The Social Kitchen of Hania (Κοινωνική Κουζίνα Χανίων)

This post also appears in Greek (scroll down), as translated for the local and Greek press, and published in websites (eg zarpanews). 

Poverty, homelessness and hunger are all relative in the world today. The Mediterranean island town of Hania is not known for any one of these states of being. But there are always pockets of society that need more help than others, having reached a level close to one of these states of being for various reasons that cannot be easily explained. Many times, other problems that these people face have forced them into difficult circumstances which force them to experience a certain degree of poverty, homelessness and hunger, even though they may have a roof over their head.

Poverty, homelessness and hunger in Hania are all tackled in various ways. A number of state-sponsored schemes help people in need with basic food items and rent subsidisation. About 40 homeless people in the area are given shelter for the night at a children's summer campsite during the winter. And certainly, no one need go hungry in a food-rich society such as Hania, and Crete in general. One of the NGOs that help in this direction is the Κοινωνική Κουζίνα, the 'Social Kitchen" of Hania, which runs a small soup kitchen in the town centre on Tsouderon St.

In the frame of showing solidarity, last Friday, 1st of April, the graduate students of MAICh, in collaboration with the chef of the Institute and the President of the Cretan Gastronomy Network, undertook the preparation and distribution of 150 meals offered to the Social Kitchen of Hania. This is the second year that this event has taken place. As a local Institute with a strong multicultural character, MAICh's interconnection with the local community is a major component of academic and research activities, and welcomes initiatives promoting volunteer activities and community service. MAICh welcomes opportunities that make its multicultural character visible in the town.

Today the students of MAICh spent their afternoon preparing meals for the town's Community Kitchen. In the early evening, they distributed it to those in most need.
Posted by Maria Verivaki on Friday, 1 April 2016

Through this voluntary action, both MAICh and the students wanted to express their effective support for the work done by the Social Kitchen, their sympathy and solidarity with the underprivileged residents of our city. In the undoubtedly difficult times that we are living in, every citizen deserves the necessary support to allow them to live a dignified life. In this way, MAICh participated in and strengthened social structures based on the principles of collective responsibility and self-organization engaged in satisfying inalienable human rights, such as access to good nutrition.

Together with the MAICh chef Mr Yanis Apostolakis, the students organised themselves in small groups to provide help in the preparation of the meal, always in collaboration with the MAICh kitchen staff.

A decision was made to pack the portions individually, unlike last year when the pots full of food were taken to the Social Kitchen and distributed there. This indivudalisation of the portions added some cost and waste to the meal (in the form of packaging), but it was done with very good reason, in the belief that an individually wrapped meal will give some dignity to the recipients of the meal, so that they can take it away with them to eat in the comfort and privacy of the place they call home.

The Social Kitchen operates daily in Hania on a volunteer basis. Various people in the community prepare and cook meals in their homes, and take them to the Social Kitchen at serving time. Others collect food and ingredients which can be shared out to the recipients or used in the prepared meals. MAICh's contribution was made in the same way. When the time came for the food to be distributed, the students helped to load the food into the vehicles, and then to unload them at the Social Kitchen. It is not the Mediterranean way to provide cans and boxes of processed foods to feed the needy - people are given the same kind of food that people would prepare in their kitchens. Food banks also do not provide processed food to recipients of the scheme - they are more likely to be given the ingredients needed to cook a 'proper' meal (see: http://www.organicallycooked.com/2013/10/food-bank-community-grocery.html).

Recipients of the meals know when the Social Kitchen operates, and the students watched in trepidation as they arrived. Who are the poor of Hania? What do they look like? Why are they poor in such a food-rich society? For some of the meal recipients, the migration dream did not turn out well for them; most of the meal recipients were foreigners. But there were also some older Greeks, people who have ended up alone in their older age, people who do not make enough income to afford the necessities of life, people with a roof over their head but perhaps no power supply, people that lack the skills necessary to be able to look after themselves completely. The descent to personal chaos has many forms, and each case is unique. But the Social Kitchen is not there to question or judge; it simply provides a service that is needed, without any strings attached. It is not affiliated to any religious group.

