With his dyed blonde hair, wristbands and ripped jeans, 17-year-old Domonkos Sera — Domi for short — looks more like a typical teenage punk rocker than a crusading do-gooder running his own charity.
But belying the common stereotype of the 21st-century adolescent — selfish, glued to a phone — the Hungarian devotes his spare time bringing aid to poor villages, homeless shelters and orphanages.
“Helping people is my hobby, that’s what makes me feel good,” he said on what has become a typical weekend activity, packing supplies into a van in a wintry supermarket carpark miles from home.
His burning ambition, he says, is to devote his life to charity work and — no less — by 30 to consign poverty to the history books in this central European country of 10 million people.
“Our work is a drop in the ocean now, but you have to start somewhere,” he says. “We’ve grown to over 20 kids now.”
Domi got his idea after getting involved last year helping some of the thousands of migrants who passed through Hungary bound for northern Europe before Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government sealed the borders. “After the refugees stopped coming, I didn’t want to drop everything, there was such a good spirit, so I decided to set up a charity and ask my pals to join,” he says.
Contacts made during the migrant surge pitched in with free legal and accounting advice on how to start his non-profit company “Most” (“Now” in Hungarian). Others offered office and storage space.
Studies have shown that altruism not only makes us happier and healthier, and that in fact it is common among teenagers. A US government report in 2014 showed that 26.1 per cent of 16 to 19-year-olds volunteer, higher than the national rate.
In Hungary, however, Domi has sometimes found volunteering a hard sell outside his school. Last year, while helping the migrants, he was even sworn at in the street wearing a volunteer organisation’s armband.
“Altruism among Hungarian kids is not typical,” says Mihaly Csako, a sociologist who has conducted studies into youth attitudes in Hungary since 2005. Social solidarity and helping others, particularly minorities, consistently rank low in the priorities of teens, who prefer to simply hang out together in malls or surf the Internet, he says.
“It’s partly a historical hangover from Hungary’s communist period when the parents of today’s teenagers were cautious about dealing with anyone outside the family,” Csako said. “As the Hungarian saying goes: ‘They’re not puppies of our dog’. At most you might help the next-door granny,” he said. Meanwhile in the remote Cserehat region near the Slovakian and Ukrainian borders, the group’s van — driven by one of their dads — has pulled up outside a community centre in the village of Tomor after an hour’s drive along potholed roads.
“We go to where the need is greatest,” Mark Takats, 17, an aspiring poet friend of Domi’s sporting a man bun hairstyle, says after unloading the pallets.
