At first sight there is little out of the ordinary at Zahony's main school, on the Hungarian border with Ukraine. Children play in the hallway, classrooms are decorated with drawings and boys play soccer on the field outside.

However, these children are not students, they're refugees. Classrooms are now filled with beds, and the locker room is an improvised nursery.

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Since the start of the conflict in Ukraine the school has been turned into an improvised shelter, able to accommodate 200 refugees.

"We are trying to fulfil the task as best as we can and provide help to those arriving," the director of the school's students halls, Miklos Lesku, tells CGTN Europe. "Even if they are traveling onwards, at least they could say that Hungarians did everything for them to feel better and to minimize the impact of the horrible things they had to suffer from."

Lesku regularly inspects the more than 80 beds filling the school's gym, adjusting a blanket here, fluffing up a pillow there, like it was his house. Some of the beds were given by the country's emergency civil service, but everything else was donated from people "all over Europe."

A month on, the makeshift shelter's operations remain supported by the work of local volunteers, like Miklos. However, Lesku believes this is unsustainable in the long term.

"What we need most is mineral water, food medications, baby food, that we can provide to refugees," he said. "It's not that there is an immediate need but we are afraid that the willingness of donors will decline in the future."

As with other border towns across Hungary, most of the work of welcoming refugees is undertaken by volunteers and paid for by local authorities. The absence of much needed central government finance and resources is clear.

"In the past four weeks alone, almost 100,000 people went through Zahony," the town's Mayor, Laszlo Helmeczi, says.

"Zahony consists of 4,300 habitants and there are two to three thousand refugees transiting here daily. The management of this situation is really difficult for us," he added.

Helmeczi is busy walking around the town's train station, talking to volunteers before he moves on to another task. It was the local government which set up the tents outside the station where an improvised canteen has been set up, and it is his office which paid for the transformation of the school into a shelter and the cultural center into a donation storage point.

"In just the first two weeks, we already had 54,000 euros ($59,422) in costs. We just had an assessment of our financial needs and we got a promise from the government that the costs will be covered," he told CGTN.

"It's not really the financial background that's missing, but the Human Resources as well. We are a small town, it's difficult to recruit enough volunteers to fulfil the task. We have almost 150-200 people working with refugees and most of them are volunteers," he explained.

CGTN Europe has asked the Hungarian government about the promised financial compensation. Officials did not comment but said it has set up a humanitarian transit point in Budapest.

In just one month, this small border town has seen an influx of 20 times its local population. Another train arrives at Zahony. The importance of the work of volunteers is clear.

As long as refugees continue to arrive, they feel their efforts must not stop.