Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 12, 1992 TAG: 9201100167
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Medium
STINT IN CENTRAL EUROPE TEACHES A LESSON IN VALUES
Lonnie Chafin was a University of Virginia graduate who wasn't ready for a desk job. So instead, he went looking for trouble.He found it - in one of the most anguished areas of the world.
Chafin, a Christiansburg resident, took a job with the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries after graduating in May 1990.
He left three months later on a 15-month assignment to Central Europe - where he passed out food, clothing and medicine to impoverished residents.
During the last three months of his trip, Chafin lived in Hungary near the Yugoslavian border - providing food and lodging to refugees from the civil war.
"We used to go up on a hill and watch the bombs and stuff," said Chafin, who returned to the United States on Dec. 21.
He had watched Yugoslavian refugees cross the border to Hungary by car, bicycle and on foot. "When we left, we had been serving 350 families a day. That's a lot of folks. And they just kept coming."
Chafin, an architecture major at UVa, applied to the Global Ministries' Mission Intern Program - something he'd heard about at church - rather than head for graduate school or a regular job right away.
"Before settling in, I wanted to do something practical and helpful," said Chafin, who belongs to St. Paul United Methodist Church in Christiansburg. Christianity means little "if it can't been seen through our actions on earth, and how we treat each other," he said.
Despite its church sponsorship, the Global Ministries program is not about force-feeding the gospel to the down and out, Chafin stressed.
"That was aggressively discouraged," Chafin said. He said many of those he worked with were Catholic - and might not have appreciated preaching from a Protestant.
"Our job was just doing what we could as well as we could, in a compassionate way," he said.
As a Global Ministries worker, Chafin was required to spend 15 months overseas, then 15 months working for needy people in his own country - possibly in the inner city, he said.
After a month's training in Atlanta, he was flown to Budapest, Hungary, in August 1990.
Chafin made his base there for many months, taking long side trips into Romania and Bulgaria.
Chafin dispensed medicine, food and clothing to the needy. He saw clinics without medicine and orphanages without running water or heating oil.
Some clinics welcomed Chafin for bringing the first aspirin or gauze they had seen in a year, he said.
At an orphanage - or children's home - in Romania, meanwhile, staff members were dumbfounded to see Chafin and his co-workers showing affection to the children.
"They would stop us and say, `Why are you picking them up?"' Chafin recalled.
As time went on, Chafin learned to bribe Romanian border guards with American cigarettes - "Two packs of Marlboros, and you're in," he said. He was shadowed by customs officials in the Ukraine.
This fall, Chafin and co-workers established a refugee camp near Pecs, Hungary, and saw bombs drop on nearby Yugoslavia.
As the refugees began to flood into the camp, Chafin heard 1,000 hard-luck stories - like that of the Yugoslavian man who had been living in a sixth-floor apartment when the bombs came. The man led his family to the basement, then bicycled into Hungary, looking for long-term shelter.
After finding the refugee camp, he returned for his family and came back. The family was in shock.
"For two weeks the women didn't say anything to anyone except her husband. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs. There's hundreds of stories like that. You would see them all the time."
Chafin, home for the holidays, said his experience taught him to value the humanity of all people above everything else.
"Everything comes second to that," he said, including political and economic systems. "And everything that obstructs that does not deserve to exist."
It also convinced him that democracy is still a concept with the vaguest of meanings in many European countries - despite media reports to the contrary.
Chafin will leave Jan 9. for the domestic portion of his three-year ministry. He doesn't know where he's going yet - though he does have a preference.
"I put in for Hawaii," Chafin said with a grin.