The students of MAICh were surprised to realise that many of the recipients of the meals were in fact Middle Eastern/North Africans/Eastern Europeans like themselves. Most of this year's intake of MAICh students speak  Arabic. Some come from Lebanon, a country with a refugee population ratio of 1:3 - Lebanon's population is around 4.5 million and it has 1.5 million registered refugees in the country which is roughly a little larger in size than the island of Crete (which has a permanent population of about 600,000). Some come from Palestine - Palestinians make up 600,000 of Lebanon's registered refugees. It is obvious that MAICh's students understand the refugee issue well.

The students regarded this event in a positive light, saying that they learnt a lot of things which they would not have known if they had not seen it for themselves. Poverty, homelessness and hunger are not always immediately visible, but we only need open our eyes to see what is happening and to be looking in the right places. The main thing is that almost everyone is in a position to help alleviate the effects of such situations, in their own personal way.

Κοινωνική Κουζίνα Χανίων – ΜΑΡΙΑ ΒΕΡΙΒΑΚΗ, ΚΑΘΗΓΗΤΡΙΑ ΑΓΓΛΙΚΩΝ, ΜΑΙΧ

Η φτώχεια, η έλλειψη στέγης και η πείνα είναι καταστάσεις οι οποίες εμφανίζονται όλο και  συχνότερα στο σύγχρονο κόσμο, ίσως για να μας θυμίσουν πως η ανάπτυξη της τεχνολογίας δεν αρκεί για την καταπολέμησή τους.

Στα Χανιά, μέχρι σήμερα, τα φαινόμενα αυτά δεν είχαν λάβει μεγάλη έκταση (όπως σε άλλες  μεγαλουπόλεις της Ευρώπης). Ωστόσο,  υπάρχουν πάντα 'τμήματα' μέσα στην κοινωνία μας που χρειάζονται περισσότερη βοήθεια απ’ ότι άλλοι άνθρωποι, έχοντας φτάσει σε οριακό σημείο, για διάφορους λόγους που δεν μπορούν εύκολα να εξηγηθούν. Πολλές φορές,  τα προβλήματα που αυτοί οι άνθρωποι αντιμετωπίζουν, τους αναγκάζουν να ζητήσουν βοήθεια στις δύσκολες περιστάσεις που βιώνουν.

Είναι αυτονόητο, βέβαια ότι δεν χρειάζεται να πεινάσει κανείς σε μια κοινωνία όπως τα Χανιά όπου είναι πλούσια σε τρόφιμα, όπως και στην Κρήτη γενικότερα. Μία από τις εθελοντικές οργανώσεις  που βοηθούν προς αυτή την κατεύθυνση αυτή είναι η Κοινωνική Κουζίνα Χανίων, στην οποία λειτουργεί ένα μικρό συσσίτιο στο κέντρο της πόλης στην οδό Τσουδερών.

Την Παρασκευή 1η Απριλίου 2016, οι μεταπτυχιακοί φοιτητές του ΜΑΙΧ σε συνεργασία με τον Σεφ του Ινστιτούτου και Πρόεδρο του Δικτύου Κρητικής Γαστρονομίας, ετοίμασαν ένα γεύμα (150 μερίδες), που πρόσφεραν στην Κοινωνική Κουζίνα Χανίων. Το Ινστιτούτο και οι μεταπτυχιακοί φοιτητές του, μέσω της εθελοντικής αυτής δράσης θέλουν να εκφράσουν την έμπρακτη στήριξή τους στο έργο της Κοινωνικής Κουζίνας, τη συμπαράσταση και αλληλεγγύη τους προς τους άπορους κατοίκους της πόλης μας. Είναι η δεύτερη χρονιά που η εκδήλωση αυτή έλαβε χώρα.

