Vehicles loaded with donations have arrived at the primary school in Tiszabecs near the Hungarian-Ukrainian border nonstop, and several civilian volunteers and organizations on the Hungarian side of the border station are helping to care for and travel with refugees from Ukraine, an MTI reporter reported on Sunday. .
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There is hardly any traffic into Ukraine, but from there the Transcarpathians on foot or by car reach the far south of the Hungarian-Ukrainian border, leaving the Hungarian side to receive refugees with a hot meal and a food package. Most of them are women and children, many of them come to Hungary with their families and then wait for their relatives near the border station to come for them.
Before crossing, Hungarian and Ukrainian words blend with English, a Croatian TV worker works on the roadside, and a French couple tells an interpreter that they can take five people to Budapest for free.
A man with a bilingual sign in his hand:
It will provide free accommodation and meals to ten needy people in one of the neighboring settlements.
When asked, he moved with his family from Ukraine to Hungary half a year ago, after working as a border guard on the Ukrainian side of the Tiszabecs border crossing for years. Others keep a sign in Ukrainian: There is still room in cars for Budapest.
The school’s gym in Tiszabecs, near the border, looks a lot like a smaller shopping mall: Donations arrive constantly, and volunteers arrange tons of perennials, packaged foods, mineral water and room toiletries.
The settlement’s mayor, Gustav Lorenz, told an MTI reporter that about 1,400 people crossed the border from Thursday to Saturday, and about seven hundred of them relatives arrived almost immediately to take them away.
The local community helps the refugees with everything, accommodates them and supplies them with hot food, and handles the donations received
he added. According to him, offers have also been received from Sixfervar and Budapest, and food and warm clothes are constantly being unloaded from minibuses and vans.
The Hungarian Red Cross and the local government set up 52 beds in the school’s gymnasium, providing blankets, quilts and sheets for those in need, and cribs for the children.