Hungarian teens get kicks from helping the poor
Print Edition
WITH his dyed blonde hair, wristbands and ripped jeans, 17-year-old Domonkos Sera looks more like a typical teenage punk rocker than a crusading do-gooder running his own charity.
But belying the common stereotype of the 21st-century adolescent the Hungarian devotes his spare time bringing aid to poor villages and homeless shelters.
“Helping people is my hobby, that’s what makes me feel good,” he said while packing supplies into a van in a wintry supermarket carpark miles from home.
His burning ambition, he says, is to devote his life to charity work and to consign poverty to the history books in this country of 10 million people.
“Our work is a drop in the ocean now, but you have to start somewhere,” he says of his group of 20 kids.
Domonkos got his idea after getting involved last year helping some of the thousands of migrants who passed through Hungary bound for northern Europe before Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government sealed the borders.
“After the refugees stopped coming I didn’t want to drop everything, there was such a good spirit, so I decided to set up a charity and ask my pals to join,” he said.
Contacts made during the migrant surge pitched in with free legal and accounting advice on how to start his non-profit company “Most” (“Now” in Hungarian). Others offered office and storage space. Studies have shown that altruism not only makes us happier and healthier, and that in fact it is common among teenagers. A US government report in 2014 showed that 26 percent of 16 to 19-year-olds volunteer, higher than the national rate.
That’s different in Hungary.
“Altruism among Hungarian kids is not typical,” said Mihaly Csako, a sociologist.
Social solidarity and helping others, particularly minorities, consistently rank low in the priorities of teens.
“As the Hungarian saying goes: ‘They’re not puppies of our dog.’ At most you might help the next-door granny,” he said. Meanwhile in the remote Cserehat region near the Slovakian and Ukrainian borders, the group’s van — driven by one of their dads — has pulled up outside a community center in the village of Tomor after an hour’s drive along potholed roads.
The supplies — flour, rice, oil, sugar as well as second-hand clothes sent by contacts in Germany — are destined for 30 mostly ethnic Roma families in nearby Szakacsi, statistically Hungary’s poorest village.
“We go to where the need is greatest,” Mark Takats, 17, an aspiring poet sporting a man bun hairstyle, said after unloading the pallets.
“I’d only seen such poverty on TV before, never so close up. We’re just ordinary teenagers who happen to like helping, as well as football, computer games and partying.”
Cserehat lies some 200 kilometers northeast of the Hungarian capital, but feels a million miles away from the teenagers’ base, a high school in a leafy suburb of Buda, the richest part of the city.
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