Στις αναμφισβήτητα δύσκολες εποχές που ζούμε, αξίζει να υποστηρίζουμε, να συμμετέχουμε και να ενισχύουμε κοινωνικές δομές που βασίζονται στις αρχές της συλλογικότητας της αλληλεγγύης και της αυτό-οργάνωσης που δραστηριοποιούνται στην ικανοποίηση των αναφαίρετων δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου, όπως η σίτιση, εργασία, παιδεία, υγεία. Άλλωστε, το ΜΑΙΧ, ένα διεθνές μεταπτυχιακό Ινστιτούτο με έντονο πολυπολιτισμικό χαρακτήρα, αντιμετωπίζει τη διασύνδεση του με την τοπική κοινωνία ως κύριο συστατικό των ακαδημαϊκών και ερευνητικών του δραστηριοτήτων και χαιρετίζει πρωτοβουλίες και δράσεις εθελοντισμού και κοινωνικής προσφοράς. Με τον τρόπο αυτό, το ΜΑΙΧ συμμετέχει και ενισχύει τις κοινωνικές δομές που βασίζονται στις αρχές της συλλογικής ευθύνης που ασχολούνται με την ικανοποίηση των αναφαίρετων δικαιωμάτων του ανθρώπου, όπως είναι η πρόσβαση στην σωστή διατροφή.

Μαζί με τον Σεφ του ΜΑΙΧ, κ Γιάννη Αποστολάκη, οι φοιτητές οργανώθηκαν σε μικρές ομάδες για να παρέχουν βοήθεια στην προετοιμασία του γεύματος, πάντα σε συνεργασία με το προσωπικό της κουζίνας του ΜΑΙΧ. Αποφασίστηκε να συσκευαστεί το γεύμα σε  ξεχωριστές μερίδες,  με την πεποίθηση ότι μια ατομική συσκευασία γεύματος μπορεί να δώσει κάποια αξιοπρέπεια στους αποδέκτες του, με την έννοια ότι  θα μπορέσουν να το πάρουν μαζί τους για να το φάνε σε ένα δικό τους χώρο, όπου θα υπάρχει άνεση και ιδιωτικότητα, ένα οικείο περιβάλλον που για αυτούς αποτελεί το σπίτι τους.

Η Κοινωνική Κουζίνα λειτουργεί καθημερινά στα Χανιά σε εθελοντική βάση. Διάφοροι άνθρωποι  προετοιμάζουν και μαγειρεύουν τα γεύματα στα σπίτια τους, και μετά τα μεταφέρουν στην Κοινωνική Κουζίνα την ώρα που γίνεται η διανομή. Άλλοι συλλέγουν τρόφιμα και συστατικά που μπορεί να διανεμηθούν στους δικαιούχους ή να  χρησιμοποιηθούν στην ετοιμασία γευμάτων. Η συνεισφορά του ΜΑΙΧ έγινε με παρόμοιο τρόπο. Όταν ήρθε η ώρα να διανεμηθεί το φαγητό, οι φοιτητές βοήθησαν να φορτώσουν τα πακέτα στα οχήματα, και στη συνέχεια να τα πάνε στην Κοινωνική Κουζίνα. Δεν είναι στο πνεύμα του Μεσογειακών λαών να παρέχουν κονσέρβες και κουτιά επεξεργασμένων τροφίμων για να ταΐζονται οι άποροι. Είναι πιο ανθρώπινο και σίγουρα συνυφασμένο με την κουλτούρα μας να προσφέρουμε το ίδιο είδος φαγητού που και εμείς θα προετοιμάζαμε στις κουζίνες μας.

