Update on the Syrians in Chania
As
I wrote in August, 153 Syrians who were fleeing the war were brought to Crete last spring when
their boat began to sink on the way to Italy. About two thirds of these Syrians
have left Crete. A number of them have gone to other European countries, such
as Germany and Sweden, in some cases joining family members there, in other
cases leaving family behind in Chania. One father has one
daughter here with him, while his wife and two children are in Egypt, and three
grown children and two grandchildren are in Duma, Syria—although he now believes
that those in Syria were killed by the bombing there. Forty-five Syrians
are still staying at the Elena Beach Hotel in Nea Chora, Chania--twelve families that
include twenty children. The children are attending Greek public schools,
thanks to some teachers affiliated with the teachers’ union and the social
center and migrants’ hangout called Steki, although the children do not yet
know much Greek. The Community Kitchen and churches provide some food, but the
six Syrian fathers I spoke with on September 26 said they do not have enough.
They ask for help to leave Greece and travel to a country with a
well-developed, effective program to help refugees. They do not understand why
the Greek government will not provide them with travel documents that allow
them to leave Greece, since it appears to be unable to support the refugees
that are already here. The Syrians seek a good, safe, healthy future for their children, including
four year old Joad (pictured).
Perspectives
and Privilege: Who Can Enjoy the View?
After
my intense, moving discussion with the six fathers from Syria, I admired a dazzling,
cloudy evening sky and wondered whether the Syrians in Chania could appreciate
it. In spite of their beachfront view, I’m not sure they could, given their
worries about their children’s futures and their ten days in a small boat where
all they could see was a rough sea and the sky. Since my children have plenty
to eat and wear, safety, health, shelter, and the prospect of a good, solid (if
not flawless) education, I have the peace and leisure to enjoy the view. I am
disturbed by the situation the Syrians face, concerned about the unemployed,
uninsured, hungry, and homeless people in Greece and elsewhere, and bewildered and
horrified by the wars, epidemics, and famine that send refugees in search of a
safe haven. But for now, at least, my own children are safe and well. I am not
preoccupied with their welfare during every waking moment. Personally, I have
only less essential things to complain about, so I can enjoy the natural beauty
around me. Not everyone is so fortunate.
Earlier
in September, the scent of jasmine and oleander occasionally displaced the
smell of figs ripening in the morning sun. More recently, I smelled the
sweetness of prickly pear fruits that had fallen onto the road. ‘Tis the season
of figs, grapes, and pomegranates here, as well as apples and pears. On my
neighborhood walks, I occasionally pluck a few of the black grapes that still
hang tantalizingly on vines outside vacant houses, remove a fig or two from an
overburdened tree, or pick a pomegranate in an undeveloped lot or an untenanted
vacation home’s yard. I only take what I think might be left to rot, but I see
evidence of poachers cooking goats over an open fire just outside our
neighborhood. While I wonder what the shepherd thinks about his missing livestock,
I also reflect on how much better it is to live in a semi-rural part of an
island that overflows with natural abundance than in Athens or even parts of
downtown Chania, where fewer people have the space for the orchards, olive groves, or
gardens that so readily provide sustenance here.
Puppetry
to Help the Hungry
Sustenance
for some, that is; with Greece ranked last in the European Union in terms of social justice, according to a German foundation, it is hardly surprising that
there are still many hungry people in Chania and throughout the country. The
Community Kitchen feeds one or two hundred of them nightly, including some of the Syrians brought here last spring. (See my August blog entry for
more on the Community Kitchen.) Their volunteers organized a benefit concert/puppet show one Sunday night in a Chania park, requesting donations of food and selling donated refreshments to
support their good work. D and I took our children to see that Karagiozis show (traditional
Greek puppet theater). As we arrived, volunteers were grilling souvlaki, collecting food for the
soup kitchen, and organizing the refreshment tables. Rows of white plastic
chairs had been set up facing a small live band and a large semi-transparent
white screen in a larger frame, behind which puppeteers would work. Since the
park was on a corner, fenceless and adjoining two fairly quiet streets, the
public felt welcome to stroll over and take a look at the free performance. At
one point I estimated that there were about 150 people present, including one
or two dozen kids in the front and far more adults than the chairs could hold.
And that was at 9:00 on a Sunday night in mid September, still early for
Greece, with more people arriving as it got later and cooler. The Greek band
warmed up and played, and the puppet theater started around 9. I took my kids
some cake and kaltsounia (pies with greens and herbs) that I bought for one
euro each. The volunteer selling the little pies was impressed that I kept
returning for more of them for my children, who appreciate more than sweets and
junk. 
