"The situation is terrible. I have never seen anything like this!" So reports? Dr. Bela Szilagyi, a ten-year veteran of emergency relief work. Dr. Szilagyi and Pavelcze Laci, Baptists from Hungary, arrived in Haiti on Friday as part of a Baptist medical team. Military air control had directed the team’s airplane to land in the Dominican Republic near its border with Haiti. UN soldiers then escorted them overland into Haiti.
Dr. Szilagyi reported from Port-au-Prince, “On Sunday we attended close to 120 patients, many of them have not yet received any medical care... Hundreds of patients are waiting on hospital corridors, backyard, parking lot. Some of us work nightshifts in the operation room.”
Dr. Szilagyi is the CEO of Hungarian Baptist Aid (HBAid), named by the European Union as one of Hungary’s four most significant aid organizations. The fourteen-year old organization has worked in major disasters around the world, including floods, famines, earthquakes and seven wars. It has been responsible for thirty refugee camps and distribution of aid to hundreds of thousands of people. American Baptist International Ministries has supported HBAid in various rescue and aid efforts, and partnered in a project to provide food relief to orphans in North Korea.
Sandor Szenczy, pastor of the Open Door Baptist Church, Virovitica, Hungary, is the “inventor” and current President of HBAid. Szenczy’s account of his “lonely conversion” while in detention in a Hungarian military outpost can be found at http://english.baptistasegely.hu/node/193 .
Szilagyi and Laci, are just two of the international rescue and medical aid workers helping earthquake victims. Dr. Steve James is providing medical care from a clinic in Christianville, southwest of Port-au-Prince. His wife Nancy, a nurse, is maintaining the communication link for Steve out of Cap Haitien in northern Haiti. Nancy and Steve are medical missionaries jointly commissioned by American Baptist International Ministries (IM) and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. IM missionary Kristi Engle is traveling from La Romana, Dominican Republic to Port-au-Prince tomorrow with a with a group of 75 individuals (about 30 medical personnel). They will be running 3 different clinics.
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