How can Greeks live on a monthly pension of just a little above 300 euros? They cannot. Rent or property tax and utility bills swallow the meager income month in, month out. Hardly is a euro left for food or other items that cover daily needs.
A food package from a charity, a free meal at the soup kitchen. Thousands of people depend on the aid of charities, church and municipalities, the health centers and pharmacies for the poor, services offered by volunteers.
The crowing poverty does not affect only the low pensioners. There are thousands of households out there,who have to invent survival methods without money, thousands of families with one parent without a work, sometimes both of them.
In the last five six years I saw at least ten people swallowing their pride and seek a soup kitchen for a meal or registered for a frugal aid package in order to survive. But food is not everything.
Some people ended homeless because they did not even have money to rent a hole or pay a bill.
What if the country received billion of euros in three bailouts? The money was in form of new loans to pay the old loans. Just ten percent was given to the Greek state, the rest went back to lenders.
A growing number of Greeks is barely getting by. After seven years of bailouts that poured billions of euros into their country, poverty isn’t getting any better; it’s getting worse like nowhere else in the EU.
In a report that might shock foreigners who live away from the Greek reality, Reuters spoke with a Greek pensioner, a 73-year-old woman, who fully depends on the food handouts.
Dimitra says she never imagined a life reduced to food handouts from the food bank: some rice, two bags of pasta, a packet of chickpeas, some dates and a tin of milk for the month.
At 73, Dimitra – who herself once helped the hard-up as a Red Cross food server – is among a growing number of Greeks barely getting by.
“It had never even crossed my mind,” she said, declining to give her last name because of the stigma still attached to accepting handouts in Greece. “I lived frugally. I’ve never even been on holiday. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Now more than half of her 332 euro ($350) monthly income goes to renting a tiny Athens apartment. The rest: bills.
Figures for the food bank in central Athens: About 11,000 families – or 26,000 people – are registered there, up from just 2,500 in 2012 and 6,000 in 2014, About 5,000 are children.
I remember a friend who was craving for fresh vegetables, an egg and some cheese. She lived for more than a year on the food packages. They included also a liter of oil, two toilet paper rolls, a can of tomatoes. For a whole month. She finally got a job with 500 net. Enough to pay rent, bills and food for a frugal table.
Occasionally, my friend says she feels desperate not only due to insecurity she might lose the job and return to the horror year s she described as “a sheer nightmare.”
She is desperate because she has the feeling that she “only exists” with no hope to improve her life.
The full article of Reuters is here.
The last time Greece suffered like this with hunger is also the last time that Germans were running Greece, in the fascist occupation of world war 2. At least this time they are not murdering Jews.
About milk one could try to contact some fighting farmers in Central Europe, normally discounter-Mafia pays them so poor they put lots of milk into trash. So next time they are on strike it will suite them even more to bring it to Greece.
I am afraid it won’t get any better any time soon. Since Greece will be a debt slave until 2059 this will continue for a while or even gets worse. It is all over the Balkans like this.