http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2012/mar/13/greece-breadline-volunteers-moved-homeless-plight
Greece on the breadline: 'We are kicking homeless pregnant women on to the streets'
Jon Henley meets a woman who has decided to do something – help the unemployed improve their skills and self-confidence
A homeless man sleeps outside the Bank of Greece in central Athens. Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters
As Greece enters its fifth straight year of recession, the cuts deepen and the dole queues lengthen, some people are beginning to fight back.
On Monday, in Plaka, Athens' old town, I met Katerina Kanelidou, 42, a leadership coach who decided she had to do something one night a couple of weeks ago when she saw a homeless man outside the station during one of the coldest Athens winters in memory.
"Then on YouTube, I saw someone had posted a video of a pregnant woman being ejected from a homeless shelter," she said. "I was just so shocked. I was thinking, how many unemployed people are going to become homeless? And what kind of society have we become, that we are kicking homeless pregnant women on to the streets?"
Realising she had neither "the power to influence the politicians, or the money to pay for more shelters", Kanelidou decided what she could do was offer her professional experience, providing specially devised, free coaching programmes for the city's unemployed aimed at boosting their self-confidence and skills.
"I just thought: I have to do something," she said. "Yes, there is real depression; huge numbers of people are taking anti-depressants. And a lot of anger at what's happened. But the time for excuses is over now. I am so fed up with the excuses: we can't do anything, we don't have the money, the time, the right paperwork. I have all I need to do something."
So Kanelidou posted on her Facebook page and emailed her contacts, offering coaching sessions to unemployed people on little or no income. She wasn't sure what the take-up would be. "People call us lazy, but we have always worked hard," she said. "There's a huge stigma to being unemployed in Greece. Plus volunteering isn't really a big part of our make-up. There's a mentality that says, if it's free it means either it's no good, or there's a catch somewhere."
But in the space of a few days she attracted 15 participants; more are joining daily. They come from diverse backgrounds: two from a family firm that went bankrupt, a couple of HR professionals, a mid-level company manager, an architect. She has taken on a volunteer assistant.
When the town hall refused to lend her a seminar room on the grounds that she did not represent any professional or corporate body, she persuaded OTE, the Greek state-owned telecoms operator, to give her space in its training centre. "They bypassed their whole bureaucratic procedure to give me the space," she said. "They saw they could do something, too."
The first sessions take place this week. In exchange for the confidence and skills she hopes to impart ("People have the experience and talent, but many need new tools for a new technological environment") she is asking her course members to devise concrete ways in which they, in turn, can do something in their community: "That way, if I am just one person helping one group, each of them will do something for another group."
and....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2012/mar/13/greece-breadline-hungry-children-pe
Greece on the breadline: the children of Athens too hungry to do PE
Jon Henley is in Athens finding out how ordinary Greeks are pulling together to cope amid the financial meltdown
Residents in Athens carry bags of cheap potatoes bought directly from Greek farmers at cost price, one of the burgeoning ways to cope in the worsening financial crisis. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features
Dozens of readers have sent me suggestions about places to go and people to meet in my search for stories behind the headlines in Athens, and I'm following up as many as I can. Others have sent me their own contributions.
Tales of solidarity come from Victoria Prekate, an Athens secondary school teacher and psychologist, who relates how her colleagues in schools in the capital have been responding:
It has been a common secret among PE teachers for some time now that they don't expect pupils to do PE any more, because many of them are underfed and get dizzy.
They need to be discreet, as these underprivileged children don't wish to be exposed to their peers. In my previous school, the teachers arranged among themselves to give the school canteen some money, so that the canteen could give the child a snack, without embarrassing the child.
However, this was not enough. In many schools today, it is the parents' associations who come together, gather food and discreetly arrange to allocate it to those families of the school who are suffering. In co-operation with the teachers, they know which children in the school are hungry and in need of help. Again, they try to do it as discreetly as possible.
"Many families, suddenly left without work, are in shock and there is nowhere to turn. Social services are collapsing. They are not professional beggars. They are ordinary people like you and me, suddenly left with nothing. I know one area, where schools have specialised in what they gather: 1st primary school gather rice and legumes, 2nd vegetables, 3rd meat and chicken etc.
Zenon Panoussis also mentions a whole string of local grassroots and semi-official self-help initiatives:
There are direct producer-to-consumer markets, collective bargaining schemes at supermarkets, organised boycotts of motorway tolls, and book fairs. In Rethimno, Crete, regular free markets take place where products and services are exchanged without money – and, consequently, without VAT.
Some local councils in Athens are helping their citizens avoid paying the new special property tax that was slapped onto electricity bills. The borough of Peristeri specifically has an entire service to collect the bills and file appeals on behalf of its citizens. They are also organising direct producer to consumer markets for staple products.
Marie Le Du writes with news of a thriving, more traditional self-help network in Kifissia, in the northern suburbs of Athens:
These are traditionally viewed as the wealthy ones. However, beneath the veneer of apparent wealth, people have been suffering here, too. It is a different picture to downtown Athens in that you do not see the poverty on the streets in the same way.
