Wood, heaters, stoves, a home to live in, a Christmas tree: desperate Greeks turn to newspapers and the internet to cover their needs. They appeal to the generosity of citizens in order to come through the cold days of winter or to find a roof over their heads.
Truck driver Giorgos Poulakis, 42, is jobless since one and a half year. His wife gets only occasional jobs. Ten days ago, he put an ad on a newspaper asking for a donation: a heater for his two kids.
“Please I ask you to give me a fan heater. There is great need . I am unemployed with two children and I have no heating.”
Poulakis told private Skai TV this morning that a journalist donated the heater just days after the ad was published. Hit by unemployment and consequent poverty, the man, who used to earn 1,500 euro per month, has used up his savings, could not pay rent. The family found a roof over the head in the house of a friend who was eager to host them.
The lack of employment had pushed many families to despair, with many of them being unable to pay in order to have a roof over their head.
A couple with a disabled child seeks a home, is willing to pay only utilities bills.
A woman with two grown up children “politely” seeks also for a free accommodation.
Yiannis is one of the many who put ads offering to prune or cut trees for free in return for fire wood. “I go wherever they call me to. I offer to prune or cut trees, trees that need pruning or have fallen from the air. I do it for free and in return I get the wood for heating”.
It’s not only the private households that are in need. Personnel of a hospital have a newspaper ad asking for a Christmas tree to bring some festive mood in the triste atmosphere of a public Greek hospital.
original ads-report published in daily Eleftheros Typos
It’s funny to read how citizens of a country with one of the warmest winters in Europe, whine about heating their homes 🙂
yes, so funny at 5Celsius that we laugh a lot in order to get warm.
The operative word is “WINTER”. at 5C it is indeed warmer than -8C, but that does not mean that heating is surplus to requirements…
In case you haven’t heard, ktos, there is record or near-record cold this week. A lot of people don’t even have adequate clothing to try to keep warm inside their homes because that type of clothing is not normally needed. I should also add that the high winds are making it feel brutally cold.
Surely, somebody somewhere can organize people and get exchange markets going? We used to do this in the 80s when things were really tough. whatever you had and didn’t need was brought to a central place once a month, and stuff was exchanged. Stirctly no money allowed. Mind you, we did get closed down with the accusation of “tax evasion”…
We also ran, for years, a system of skills-exchange. Again, no money. but I can fix a bike, and you can dig a garden, so we exchanged our skills. Again, strictly no money. An hour work for an hour work, irrespective of what the work actually involved. And a central tally where hours given and hours received were recorded. The difference was not ever allowed to go higher or lower than 5. Again, worked an absolute charm, and people were actually a lot more relaxed about doing work. And then the revenue decided that we were breaking the law and evading taxes…
there are here too opportunities ‘exchange/I give for free for goods and/or services’. mostly on internet. in the case of the man the exhange would be: heater for free for one hour truck driving 🙂
Nothing wrong with that. Just as there was nothing wrong with building a cvommunity website in return for extra tuition for one of my children wtruggling with mathematics. It is very possible, the end result is the same, everybody has what they need/want, the only thing that is not in the picture is money. Which is what the authorities don’t like of course. The golden rule for any authority, make sure you can measure it. Only if they can measure it, can you tax it. That is why they have this obsession with numbers, rankings, tables, and indeed, money…
Comments like this really annoy me (Ktos), please get educated, there are thousands of villages in mountainous areas that are already covered in snow, where temperatures are below freezing!!!!