(EDITOR: The report is from Gabor Skulteti, Director of the American House Foundation, a U. S. 501(c)3 charity with headquarters in Budapest. As divided as we are on the topics of the day, it is wonderful to see how many people come together to help others in an emergency. The immigrants are largely from Syria, refugees from the civil war.)
Flag of Hungary
Last week one night the train station guards wanted to close the station and force a migrant family to leave the station, into the night that was quite cold at that time. The family had a small child. Having nowhere to sleep – though they had money, they could not have been able to rent a room because they were migrant , it would have been dangerous for the child.
A few citizen (activists) have been alarmed, they ran to the station and did not let the guards push the migrants out of the building. When the guards told them they would call the police, the activists replied: “Do it!”. The police came and after a lengthy discussion the station stayed open.
Then in a very few days a lot of things happened. The activists created a Facebook group, Migszol. They have agreed with the mayor that they operate an information and distribution point at the station, next to the entry, outside of the building. The local government let them use a wooden house and provided the basic infrastructure (from tomorrow they would probably have free wifi, too). Many local started to give them food, clothes, shoes, water. Now they have 80 volunteers, they mostly work after their job hours, or using their holiday times.
They are open day and night. Just across the station they have a quite a big room where they store clothes, diapers and other stuff. When I was there, some 6 volunteers organized the items.
At a local church facility they make an average of 1,000 sandwiches a day, for the distribution at the station and the state-operated collecting stations (Nagyfa and Moszkva korut in Szeged). They not only receive things from the locals, but a lot of people buy items on the internet at Tesco, with the delivery to the Miszolg.
When the migrants cross the border, sooner or later many of them are caught by the police at the river or close to it. The Migszol gets a phone call telling how many people are caught, how many children are there, what are their immediate needs. Migszol quickly gets the stuff and arrives to the migrants in 10 minutes or even faster. They use their own cars, fueled at their costs.
Migszol takes care the garbage along the road at the river, and regularly collects full bags. (There are some people from the city who go to the riverbank, collect the things (old clothes, etc.) the migrants get rid of, and sell them.) And there are some, who search for migrants who do not want to meet with the authorities, and take them in their cars to Budapest or somewhere else, for a fortune, allegedly. Some are arrested, because this is regarded as a crime. We have seen a lot of these “searchers”.
I went shopping with one of the activists. They need some cheese and bread for the sandwiches (they expected a delivery for later today), wet wipes, calcium pills and some ointments. They have just received a cubic meter of diapers and a lot of water. Later in the afternoon the Baptist church’s cars arrived full of clothes, food, etc.
They welcome any help. Since they have no formal organization, they cannot receive cash donations but a local NGO agreed to cooperate, so that they would be able to do so in the future.
As for the migrants who do not want to be caught by the authorities and still are in the forest, Migszol thinks they could not do much for them, because it is hard to find them and it can be dangerous to meet desperate people in an uncontrolled area. They do not think that these people are criminals, but it has already happened that some of them had been forceful, probably because of the long, exhausting trip.
At the station I have seen many migrants. Many who speak some English. I have spoken with 2 brothers, 16 and 18 years in age, the older speaking quite well. They wanted to go to Germany. From the station there are trains hourly. A few minutes before the train starts one of the volunteers shouts: “The train is about to leave!” and the migrants get up and walk to train platform. They can travel free of charged if they are registered by the authorities in 2 days after the registration. They can go to one of the three big camps in Hungary (Bicske, Debrecen, Vámosszabadi). Most of them would not enter the gate of the camps but travel on to Germany.
During my visit there were some five journalists there, making interviews with Migszol. There were a French journalist residing in London (he migrated there because he could not find an appropriate job in France!!!) whom I helped a little in his communication by speaking English. He travels through Hungary, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Romania and Croatia, to research the migration problem. He is self financing his two months trip but he wants to sell his story. He is a freelancer.
(At the station I have met a man of about 65, who came to Hungary in 1984 from Transylvania who hoped there was an American among the journalists to whom he cold have told that he had not received an answer to his two letters to the US Ambassador in Hungary. He said he was not welcomed by Hungarians since his arrival here, and wherever he moved in the country he experienced the same over and over again.)
During the day Gabor Ivanyi called me back from the evangelistic church. He told that so far he delivered in-kind donations twice from Budapest, to the state-controlled collecting stations.
Gabor
