”Even if our mission isn’t profitable we’ll do it” – The Hajnalfény Medical Group helps people in need in Transylvania
László Szalai is an ophthalmologist who had helped people in need in the Far East earthquake zones and Middle Eastern war zones before realizing that the same desperate situations existed at home. His role model was Ajándok Eőry, a doctor for the poor, with whom he traveled the country after graduation. With the Hajnalfény (“Dawnlight”) Medical Group Association, they have now been able to help hundreds of thousands of people, identifying their illnesses in time. For nearly 20 years, the NGO has had a stable membership, representing a wide range of specialties, but unfortunately, it is difficult to involve future doctors in its mission.
In the late nineties, you and Ajándok Eőry were pioneers in this country in healing the poor. Did the two of you go to the people in need?
Initially, Ajándok Eőry, then a biologist, started working as a naturopath among the poor and later joined the homeless care service of the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta. When I met him, he had just started medical university as a family man. I started working with him as a medical student: we used to drive an old German ambulance, through the woods and squares of Buda, collecting people in crisis and taking them to hospitals. At that time my knowledge was fresh, and I had a much more plastic picture of medicine, I could deal with an internal medicine case more easily. Ophthalmology came into the mission later: as part of an academic initiative, we started to carry out medical examinations in small villages in Nógrád County, and we provided spectacles to the visually impaired. From there, we started our "Sight without Borders" program (“Látás határok nélkül”) in the areas beyond Hungary’s borders, as well as our "As far as the eye can see" („Látás határok nélkül” ) preventive medicine program inside the borders of Hungary. At that time we worked with the Maltese, but later we set up our own association. Today, we cannot even count the hundreds of thousands of people we have reached.
Your medical group brought together dedicated doctors from several specialties.
The Hajnalfény Medical Group is special in that nearly ten professions are represented with some regularity in the critical areas. We set up an inflatable tent where we carry out physical examinations and start the patient's journey with a targeted diagnosis. Today we have tools that go beyond the level of primary care. We took photos of patients' skin lesions with a mobile phone, and our colleague in Budapest would analyse the pictures. The identification rate was 70-80 percent, as was the therapeutic guidance, accordingly.
But for the team to really come together, tragedies such as the Asian earthquakes, the tsunami, and the war in Lebanon had to happen in the world.
We represented Hungary in these areas, in cooperation with civilians. It was interesting to see that in the Islamic world, the people who helped were mostly there through some kind of Christian organization.
These were temporary missions, but we realized there that there are similarly desperate situations at home, in Hungary, too, however, those cannot be measured on the Richter scale. From the very beginning, all our programs include eye examinations since identifying and supporting children with visual problems is essential to their studies and development.
Does social security not support access to glasses for children in need?
No, it doesn’t, and no decision-maker has yet managed to achieve this. We are the ones who must have these glasses made and delivered to the villages. Sometimes these are not financially wise decisions but we said that even if our mission is not profitable, we will do it. Like in the case of our last trip to Transylvania: we didn't even have enough company funding for fuel.
Can cheap reading glasses from drugstores be bad for your eyes?
The ones you get in a drugstore do not match your biometric data. The easiest way to understand this is to consider the asymmetry of our bodies as a law that pervades all life.
Our two eyes should be considered two separate organs.
So these ready-made glasses are not made for us, they are only good when you just grab them out of your packet to look at something but they can cause autonomic nervous system disorders with regular use. People in need select their frames and, based on biometric measurements, the lenses are made, put in the frames, and returned to them.
How quickly did the members of the Medical Group become reliable, equipped helpers?
Very quickly, because the core of the group remained the same from the beginning, thus it developed very quickly. There's a dynamic when a team comes together.
Are there young people joining the Group?
Interestingly enough, very few. Their attitude is very different from what ours used to be. This kind of charitable attitude is slowly disappearing from young people, people have become more egoistic. Today, a graduate student's vision includes a PhD, a career and money. It is difficult for them to see how this kind of charitable energy comes back to them in their work, but we see that it gives us a lot of strength back. We advertised for university members, but very few people applied. Maybe the university education is to blame too: narrow specialists are being trained, young people who think in algorithms, and thus have a weaker ability to solve problems and connect with people. As fresh graduates, we used to go to the slums without a background diagnostic park. It was deep water then, with deep dives: we were confronted with rare diseases that we had to understand and process there and then.
Have there been any dramatic incidents during the missions?
There always are, but the most harrowing experience was in Transylvania, in a home for the most severely disabled children in the area. Several of them were brought back from the dead several times. The only sign that they perceive that they are being cared for is the smile the nurses assume they have. It was moving to see those eleven or so little children full of cannulas.
There I felt that should those Transylvanian nurses give five minutes of their lives to each and every person living on the globe, the whole of humanity would be different.
I saw many desperate situations, but this was the most shocking.
Have you ever felt so sorry for anyone that you invited them to your doctor’s office in Budapest?
There have been many such cases. One of the important milestones in the development of our program was to take patients with serious conditions by hand and bring them into our own institutions. After screening for colon and rectal cancer, our abdominal surgeon operated on the patients who were screened at the National Institute of Oncology and saved them from death. Our dermatologists and cardiologists have also been in contact with those in need. These things still work like this, even today.
Were you still a university student when you first went to Transylvania?
No. When I was a child I went with my parents. But what I remember most from those times ('70s) is the experience of deprivation. Later, as a university student, I returned with a cultural hunger, and since then I've been going there with the medical group several times a year. In Transylvania, there are still communities that are even more disadvantaged than those in Hungary.
When we meet a patient, we need to give a general picture of their physical and mental condition, and then pass it on to the specialist care there, which can take the work forward locally. Such a health screening involves a lot of quick decisions. The team that I work with has mastered the philosophy of this way of working and is very used to making professional and rapid assessments and decisions.
You are, involuntarily, holding up a mirror to the professionals in the state health care system. Do your actions bother local doctors, is there a rivalry between you?
It’s true that our presence shows the shortcomings of primary and specialist care, but I always think that we can do better, even if we have to change our methodology. The fact that in many places in Hungary, blood pressure treatment works by prescribing drugs on the basis of a single measurement without laboratory control is not medical care to me.
The essence of healing is to look at the patient as a whole.
Vision control also means that a nearsighted child who gets minus 2 dioptres at the age of 4 and sees well with them will not see the same way later: if you don't follow them, they will get stuck with what you prescribed then and it won't meet their needs later.
Ajándok Eőry based his philosophy of helping on providence and the love of Jesus. What do you base it on?
This is what we all base it on. When I started this, I was first taken by the freedom of healing: to heal with the joy of freedom. Of course, there were drawbacks: I was on my own, and inevitably I had to be connected to the rigid, well-trodden paths of the healthcare system. Later, I was touched by the power of charity: you help and you get re-energized by it – we must make this good energy work in us.
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