“They are my people,” David Pandy told the Record while on furlough in Canada, of the Ukrainian Roma or gypsies with whom he works. “I thought, if I have talents to help them come around, to get an education, maybe I should be doing something.”
David and Anna Pandy-Szekeres have worked in East-Central Europe through the Presbyterian Church’s International Ministries for a decade; and for several years before that through the Reformed Church of the sub-Carpathian Ukraine. As missionaries, their task is to bring education to Roma children, where the emphasis is on establishing a relationship based on Christian love and tolerance, and to ethnic Hungarians who have slowly seen their language, culture and land disappear during years of persecution.
Today, not only can children get an education in their native Hungarian, they can do it in a Christian environment — a first made possible by Anna who began the first Hungarian Reformed Christian secondary school in Ukraine — and most likely in the entire former Soviet Union — back in 1993.
“For me, it is a big blessing to see my former students return and occupy the position of teacher, doctor, pastor,” said Anna, who, with David, has three children.
When the Iron Curtain fell in 1991, Ukraine was hurled into disaster mode. The currency was worth almost nothing; money from the banks mysteriously disappeared. “People were unable to pay for electricity, gas, or clothing. But it was, and is, a rich agricultural area, so people grew their own food,” said David, who grew up in the West, though his parents are from Hungary. He notes that his salary at that time was a mere $14 a month. Today, each of the four Christian schools overseen by David has a farm attached to provide food for students and staff.
But the area’s ills persist. David said the government is not functioning effectively, reforms are slow and unemployment is high. Kiev, the capital, is the only area to show any prosperity. “It’s typical,” he said. “There’s a layer of the extremely wealthy, and the rest don’t have much.”
The four secondary schools run by the Pandys (plus an elementary school for the Roma) have about 100 students each. They also run a missionary training school. David said most of the graduates go on to university and some return to the sub-Carpathian Ukraine (an area repeatedly annexed to various European countries over the last century and whose population now stands at about 1.3 million — 150,000 of whom are ethnic Hungarians), as doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers. Some of them work in the Hungarian Reformed Church as pastors and catechism teachers.
“The idea is to build up the church,” said David, whose official titles are supervisor of missions and general director of schools. “But there are problems. Even if they graduate, there are often few employment opportunities in sub-Carpathian Ukraine. The church tries to do a lot, but it can’t do everything.”
Many ethnic Hungarians live in Ukraine in what was once Hungarian territory. Persecution was rampant for decades and, according to Pandy, inequalities still exist. It is for this reason that the Pandys, as well as the Hungarian Reformed Church and the Reformed Church of the sub-Carpathian Ukraine, are working hard to help.
“Hungarian people are an ethnic minority in a large country that is fighting the odds just to survive,” he said, noting that Ukraine’s population has dropped from about 52 million to 47 million in just a few years. “People don’t perceive themselves as having a future.”
“One of my principle goals is to make myself, or the work that I do, redundant,” said David, “because this will mean that the institutions we established are strong enough to stand by themselves and continue to provide the services they were called to do. It will be a good sign that my purpose for having accepted God’s call will have made a difference.”
