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A brief trip to Croatia to work with the Bayash people.
By Richard Arnold
What follows is a brief account of the work of Smile International and the Roma Bible Union amongst the Bayah people in northern Croatia.
I flew out from Stansted on lst January to spend a week working with Bob and Nancy Hitching of the Roma Bible Union, and a team of Americans around the town of Varazdina in Croatia. I had been on several short term missions before with Smile International to Kosova and have always found them to be a blessing even if sometimes difficult. I was a bit concerned as to whether I would be able to fit in with the Americans, but need not have worried about it as they soon made me welcome and in many ways they were a blessing to me even if they did not realise it at the time.
It’s best if I start by explaining a little about the Bayash people and Croatia. The roots of the Bayash people actually go back to India which they left about 800 years ago and like so many other people groups they migrated westward, eventually they ended up in Romania where they were enslaved for hundreds of years. Finally in the 18th century they were granted their freedom, but were very much impoverished. Continuing to migrate westward and south, today they can be found across Croatia, Hungary and Serbia, one of a number of groups that we would call Roma Gypsies. Like most gypsies they are marginalised and have to live on the edge of society in extreme poverty. Because of discrimination they find it difficult to find regular work and so they exist by scavenging or resorting to petty crime.
Aside from poverty one of the main problems that is rampant amongst the Bayash people is drunkenness as so many of them have no hope for the future. As for Croatia it was part of the former Republic of Yugoslavia until it declared its independence in 1991. This led to intermittent fighting up to 1995 and a considerable refugee problem as people fled the fighting. While Croatia is very much a Catholic country there are a number of Baptist, Brethren and Pentecostal churches, particularly round the capital Zagreb. Some of these people got involved with distributing aid to refugees during the fighting and as time went by some felt called to reach out to the Bayash people because of the poverty they live in.
So what was I doing in Croatia? Well, basically helping to distribute aid, mainly shoe boxes that had been made up by Smile International or Samaritans Purse as Christmas gifts for children. As somebody else said at the time, “for some of these children it’s the only gift they will receive this year” – and I would say it makes a real difference to them. Without things like pens and paper these children would not be able to go to school for one thing. For another thing the fact that you are giving them something is a powerful expression of God’s love for them. Things that we would take for granted mean so much to them, particularly just spending time with them and taking an interest in their welfare.
Living conditions for the Bayash vary quite a lot from settlement to settlement and even house to house. In fact, some places are more like run down shacks or hovels no bigger than a single sized car garage in this country. In some places a whole family will have to live, eat, sleep and have to do everything else in a one-roomed house. Many of their homes are rat infested and children can be attacked during the night by rats who often go for the eyes or face.
One of the worst places we visited was a little settlement called, Sv Juraj (St George) where Bob and Nancy had been involved with helping to build a number of one-roomed homes for the Bayash people. Here you could see the remains of dead rats and other animals that had been slaughtered for food, and despite temperatures being below zero some of the children ran around semi-naked. At this time of the year their main concerns are all about getting enough food to eat and keeping warm. Because of the harsh conditions there are real concerns that some of the younger children will not make it through the winter. It was a case of some of these families literally living on the edge of survival, as somebody put it at the time.
Despite what I was seeing in terms of poverty and suffering amongst the Bayash, and I’d seen similar things before is Kosova and Serbia, I found that I was able to cope better than I had done in the past and was able to get on with the task of helping these people.
To try and finish on a brighter note, one of the most moving and significant times I had with the Bayash people was on the first night there. We went to a small settlement to distribute shoe boxes and some food. It was getting dark and somehow we all managed to cram into one of their small hovel-like homes. As we gave out much needed gifts to these people it just struck me that where we were, and what we were doing, has so much more in common with the birth of Christ over 2,000 years ago than our over-commercialised, western celebration of Christmas. He was born into a dark, out-of-the-way, obscure place that most people would never have heard of, let alone wanted to visit, just as these people exist in poverty and obscurity. To me this is what Christmas, and the good news about Christ coming into the world to save us, is all about, and it was a blessing to be able to spend it with these people. See - Luke 2: vs6 & 7 and 19: v10
May God bless you.