Spyros Gkelis, a smart and hard-working biology lecturer from Thessaloniki, saw it like this.
“If someone shoves you, you know, like really pushes you, hard, in the street, so it hurts, your first reaction is to lash out. Strike back. But if that doesn’t achieve anything, if they keep pushing and it keeps hurting, you think again. Try something else. Work out some way of dealing with it,” he said.
In their fifth year of recession, with 21 percent of the workforce jobless, salaries slashed, one in 11 people in greater Athens using soup kitchens and half the country’s most prescribed medicines now in short supply, that is what more and more Greeks are doing. Faced with a half-broken state, and systems and structures only making things worse, people are doing things differently.
In a clearing on a hillside above the second city, Elisabet Tsitsopoulou found herself buying five 25kg sacks of potatoes, for herself and her neighbors, from the back of a lorry. She paid 0.25 euros a kilo, against the 0.60 euros to 0.70 euros she would pay in the shops. The farmer she bought from, Apostolos Kasapis, was equally happy — he got his money straight away, rather than having to wait for up to a year, or forever, for a middleman’s check.
“It benefits everyone,” said Christos Kamenides, professor of agricultural marketing at Thessaloniki University, of the producer-to-consumer system he has helped perfect.
The potato movement was launched last month and it is spreading across Greece, incorporating other staples such as onions, rice, flour, olives and — at the last count — more than 4,000 Easter lambs. Town halls announce a sale; locals say how much they will buy; farmers show up with it in 25-tonne trucks. Everyone’s happy.
With many Greeks now taking home 30 percent less money than before the crisis, but prices of plenty of products still impossibly high, the movement is a clever and, for many, vital way to cut costs that is of practical help to both parties to the transaction. There is anecdotal evidence, too, that supermarket prices are starting to fall in response to it.
In several parts of the country, small volunteer shops are being set up, often on the initiative of local councils, selling produce at barely more than cost price — the margin is marked on the pack — in member-only schemes, to avoid tax and legal problems.
Kamenides is developing a broader scheme along these lines. His “unified cooperative” will unite producers and consumers, and it may eventually serve as an economic model for buying and selling essential foodstuffs.
A couple of hours south, in the port of Volos, an alternative economic model is already up and running.
More than 800 townsfolk have signed up for a local currency scheme called TEMs. Teachers, doctors, babysitters, a bookkeeper, farmers and smallholders, a decorator, hairdresser, seamstress and a lawyer are among the members.
In the past couple of weeks, Theodoros Mavridis, a local electrician, has not had to pay a euro for his eggs, tsipourou (the local brandy), fruit, olives, olive oil, jam, soap and help in filling out his tax return. Maria Choupis, a founder member, said up to 15 such networks are active.
Members transfer units into and out of each other’s accounts online. To ensure the currency works hard, these can hold a limit of 1,200 TEMs and they cannot be more than 300 euros overdrawn.
For Bernhardt Koppold, an alternative therapist, the scheme is easier and more direct, but also “a way of showing practical solidarity.”
Choupis agrees it is “as much social as economic.”
That is a point that recurs frequently. There is, among many Greeks, still intense anger at what they are living through, as well as almost complete disillusionment with politicians, not to say politics, but in Choupis’ words, many are “moving beyond anger” — instead of lashing out, coming together.
In Volos, a waiter in the taverna by the ferry terminal said: “In the years of cheap money and easy credit, we just lost sight of what matters, you know? It’s sad that it’s taken a crisis to do it, but we’re rediscovering our values.”
People are helping each other in small, informal ways.
Teachers and parents’ associations “come together, gather food and discreetly arrange to allocate it to families in the school who are suffering,” said Victoria Pakrete, an Athens teacher, who herself volunteers in a soup kitchen.
Marie Le Du said that in the northern Athens suburb where her mother lives, women from the local Orthodox church “work in pairs. They visit two or three families that are ‘their’ families, drop in for a coffee and a chat to catch up — and discreetly hand over a parcel of donated food, as part of the visit, to preserve the family’s dignity.”
