By Rita McInerney

The bloody civil war in the Balkans has made refugees out of vast numbers of young, old and middle-aged forced to flee their homes in cities, towns and villages. They are existing in homes or refugee centers where their private space is often only a bunk bed.

Their governments have no money to care for the newly homeless. Such funds as there are go for soldiers fighting a war that has turned families and neighbors into ethnic enemies. Hospital care and medicine goes for maimed and wounded fighters.

Providing medical care and supplies for the refugees has become the mission of voluntary private organizations, mostly church-related.

MAP International, based in Brunswick, GA, is one such non-profit Christian health organization. Since its beginning in 1954 as Medical Assistance Programs, it has aided people devastated by war, repressive regimes, and natural disasters.

In October, three MAP staffers, a journalist and a free-lance photographer spent two weeks in Eastern Europe. One week was spent in Romania, a country impoverished through years of oppression by longtime dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The second week was spent in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Here civil war has brought death and misery to innocent civilians and divided Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims.

The MAP group traveled to these troubled regions to check on the estimated $20 million in aid the organization has supplied for the refugees and Romania's poverty-stricken sick. MAP works entirely with charitable groups within each country, not with governments.

In Romania, the group visited clinics and hospitals. There is a thriving black market, according to Linda Schaefer, photographer on the trip, and MAP tracks donated medicine to be certain it reaches the right people.

The environment is non-sterile in the country's state-run hospitals, she found. There is no heat, no light in the corridors. The doctors who showed them around wore bathrobes over their hospital gowns to keep warm. Lights are turned on in the operating room only when surgery is performed. There are no antibiotics for the sick.

Ms. Schaefer became aware of "a coldness, a blankness," in the eyes of many Romanians she encountered. "It was like they were in a time warp. They seemed to have a total lack of faith. They've been downtrodden so long, their churches torn down, their villages destroyed. Everything that made them individual is gone."

They found conditions somewhat better in Cluj where babies in the hospital nursery were snug in warm blankets and tended by caring nurses.

What a contrast the visitors found at an orphanage run by Mennonites. "It looked like a piece of Pennsylvania Dutch country had been set down" outside Sueava, a town in northern Romania. "There was even a white picket fence," Ms. Schaefer said.

The Mennonites oversee distribution of the MAP donations in Romania. In Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina this supervision is by PLIVA charitable organization and Agape, a Protestant ministry.

A cordial welcome from the abbot greeted the party at the Franciscan Monastery Imotski, an old stone structure overlooking a valley on the Croatian border less than 10 kilometers from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

After a hot meal prepared by Franciscan sisters, the three MAP staffers talked to some of the monks who go out from the abbey to distribute medicines and supplies to hastily improvised hospitals and clinics. The abbey is in the war zone, according to Mark Mosely, one of the men from MAP.

The following day Ms. Schaefer and the journalist made a hazardous trip into Mostar less than 30 kilometers from the abbey.

The besieged city is surrounded by mountains in Serb control. Muslim and Croatian troops hold their own sections of the city. The excursion was made through sounds of gunfire from the hills. Their destination was a hospital where medical personnel work under incredible hardships to care for the casualties.

Another day, there was a visit to nearby Medjugorge, the town where millions once came in hopes of seeing a vision of Mary. They found a quiet town with few tourists in sight.

Two hospitals, in Zagreb and Split, care for the most critical patients, mainly civilians. The biggest in Croatia, they serve over 3,000 patients in sorely overcrowded space. Many beds are filled with children, victims of land mines.

Here hospital officials told the MAP visitors that medicines contributed by American pharmaceutical and supply companies through MAP are much appreciated. One nurse, at the hospital in Split, told them that without the medicines they would have to close the 1,900-bed facility.

MAP International has been rated by Money magazine as the most cost-efficient health charity in the U.S. Rated from 1990 to 1992, the publication found the interdenominational Christian group spent 95 percent of its income on its work at more than 600 hospitals and clinics in 118 countries helping people of all faiths.

Close behind MAP is Catholic Relief Services which spent an average of 94.6 percent on programs over the past three years. So far in 1993, Catholic Relief Services has provided $32.5 million in aid to the battling republics in what was once Yugoslavia.