People here are embarrassed to find themselves in reduced circumstances and are doing what they can to camouflage it. They will very reluctantly admit to not having enough to eat, pay bills or heat their houses.
With this in mind, our local Orthodox church (Agia Triada) did not organise a soup kitchen, but instead runs a food bank where people can donate food. Volunteers (mostly retired Greek women; my mother is one) then deliver the food to families that they have heard are in need (local news travels through the old-lady-network much more efficiently than any social media).
In an attempt to help the needy families preserve their dignity, they work in pairs and visit two or three families that are "their" families, dropping in for a coffee, chat, to catch up and give the food parcel discreetly, as part of the visit (it is traditional in Greek culture to take food/sweets to someone's house when they have you over for coffee).
The same old-lady-network (they call themselves Proneia, which literally translates as "providence") meets regularly and exchanges news as to who needs what in the area. This can be anything from clothes, food, money for medications to the fees someone may need to have surgery abroad. They raise the money by phoning to their friends, family, anyone who still has money.
A lot of self-help and charity in Greece has always taken place informally and discreetly. A lot of foreign friends are keeping cleaning ladies and nannies employed out of a sense of solidarity even though they are having to make other big cuts in their budget, because they know that these workers will get absolutely no benefits if they are left without work.
In my mother's block of flats there are tenants who have not paid rent in 10 months, yet the landlord is turning a blind eye. I think the bulk of self-help is happening on a personal level and goes undocumented rather than through any organised activist networks.
And I think that actually these informal networks have played a large part in maintaining some social cohesion in these difficult times. The question is, what will happen once the pensioners who run Proneia find themselves in dire straits?
• Jon is in Athens. If you have a story to tell, know a person he should talk to or live in an area you think he should visit, please contact him: jon.henley@guardian.co.uk, or @jonhenley (the hashtag for this venture is #EuroDebtTales)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/11/greece-breadline-social-strife-solidarity
Greece on the breadline: amid the fury, solidarity
Jon Henley goes to meet Greeks who have responded to austerity with innovation and resourcefulness as well as anger
Homelessness and boarded up businesses in Athens: Greeks fear several more years of swingeing austerity measures will change its society beyond recognition. Photograph: Orestis Panagiotou/EPA
Last week's news that Greece had won enough support from its private-sector creditors to finally secure the latest crucial €130bn (£109bn) bailout package was greeted with relief in Europe's capitals and undisguised joy in Greek government circles, where the deal was hailed as a "triumph".
It certainly gives Athens a breather. But for ordinary Greeks the price will be at least five more years of swingeing austerity measures that will change the country beyond recognition. EU officials have admitted that after seeing their wages cut by a third since 2009, Greeks will suffer a further 15% reduction in the next three years, and probably more after that.
The economy is forecast to shrink by up to 5% this year, after a 7% contraction last year. Stuck in recession for five straight years, Greece has seen its GDP shrink by a crushing 17%. That, is the level to which unemployment is expected to fall in two years' from 21%, at present.
Far from rescuing Greece, the austerity measures dictated by the IMF,European Union and European Central Bank, many here believe, will turn the eurozone member into a marginalised, third-world economy for decades to come. Not, of course, that Greece – in particular its swollen, corrupt and often hopelessly inept and wasteful public sector – didn't need reform. But at what cost?
Behind the numbers lies the reality that an estimated one-third of the Greek population has now fallen below the poverty line. Even for conservative analysts, the heavy and repeated cuts in salaries and pensions, spiralling tax hikes and never-ending public spending cutbacks are pushing Greece to the brink of economic, if not social, collapse.
Even the minimum wage is being slashed by 22%. The queues for the soup kitchens are lengthening; each day, the Greek Orthodox church is handing out emergency food rations to a quarter of a million people. An estimated 20,000 Greeks find themselves suddenly homeless, more than half of them in Athens.
Anger, particularly against the country's political class, is mounting, perhaps to dangerous levels. Commentators predict not just an explosion but an eruption, extraordinary scenes, even the breakdown of civil society. Elections scheduled for next month could prove a momentous test of strained resolve.
That said, alongside the fury there is solidarity. Self-help groups are emerging, citizen activists joining forces and several grassroots initiatives taking shape. Academics are offering free tuition; community web radio stations provide a forum for advice and support; volunteer soup kitchens deliver food to places the town hall can't reach. In municipalities around the country, farmers have started selling potatoes and other staple foods – including Easter lamb – to consumers directly, at ultra-low cost.
Last October I travelled to Portugal, Spain, southern Italy and northern Greece in search of real people's stories behind the headlines for a series called Europe on the breadline. This week I'm returning to Greece – to Athens and then up to Thessaloniki – on a similar quest, looking not only at how people's lives are being affected by the ongoing crisis, but also at the innovative and resourceful ways in which they have started to help each other.
As before, I'll be tweeting pictures and interviews along the way using the hashtag #EuroDebtTales, as well as blogging. As before too, I'm counting on your help: last time, readers came up with some truly remarkable tales. So please suggest places I should go to and people I should meet. Or if you send me your personal story (not too long, please …) I will post as much of it as I can on the blog. You can reach me at @jonhenley or jon.henley@guardian.co.uk. Thanks!
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