Karagiozis
theater is called shadow theater because that’s what it used to be, but now it
doesn’t use shadows much; we see the colorful detail of the flat, jointed puppets
as they’re manipulated behind a backlit semi-transparent screen. A well-known type
of Greek folk art, Karagiozis shows feature characters from different regions
of Greece, with puppeteers highlighting their accents and peculiarities and
making fun of all of them, but doing so in an inclusive way, my friend Irini told me, which
people tend to appreciate rather than resent. D said there were some jokes
related to current political events, and such shows may include risqué comments
that many Americans wouldn’t make in front of children, but there must have
been child-friendly humor as well, because our kids were definitely amused. (The
Greek was well beyond my vocabulary level; in any case, I was talking with people
about the Syrians in Chania.) The kids protested my insistence that we leave when
the band returned after the first Karagiozis act, but it was already
9:45 on a school night, and D wanted to get home for the soccer news.
Summer
Weeks in Athens: Crisis and Contradiction
We
went to a professional soccer game featuring D’s favorite Olympiacos team
during our August trip to see friends and family in Pireaus and Athens. It was only
a “friendly” game, so the kids were in no danger from the hooligans. However, I was repeatedly reminded that Athens is not
all fun and games. Back at a tourist shop in Chania’s Old
Port, I’d noticed a black T shirt imprinted with the heading “Greek crisis.”
Below that, boxes were checked off next to each of these phrases: no job, no
money, no problem. I’m not surprised that shopkeepers catering to tourists want
to encourage them to make light of the situation, as if to suggest that the
“what, me worry?” mentality is typically Greek. But it’s not that simple for
those who have really been hit hardest by the economic crisis—the majority who
have lost an average of almost 24% of their wages since 2010, the 27% who are
unemployed, the six in ten Greeks who are “living in or at risk of poverty.”
For
example, I talked with a 60-year-old Greek man I’ll call Yorgos who had expected
to retire from his physically demanding work on commercial ships by now.
However, due to the government’s new policies, he must try to find work for
another two years before retiring. At his age, with the economy leaving the
Greek shipping industry in turmoil as workers struggle to collect their
salaries, Yorgos cannot find much work. Since very few of the long-term
unemployed in Greece receive unemployment benefits or health insurance, this
leaves him and his family uninsured as well as struggling to pay bills. Yorgos says
he has never seen Greece like this, with homeless people sleeping outside and
citizens stopped by security personnel for being unable to afford bus and metro
tickets to get around. He sees none of the economic improvement the Greek
government boasts about and seems to expect major social and political upheaval
this fall. He has great respect for Barack Obama, who he believes is far more
concerned about, and helpful to, ordinary people than current Greek leaders. He
says if he were American, he’d have voted for Obama, but here he has no one to
vote for.
In
Piraeus, a well-known small family business was another victim of the Greek
economic crisis. It was the end of an era for Pantos Zacharoplasteio (Confectionery),
which closed down after sixty-four years. The family patriarch had started out
as a poor, hungry Greek-Albanian boy who was found on a street corner and taken
in by a sympathetic confectionery owner who employed him as a dishwasher and
gradually taught him all about the business. Grown up, that boy started his own
confectionery with a single room and some tables on a sidewalk, eventually upgrading
to a larger store. His son later remodeled it into the nicest, busiest sweet
shop in the neighborhood, where the second generation would greet us as we
walked by during our semi-annual visits, commenting on how much our children
had grown. Some time ago, the grandson took over the shop, but then competition
moved into the neighborhood, and the economic crisis moved into the country, so
people could afford fewer luxuries, and business decreased. Finally, the
grandson got a job with an insurance company and closed down the confectionery.
His father, devastated by that sad end to the family saga, has seldom been seen
in the neighborhood since then. He said the shop never would have been closed
if his father had been alive. And my kids lament the loss of that source of
ice cream, chocolate creations, Greek sweets, and cakes every time we walk by
it. Rumor has it someone else will open a confectionery there, but it won’t
change the conclusion of the story: rags to (almost) riches to crisis-driven closure.
One
evening we met D's sister and her family in the partly lovely but largely run-down park of Pedion Areos
in downtown Athens, another place that has seen better days. Its costly 2008-2010
renovation showed in the state of the large, gorgeous trees and oleander
bushes, some of them forming arches above the walkways. But some play equipment
off to one side had been mostly destroyed, garbage was generously strewn about,
and a potentially wonderful playground was supposedly closed, no doubt due to
the piles of cut-up tree branches and the dangerous holes in some of the play
equipment. Supposedly closed, I say, because parents like us weren’t about to
let locked gates disappoint their children once they’d come that far for fun,
and someone had discovered a point where it wasn’t too hard to climb in. A
mixed group of immigrants and Greeks had already managed to enter. Outside the
playground, along a main promenade near one of the park entrances, extremely
thin men and women with multiple tattoos and piercings viewed our stroll with
apathy or antipathy as they shared cigarettes or something stronger. Some of
them drank and washed at a cut-off hose that drained water into a muddy puddle.
