On March 1st, we met with a couple of our potential partners to visit the projects that they would like LDS Charities to involved with.
SOS Children's Village: For the financially challenged, they have a program where they provide chickens as well as training on how to raise chickens. The families work together and can use the chickens and/or eggs to feed their families and eventually sell the chickens and the eggs.
SOS also provides homes where foster children live. We visited a home in Oroshaza where 7 children live with a foster mother. The foster "mother" has 3 grown children and 4 grandchildren of her own. She wanted to do more with her life and decided to become a foster mother. SOS has several homes similar to the one that we visited. Most of the children that live in these homes come from homes where they have either been abused or the parents give away the children because they cannot financially support them. SOS provides a home as well as counseling for both the children and their natural parents in hopes to be able to reunite the families. We were extremely impressed at how clean and neat the house was and how well mannered the children were. It is obvious that this foster "mother" is a loving and caring "mother" to these children.
Our final visit in Oroshaza was to a home of woman with 4 children. This home was in very poor condition. This woman's husband has left her for another woman and provides no financial support for his children. Two of the children have chronic illnesses which prevent her from being able to work as much as she needs to. SOS provides support and counseling to families such as this one. It is not easy to enter the home of someone who lives in such poor conditions. It about tears out your heart to see what poor conditions these people live in. And I'm certain that this was not even close to being one of the worst.
Our final visit that day was to a home in Szeged, a large city with a big university. This home houses about 10 -12 young adults (18-23 years old) who are too old to be in the foster home system, but are too young to turn out on their own. SOS provides housing, counseling, and career and financial guidance to them. This is a very nice house. Again - the home "mother" was very nice and it was very obvious that she truly cares about the young adults under her charge. We were again very impressed at how clean this home was. The fact that our visit was a surprise visit made us even more impressed.The next day we visited a home/school in Fót, a small village just outside of Budapest. This is a home to just 6 young refugees (unaccompanied minors). (Sometimes they have up to 20 refugee children - a couple years ago they had 300 children in the home that set up for only about 25-30) Here Menedek (our NGO partner) houses, counsels, and teaches these children to prepare them for life in Hungary. They teach Hungarian and English, as well as other skills necessary for incorporating into Hungarian society. We spent about an hour with them learning Hungarian. It was a great experience to be with and learn with these young men.
The week after this visit to Fót, we spoke at a Youth Conference for the entire country. There were about 100 youth in attendance. We spoke about what we do as Humanitarian missionaries and what the LDS Charities do. We gave special emphasis to the refugees and specifically talked about the facility in Fót. At the end of each presentation (we did this with 3 different groups) we had the youth write letters to these young men to welcome them to the country of Hungary. We told them they could write in either Hungarian or English. We were surprized at how many wrote their letters in English! We hope to be able to deliver these letters this week. We are also trying to arrange for activities where the young men are invited to participate.
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| The LDS Youth of Hungary |
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