are actually working. I’m equally fond of the so-called “positive psychology,” which is — nothing to do with positive thinking, but — the science of optimal human functioning (also called “happiness”), explicitly shifting the interest from the traditional pathology-focused view of psychology (“what’s wrong with you”) to the ingredients of well-being (“what’s good for you”).
And there is the passion for volunteering. I’ve been doing it since the age of 11, and after a while, I started to visit, try, and understand many fundamentally different volunteer activities and the communities around them, consciously aiming for a diversity of opportunities. I approached these groups and organizations as a cultural anthropologist does fieldwork: paying attention to many small details that my anthropology training made me value and understand. My husband also picked up the hobby, so we often went together on these adventures.
After several years, we decided to start our own international magazine for and about volunteers and activists. The magazine is not launched yet; we are still working on it, but we also understood that the matter of the Ukrainian volunteers is time-sensitive. We hope there will be — fair, just — peace in Ukraine soon. But I also think that this unique human phenomenon we are about to investigate is a specialty of not just a wartime country, but this exact country. The answer to the question of “why this country specifically” is complex; I will do my best to explain it in the book. So here we are, with a newly started and not even publicly opened journal for volunteers, while something extraordinary is emerging organically in front of our eyes, and we better pay attention to it now, before it fades away with the new peace.
What makes this book different?
It merges the research methods and practices of cultural anthropology, positive psychology, and solutions journalism. Adding the flavor of something called “participatory action research”, that turned my view of science upside down in the best possible way when I encountered and started to study the idea. This book will not report on an official scientific research, but I will do my best to have valid, reliable data, presented in a no-nonsense, but still entertaining and user-friendly way, working together with experts of other fields conducting a cross-discipline investigation of the “what, how, and how to upscale it” of the Ukraine Effect.
How is it structured?
Like a cookbook. After one or two introductory chapters, I will describe and explain the numerous ingredients of the phenomenon, including interview clippings with volunteers and the opinions of the guest experts, finishing with a summary, a chapter about limitations, about future implications of the findings, and a “how-to” chapter to help current or future volunteers.
How can YOU help, Dear Reader?
If you are or were volunteering in Ukraine, doing civilian activities, are originally from another country, came here because of the war, and speak moderately fluent English, then we would be delighted to have a conversation with you! Please, if you would be okay with a friendly chat, contact us at the ukraineeffect@protonmail.com email address. We are mostly based in Kyiv and Lviv, but visit other locations too. I hope to see you soon!
The Ukraine Effect 