On the far side of the park, a café served expensive desserts, drinks, and
snacks, and kids played soccer in an open area in front of a courthouse.
That's
Athens for you—a mix of mixes. I like its dirtiness and ugliness, poverty and
expense, pollution and garbage, less and less all the time. But I do appreciate
its multiculturalism, public transport, shopping bargains, archeological sites,
cultural attractions, coastal walks, and sea views. Inside the city, there’s the magnificent Acropolis
Museum (which was literally mobbed on the August full moon night when entrance
was free); outside the city there’s the peaceful countryside around Marathon
Dam. I like Athens for the intriguing places to go, the friends and family to
see, but as a place to live it strikes me as too expensive, dirty, dangerous,
and difficult. It’s fine for the rich and leisured who can afford to sample its
many cultural, culinary, historical, athletic, and material riches; it’s
wonderful for visitors who can do the same. But if I lived there for more than
the year I did in 1991-92—when I stood out as a blond foreigner as I no longer
do--I think I’d feel that it offers more struggles than rewards. Of course,
many still like it and speak of it fondly—especially from afar, or from a
wealthy neighborhood.
Or
from the perspective of a pleasant day. One afternoon in Athens, when I had
entered the stations just in time to catch my trains, so I could finish my solitary
shopping without delay, I found myself with a rare bit of time on my hands—and
only my hands, not my family’s. I decided to wander around the ancient Agora
(Marketplace) beneath the Acropolis, since I was in the neighborhood. I do not
remember having another leisurely walk around an archaeological site in such a peaceful silence in the last decade; I've grown used to complaints or arguments about where to go, how fast, for how
long, that reflect childish, conflicting preferences. I
actually forgot, for a few minutes, that I wasn’t one of the twenty-something
women walking around with no thoughts of children waiting for me at their
grandmother’s, as I had been decades ago. Some of the young people (from
various parts of the world, based on the number of languages I heard) looked
hot, tired, and somewhat bored, but I didn’t feel that way myself. I felt no
obligation to study sculptures or read signs that didn’t strike my fancy, since
I’d been there before and expected to return. Rather, I decided to take a quick
look in the museum, focus on the intriguing perspective of the colonnades in
the beautifully reconstructed Stoa of
Attalos, and take a stroll around the site. I spent most of my time
admiring the impressive columns of the largely intact Temple of Hephaestus (or Temple of Theseus). I always strive for a glimpse of that temple when
I’m on the train that passes below it, but the perspective through its immense
columns is truly awesome up on that hill, with its view of the Agora spread out below it and the Acropolis standing above it.
Back
to School: Missing Teachers, Missing Money, Some Solutions
Back
in Crete a month later, school started, more or less, on 9/11. Initially, we
were still missing three hundred grade school teachers in Chania, so my kids’
school day was four and a quarter hours long. Just like last September. And part of
last October. The Greek government doesn’t have enough money (thanks to its
arrangements with the Troika) to pay enough teachers and was awaiting funding
from a European fund known here as ESPA. Why is it not possible to work that
out over the summer? That would be too logical. After all, this is the country
where high school graduates don’t learn which tertiary schools they are
eligible to enter until the end of August, just before they must scramble to
make arrangements to start classes, whether or not they need to move to a
different part of the country (which most families struggle to afford now). This
is the country where the education ministry asked a university council to
provide their 2014-2015 budget within one day in midsummer, including a 15%
budget cut plus a 9% surplus during the academic year for a total of a 24% cut.
They had not been told earlier that they needed to find that much in savings,
but they were supposed to figure it out in one day. Right. That would make the
current budget (not including salaries) 70% lower than in 2008, although they
expected approximately 40% more students at the university than they'd had six years ago! Do the government
and the Troika really believe a budget can be cut that much without compromising the university’s ability
to educate its students?
Looking
on the bright side: I was in for a pleasant surprise at our elementary school. Things
got straightened out with the teachers much faster than last year, and our children’s
school days lengthened to almost six hours after just two weeks. Not bad,
considering. Now if I can only remember that I need to turn on the hot water heater
if I want a hot shower, since the solar panels that heat our bathwater just
fine all summer need some help now that the cool, windy weather and clouds of
fall have suddenly struck us, right on time for the change to our season of glorious
skyscapes. Acknowledgments and a note:
Many
thanks to the Syrians who took the time to speak with me about their
experiences last week in Chania, and to the volunteers at Steki who answered my
questions. I have a great deal more to say about the Syrians in Chania, but
since I am trying to publish some of that where more people can see it, and
duplicate publications are often not appreciated, I will not add more to this
blog just yet. If you notice
discrepancies in the numbers of Syrians discussed here or elsewhere, I have,
too. Different sources mention different numbers; even the same person may give
a different number on a different day. But they are approximately correct.
