People were trudging down the streets, on their way to work. Maybe it was the early morning, maybe it was just another day at work, maybe it was lots of things...
I just couldn't help feeling that they were caught up in the drudgery that this song captures! (With my 100 pounds of groceries I was carrying, I wanted to start singing: "If you see me comin', better step aside. A lot of men meet me, a lot of men die...")
Quinn and I want to lift these people. There are so many people here who are just plain discouraged! They get less than half of their paychecks...and that's even the "poorer people," like the handy man that came to work on our door and charged only about $25 for two hours of work! The food costs at least as much as in the US, utilities are crazy, and clothing and gas are pricey. The only thing that is cheap is our housing.
We have been studying a bit of Hungarian history and the following quote really stood out to me. It is from a description of the Battle of Mohacs, around 1550 ad:
Mohács is seen by many Hungarians as the decisive downward turning point in the country's history, a national trauma that persists in the nation's folk memory. Whilst Mohács was a decisive loss, it was the aftermath that truly put an end to independent Hungary. The ensuing two hundred years of near constant warfare between the two empires, Habsburg and Ottoman, turned Hungary into a perpetual battlefield. The countryside was regularly ravaged by armies moving back and forth, in turn devastating the population.
It is hard trying to get an impression of a "mood" having minimal knowledge of the language and not having met more than a handful, but between what I have heard and seen, it seems that these are a people weighed down with a past of oppression and weariness. The paragraph above captures this, with it's reference to the "national trauma that still persists in the nation's folk memory."
They are a beautiful people. They would do anything to help us. They would give us the shirts off of their backs. I have had men that look like the one in the first photo, reach down to help the stroller off the bus, shoot out a hand to help one of our children as they stumble down the aisle on the bus, or just melt as they see Spooner, our little baby, smiling at them, and give a little "hello" wave. The Hungarians are shy, but when you get beyond that, with a smile, a hug, a friendly "hello," you see the beautiful warmth of their soul creep out into a slight twinkle of the eye or a shy smile that lights up their whole face.
I love these people..."trudgery" and all.
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