By Brandon Elrod
Baptist Press
POLAND — A Disaster Assistance & Response Team (DART) of Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) and volunteers returned from Poland last week to survey ways volunteers from the United States might engage and serve Ukrainian refugees fleeing the invasion of their homeland.
“We were the initial team to go in and assess how volunteers from the U.S., specifically DR volunteers, can be involved in helping with the refugee crisis in Poland,” said Tom Beam, state director for SBDR with North Carolina Baptists. “There are many Polish churches and International Mission Board (IMB) missionaries who are working with refugees, and our task was to assess how we could best assist them going forward.”
So far, Send Relief and SBDR have identified four different sites – in the Polish cities of Warsaw, Chelm and Gdansk and in Suseava, Romania – where small teams of no more than 10 volunteers will be able to serve local churches who are ministering to refugees by cooking meals, hosting activities for children, doing laundry and cleaning showers among other projects as necessary. [Read more…]