A letter from our missionary Andy Ziesemer in Eastern Europe
A Jesus Mission and The New Divide has been honored to serve alongside you guys for around a decade. This is the moment I truly need to ask you to come behind us. We have a real opportunity to be the church together today. I am on route to San Diego to lead worship this Sunday, then immediately head to the front lines of the refugee crisis on Sunday night. A Jesus Mission has around 30 people serving in Hungary, Romania, and probably Moldova. We are in partnership with a huge network of churches responding to the crisis.
We cannot raise money fast enough. As I write this, my team and I will be trying to take $60,000 dollars cash to start working in Romania and Hungary. There is no way to withdraw money in country fast enough, and so every person traveling with me will carry the legal maximum of 10k in cash. Here is what we are doing with it:
1 – Providing essential aid to the many local churches serving refugees and coordinating housing/travel/food/water/care for the more than 250,000 Ukrainians who’ve come to Budapest. We have a mobilization team lining up as many volunteers as possible to become drivers, line cooks, toilet cleaners, and everything in between. We are sending people to serve at a conference center that has been converted into a refugee camp, as well as in the heart of Budapest as refugees pile off of the incoming trains from UA.
2 – We are purchasing as many vans as possible in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, where we have a team of missionaries and volunteers ready to drive emergency aid directly into Ukraine. (We are establishing a base camp in Cluj, one in Budapest, and likely one to the east near the border, where we’ve already spent nearly $20,000 building a refugee center inside of a local church. The teams in Romania will be shuttling aid into Ukraine, and driving into the hot zones to evacuate anybody who wants out. We will drive them to Cluj, where they will be able to be safely lodged in a refugee center we’re helping establish alongside YWAM, local churches, and anybody with the space to put a mattress.
3 – We are in the process of setting up a transit system to move the nearly 200,000 refugees who got to Moldova either to Cluj, Budapest, or Vajta, Hungary. Where we are partnering with a Danish team to pick them up and take them north. Either to Germany or Denmark. We hope to have more than 50 vans running by the end of the month.
Fuel is about $9 USD per gallon in Romania. We can buy reliable vans for between 6-12k each. We have a church we’ve worked with more a decade and trust with our lives that is letting us use their NGO inside Romania to register vehicles as quickly as possible.
I will be returning to the USA to continue mobilizing volunteers, raising the money we need, and taking small teams back to Europe with as much cash as possible. Again, ATMs are empty, credit cards can’t withdraw enough money fast enough, and millions of refugees are expected to cross into surrounding Romania, Moldova, Slovakia, Hungary, and Poland.
Because of the political nature of this war, local governments are not going in to aid civilians. It is SOLEY the church and local NGOs that are willing to go into Ukraine. I’m proud to have nearly 30 people already signed up and willing to be drivers.
I need money to pull this off. Lots of it.
We are trying to post updates and data as fast as we get it, but it is literally changing by the hour.
If you have anybody willing to get on a plane and go serve as we transport and care for refugees, have them follow www.ajesusmission.org/ukraine-resposne/volunteer
I will be in Budapest from Sunday night until the following Tuesday, collecting videos and sending updates, as well as encouraging and mobilizing our team. We expect/pray to have more than 100 people sent to the field by the end of this month. This crisis will not be slowing down. We will also be sending short term missions teams to help serve refugees throughout the entire summer, and likely into next year. Consider joining us.
If you have any questions, would like to hear any more information, I will gladly get on the phone with you. Andy Ziesemer
President – A Jesus Mission
360-830-8797