Meeting the Needs of Refugees in Romania

By Laura McKillip Wood

When she was growing up, Sarah Putman never considered herself a missionary candidate, but through a roundabout path, she is now helping refugees who have escaped the war in Ukraine.

The Cincinnati native is the daughter of a pastor. After earning a teaching degree in 2007, she began working with a Christian school. At that first teaching job, she met a fellow educator who spent every summer working with orphans in Romania. In 2009, Sarah felt sure God was telling her to go with her friend to Romania, so she accompanied a group of high school students to a town near the border with Hungary to work with Roma children in a day center.

Children who came to the center received a meal, bath, clean clothes, and a safe place to relax and play. She formed relationships that summer and ended up going back many following summers. By 2013, she felt God’s leading to quit teaching and become more involved in ministry. She accepted a position as a mission assistant at a church and earned a degree in clinical mental health counseling.

ROMANIA

In 2016, Sarah went to Romania and met a pastor who dreamed of starting a counseling center and providing other outreach to people in the community. By 2019, she had moved to Romania and later began working under the umbrella of New International (formerly known as New Mission Systems International). There she works with the local church; she helps with worship services and participates in the life of the church.

Sarah also works with Alfa Grup, a nonprofit that helps meet the needs of the orphan population in the city of Cluj. Alfa Grup works with orphanages, helping improve the lives of the children there and preparing those who are about to age out of the system for life after the orphanage.

“I love what I’m doing right now,” Sarah says. “I wouldn’t like to change what I’m doing. I would like to add to it.” She envisions adding group therapy sessions for Cluj’s international population, which is large, and helping them transition to the new culture.

HELPING UKRAINIAN REFUGEES

The church Sarah works with used to gather in the meeting room of a hotel. The owner eventually turned hotel management over to the church, and they use 20 of the 30 rooms to house 6 Romanian nonprofits working in the city. The other rooms were used as hotel rooms until the Russian invasion of Ukraine in late February; when that happened, the church immediately began housing Ukrainian refugees in those extra rooms, providing them a safe place to land in their journeys west.

Refugees initially found the hotel online, but then word of the assistance available there spread among friends and family of those early refugees.

Many of the refugees used the hotel rooms as transitional housing, staying only until they could find a more permanent place to live, but the church and nonprofit workers kept in touch with them. About 20 to 25 of the people the nonprofits have helped settle in Cluj are now involved in the life of the church. On Wednesday nights the church has a meal specifically for Ukrainians to come together for fellowship; the church also helps them find housing and settle in the country.

In addition to helping refugees, these Christian workers are also organizing deliveries of food into Ukraine. They have thus far made 20 deliveries, 4 of which went directly into the hot zones. On some of the return trips after deliveries, they have helped evacuate people who needed to leave. Some of these evacuees are older and have experienced traumatic events.

The group has been working with a monastery in the countryside outside Cluj; they have given the evacuees the choice of going there. Many of them have chosen that option, and so they are now staying in a calm, peaceful place that is close to nature where they can recuperate from the horrors of war.

Sarah has followed God at every step in her life and has seen how he put her in the right place at the right time to do the work he had planned for her. God is using Sarah and others working in the nonprofits in Cluj to help meet the needs of those affected by the war in Ukraine.

If you would like to contribute to the work of Sarah and Alfa Grup, visit New International’s website.

Laura McKillip Wood, former missionary to Ukraine, lives in Papillion, Nebraska, and writes about missions for Christian Standard.