The Budapest municipality has offered to pay for 3,000 train seat tickets to help refugees from Ukraine, Mayor Gergely Karácsony said on Facebook on Thursday.
The mayor suggested that the government’s offer of free travel for refugees on Hungary’s railway lines “is still not entirely free” as they need seats to go with the tickets which they could not buy unless they had forints. He said that exchanging the Ukrainian currency had become difficult in Budapest, while
an increasing number of refugees could not use their bank cards either.
“Civil activists, volunteers are seen in front of the box offices paying for the ‘free’ tickets,” Karácsony said. The mayor said they had contacted civil organisations helping refugees, and said he hoped “by the time the city’s seat tickets run out, the government will have changed the rules to ensure that travel by train is in fact free for the refugees”.
Aid centres set up at the Hungary-Ukraine border are well prepared to receive the growing number of refugees expected from Ukraine in the next few days, the state secretary for church and minority relations said on Thursday.
Miklós Soltész told MTI after visiting Barabás and Beregsurány at the border that aid workers and police expect further masses of refugees to set off from Transcarpathia in the near future, following a few days of calmer conditions in recent days. Donations received from all over Hungary have filled storage capacities at aid centres and now everyone who wants to send contribution are asked to forward non-perishable food directly to a central warehouse in Aranyosapáti, he said.
First Lady Anita Herczegh, a goodwill ambassador of the Hungarian Maltese Charity, also visited the aid centre in Beregsurány on Thursday.
She praised Hungarians’ readiness to help refugees and said that communities in neighbouring villages had joined forces in the first few days of the war already and this has been further elevated after the arrival of aid organisations.
Imre Szabján, the head of the Hungarian Maltese Charity’s crisis management working group, said that psychological first aid was also being offered in Beregsurány, which appears to be increasingly in demand among refugees traumatised by recent events.
Read also You are a refugee in Hungary? Here is how you can get free train seat tickets
Source: MTI
