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A REFUGEE FAMILY of ethnic Albanians forced from their homes in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, huddle in a sports facility in Korca, Albania, where Texas Baptist volunteers helped set up latrines and distributed food. (Photo by Dick Jenkins)
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Texas volunteers haunted by
images of Kosovar refugees
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___DALLAS--Days after returning to the United States from Albania, Texas Baptist relief volunteers said the stench of squalid refugee camps remained in their nostrils. But the look in the Kosovars' eyes was what burned indelibly into their memories.
___"The physical suffering was obvious, but what we saw in the faces of the people stayed with me," said Dick Jenkins of Legacy Drive Baptist Church in Plano.
___"What you saw was the hurt in their eyes--the pain of being yanked away from
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THE FACES of Kosovar refugee children living in the "sports palace" in Korca, Albania were burned into the minds of Texas Baptist volunteers who recently worked there. (Photo by Dick Jenkins)
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what they knew in everyday life, the pain of being separated from family, the pain of these clean people being put into the midst of this filth."
___John Bullock, state director of children and youth missions and ministries for Texas Baptist Men, served hundreds of miles away at another refugee camp, but he had the same impression.
___"There was such a sense of shock and lostness in the people's eyes. We would watch the people as they would get off the bus, and they didn't know what they were doing or where they would go. That haunts me," Bullock said.
___Jenkins and Bullock were among a dozen Texas Baptist Men volunteers who spent a week digging latrines and building relationships with refugees from Kosovo. Another team is slated to go to Albania in mid-May, according to Jim Furgerson, Texas Baptist Men executive director.
___Contributions to the ongoing relief effort should be sent to the Baptist General Convention of Texas, 333 N. Washington, Dallas 75246-1798.
___Texas Baptists responded to a request from the
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DICK JENKINS (l) of Hunters Glen Baptist Church in Plano and Nio Todo, manager of the "sports palace," survey the facility filled with refugees.
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coordinator of refugee response for the Albanian Evangelical Associ-ation. Working in cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, the Texas Baptist volunteers left Dallas April 14, planning to set up refugee camps in Korca and train Albanian Christians in their operation.
___The volunteers expected to purify water, distribute food and provide medical aid for refugees in one city. But once on the field, both the nature and scope of their mission changed.
___Jenkins served in Korca with Robert and Brad Mann from Fielder Road Baptist Church in Arlington and David Carpenter from Waco, a former Albania-based missionary now with the All Peoples organization.
___The volunteers worked primarily at the "sports palace," an athletic facility that was operating as a ministry center for refugees. When the group arrived, about 150 Kosovars found shelter there. By the time they left, the number had passed 1,000.
___Jenkins initially tried "playing carpenter" by building examining tables, waiting room benches and IV poles for Doctors Without Borders.
___But the whirring of his circular saw was like a magnet drawing refugees, he said. A couple of the refugees told Jenkins they
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REFUGEES outside the facility in Korca, Albania.
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were carpenters by trade, so he turned the task over to them.
___"They had nothing else to do there, and they are a very industrious, energetic people," he said. "It gave them purpose."
___After Robert Mann, a pediatrician, discovered that others were available to meet immediate health care needs in the refugee center, he started going into private residences where local families had taken refugees into their homes.
___"I was like a country doctor making house calls," he said. "I would go into a home or apartment to see one person, and people would just start streaming in, bringing others."
___Mann treated cases of exposure, kidney infections, respiratory ailments and skin conditions, as well as caring for people who had been forced to leave their medicines behind.
___He also treated a child who sustained severe burns when her family's home was burned. It was not the only evidence of atrocities the Texans saw.
___"One woman came to a refugee camp hysterical," Jenkins said. "Her baby had been taken away from her, beheaded right in front of her, and then its body handed back to her."
___Although the Albanians tried to meet the needs of refugees, their numbers were too great to be absorbed by the impoverished people, the Texans noted.
___Lacking any other facilities, the Kosovars were forced to use floor gratings in the sports palace showers as latrines until the Texans helped build more sanitary facilities for them.
___Brad Mann accepted the "down and dirty" duty of cleaning out the showers and building latrines, his father said. The Albanians found it hard to believe Americans voluntarily would take on that kind of unseemly job.
___"We would tell people that when Christ comes to live in your heart, you have love for other people," Mann said.
___Larry Blanchard from First Baptist Church of Lindale, Cotton Bridges from First Baptist Church of Plano, and Joe Ragan, a student at South-western Baptist Theological Seminary, worked in Ereske, south of Korca. The three-man team developed a sanitation and personal
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TEXAS BAPTIST volunteers helped more than 1,000 refugees staying at this sports facility in Korca, Albania.
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hygiene system for about 500 refugees who were sheltered in a gymnasium.
___Ragan wrote in his journal about one extended family of 33 people, living in a 12-by-16 foot room, their sleeping mats lining all four walls with only a narrow footpath through the room's center. The family had been forced at gunpoint to leave their home in Pristina with only the clothing on their backs.
___Gary Smith of Midway Road Baptist Church in Dallas led a five-man team working near the Yugoslavian border in Shkoder, northwest of Tirana.
___"After a couple of days of serving food at the sports palace, a need for toilet facilities was identified at an old tobacco factory which was being turned into a refugee camp," Smith
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BEKIM BEKA, A KOSOVAR PASTOR in Tirana, Albania, carries Nazite Badallaj, an elderly Kosovar refugee, to a guard station at the Albanian border. The woman collapsed in no-man's land between Albania and Yugoslavia after Serb troops forced her to flee her home. She walked for miles in her stocking feet. (BP photo by Grace Robinette)
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recalled.
___Bullock worked in Shkoder with Smith, Dick Hurst from First Baptist Church of Tyler, Dan Hogan from Calvary Baptist Church of Texas City and J.T. Carpenter of Waco, who previously served with his family in Albania.
___Bullock noted that all the Christians with whom they worked had been believers five years or less. Virtually all had become followers of Christ as a result of the "Jesus" film project that the Carpenter family helped to coordinate in remote villages, in conjunction with Texas Baptist Men, Campus Crusade and other evangelicals.
___Each of the teams working in Albania reported miraculous answers to prayer.
___"There was one time we ran out of lumber. We gathered some of the people from Kosovo around and prayed with them. About the time we finished, this Armenian guy pulled up with a truckload of lumber. He wouldn't even let us pay him," Bullock recalled. The refugees, most of them Muslim, wept openly.
___They also wept when the Texas Baptists said their final goodbyes. As is their custom, the Albanian Kosovars kissed the Americans. But instead of one polite buzz on each cheek, they kissed the Texans--whom they had only known for a few days--twice on each cheek.
___"That's the sign of a dear friend," Bullock explained. "I won't forget that."
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