Others are more organized.
Reveka Papadopoulos, head of Medecins Sans Frontieres Greece, said that in the past year she had seen “some really encouraging, exciting things. People are seeing the power of organizing themselves, of helping themselves and each other. It’s wonderful to see ... it keeps you going.”
So in Thessaloniki, the National Theater of Northern Greece is about to launch a season of plays by Genet, Pinter, Albee and Greek authors under the banner “Social Theatershop.”
Theatergoers will pay for their tickets with food, which the theater’s 300 staff — actors, technicians, administrators, all working on the project for free — are distributing among charities and welfare groups in the city.
“We are, everyone knows it, in a very bad situation,” deputy artistic director Giannis Rigas said. “We thought, we have to do something for people who now have so little money that they are going hungry, but this isn’t charity, it’s a fair exchange — food for theater — and it’s also a way to put the theater back where it belongs, in the community.”
Across town, on the redecorated first floor of a battered building owned by a trades union association, more than 80 doctors and dentists volunteer their time at the social medical center, opened late last year to treat illegal immigrants with no access to free healthcare.
In fact, 70 percent of the patients seen by the doctors and specialists at the center until 9pm each night are Greek citizens who can no longer afford health insurance.
“If you’re not earning, you no longer have easy access to care,” said Sofie Georgiadou, a dentist who volunteers one evening every two weeks. “I never imagined I would one day find myself working somewhere like this, in Greece.”
It does not, in some instances, take much to change things.
In Athens, Xenia Papastavrou, fed up with the quantities of perfectly good bread going to waste in restaurants and bakeries when welfare groups were spending money elsewhere to buy it, has founded a network called Boroume, that, via its Web site, now puts 70 commercial food donors — including Greece’s largest bakery chain and 25 Athens hotels — in contact with 400 welfare groups, from elderly people’s homes and orphanages, to drop-in centers for the homeless and municipal soup kitchens.
Similarly, Silia Vitoratou, a statistician, joined with friends in December to set up Tutorpool, whose site now puts 500 volunteer tutors in contact with pupils who need their help. It is a fact of Greek life that most schoolchildren, especially those hoping to go to university, will at some stage need after-school tutoring — many parents can no longer afford the private tuition centers that for decades have met that demand.
Tutorpool is helping Vassilis Xanthopoulos, 11, who is dyslexic and has had extra private tuition since he was very young.
“Last year, we had to stop,” said Harris Xanthopoulos, his father. “My business has practically collapsed and my wife is earning half what she used to. It was 450 euros a month we no longer had. Vassilis started falling behind almost instantly. Tutorpool really saved us.”
Warming as they are, though, such initiatives cannot save everyone.
Korina Hatzinikolaou is a developmental psychologist at the Athens Institute of Children’s Health, which coordinates Greece’s child healthcare provision.
Her salary has been cut by a third and she has not been paid since December — she and her two small sons have had to move back in with her mother.
More alarmingly, the institute itself can no longer make ends meet and it is threatened with closure — Greece’s national neo-natal screening program, among others the institute runs, is now at risk.
“There are limits to what ordinary people can do,” Hatzinakolaou said.
“We can do much, but we cannot run a health system. At some point, a state has to say: ‘You know what? This really matters. Let’s all do it, together. Let’s make it a priority.’ But here in Greece, the social state is collapsing. I am really not sure how it will end,” she said.
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
The past few months have seen tremendous strides in India’s journey to develop a vibrant semiconductor and electronics ecosystem. The nation’s established prowess in information technology (IT) has earned it much-needed revenue and prestige across the globe. Now, through the convergence of engineering talent, supportive government policies, an expanding market and technologically adaptive entrepreneurship, India is striving to become part of global electronics and semiconductor supply chains. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Vision of “Make in India” and “Design in India” has been the guiding force behind the government’s incentive schemes that span skilling, design, fabrication, assembly, testing and packaging, and
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.