Syrian Refugee Relief
Crisis on the border
It is interesting to look at what our churches did with the Syrian refugee crisis. In general, these kind of things happen suddenly. They’re hard to predict, we started seeing Syrian refugees piling up on the former Yugoslav border, it was right in our own backyard. So we were there immediately. We were there before the media. We were there before the Red Cross.
We were building refugee camps out in corn fields. We organized to pay the farmers for their crop and then cut down the corn and put up tents and began serving tea, passing out food. Hundreds of people would stay each night.
And then the Hungarian government would have buses there in the morning that would take the refugees to the trains to take them on to the Western European borders. They only wanted to transit. So they wanted just the simplest of care. In this current crisis, the Ukrainians would much rather go back home. They want to get back home as fast as possible, but they have nowhere to go to.
The Syrians responded gratefully to the help that we gave them. We worked in the rail stations that were just mob scenes. We worked on the border where wave after wave of people came. Everybody’s story is different. I can remember a group of young men who came, they were actually Afghans and they had run through the night, fleeing from the Taliban. They were three or four guys, although they had started out as five or six, one had been, been shot by the Taliban as they ran through the night and then hid in swamps and in any place where they could just get down, some place where the Taliban hopefully wouldn’t find them. And they ran and ran and ran until they got to Hungary. There were many women and children, and some families with men as well. Everybody wanted to make a new life for themselves.
A heart for the refugee
Why do we feel so motivated to get involved in refugee crises? I think you have to look at what the scriptures say, you can’t take care for the refugee and the homeless out of the scriptures, and still have the Bible.
It just says it in black and white. In the old Testament God told Moses again and again that the Jews had to be completely upright, fair, and even handed in their treatment of foreigners who chose to live with them even while they were fleeing through the wilderness. So, this is ingrained in our Judeo-Christian tradition. I don’t know how you can have a Christian worldview without having a heart for the refugee and the homeless and the needy.
During the Syrian refugee crisis people were moving through so rapidly, there’s a real limit of what we could do, but tens of thousands of people were coming through. Underneath the train station, the ladies set up a baby washing tent, and it was a very private place. It was heated, it had warm water. How many babies got washed there? I don’t know, maybe 30, 40, 50 a night. At the borders tens of thousands came through, we were feeding them, giving them a hot drink and maybe putting some tents for the night, and then putting them onto buses and loading them through. It was all very rapid.