Οι παραλήπτες των γευμάτων ξέρουν τις ώρες που λειτουργεί η Κοινωνική Κουζίνα, και οι  φοιτητές τους παρακολούθησαν όπως έφταναν. Ποιοι είναι άραγε οι άποροι των Χανίων; Γιατί δεν έχουν να φάνε σε μια τέτοια κοινωνία πλούσια σε τρόφιμα και υλικά αγαθά; Για μερικούς από τους αποδέκτες τους γεύματος, το όνειρο της μετανάστευσης δεν πήγε καλά. Οι περισσότεροι από τους παραλήπτες ήταν αλλοδαποί. Αλλά υπήρχαν και Έλληνες, άνθρωποι που έχουν καταλήξει μόνοι τους στη ζωή, άνθρωποι που ίσως δεν έχουν αρκετά έσοδα για να ανταποκριθούν στις ανάγκες της καθημερινότητας, άνθρωποι που μένουν σε σπίτια που μοιάζουν σαν τα δικά μας, αλλά ίσως δεν έχουν πια παροχή ηλεκτρικού ρεύματος λόγω χρεών, άνθρωποι που στερούνται τις δεξιότητες που είναι απαραίτητες για να μπορούν να φροντίσουν τον εαυτό τους. Η πορεία του κάθε ανθρώπου στο προσωπικό χάος που ζει έχει πολλές μορφές, και η κάθε περίπτωση είναι μοναδική. Αλλά ο ρόλος της Κοινωνικής Κουζίνας δεν είναι ρόλος δικαστή, δεν κρίνει, δεν αμφισβητεί.  Απλώς παρέχει μια υπηρεσία που είναι απαραίτητη, χωρίς δεσμεύσεις. Δεν είναι συνδεδεμένη με καμιά θρησκευτική ομάδα, εθνότητα, χρώμα και φυλή.

Οι φοιτητές του ΜΑΙΧ έμειναν έκπληκτοι όταν συνειδητοποίησαν ότι, εκτός από Έλληνες, αρκετοί από τους παραλήπτες των γευμάτων ήταν από την Μέση Ανατολή, την Βόρεια Αφρική και την Ανατολική Ευρώπη. Δηλαδή προέρχονταν από τις  ίδιες χώρες με αυτές των φοιτητών! Αρκετοί φοιτητές του ΜΑΙΧ μιλούν αραβικά. Μερικοί έρχονται από το Λίβανο, μια χώρα με αναλογία προσφύγων  1: 3 - ο πληθυσμός του Λιβάνου είναι περίπου 4,5 εκατομμύρια ενώ υπάρχουν 1,5 εκατομμύριο εγγεγραμμένοι πρόσφυγες στη χώρα αυτή που είναι περίπου λίγο μεγαλύτερη σε μέγεθος από την Κρήτη. Μερικοί έρχονται επίσης από την Παλαιστίνη - οι Παλαιστίνιοι συνθέτουν αριθμό 600.000 επί των   εγγεγραμμένων προσφύγων του Λιβάνου. Είναι προφανές ότι οι φοιτητές του ΜΑΙΧ έχουν καλή κατανόηση του προσφυγικού θέματος.

Οι φοιτητές αποκόμισαν πολλά από την προετοιμασία της προσφοράς αυτή. Ήταν γι’ αυτούς μια εμπειρία μοναδική με ιδιαίτερη συναισθηματική φόρτιση.  Η φτώχεια, η έλλειψη στέγης και η πείνα δεν είναι πάντα άμεσα ορατά, αλλά το μόνο που χρειάζεται κανείς για να τα δει είναι να ανοίξει τα μάτια του για να δει τι συμβαίνει και να αναζητήσει τρόπους για να επιλυθούν τα προβλήματα. Το σημαντικότερο είναι ότι σχεδόν όλοι μας είμαστε σε θέση να συμβάλλουμε στην άμβλυνση των επιπτώσεων τέτοιων καταστάσεων, με το δικό μας προσωπικό τρόπο.

Learn more about the Social Kitchen of Hania - Μάθετε περισσότερα για την Κοινωνική Κουζίνα Χανίων:
website/ιστοσελίδα - http://koinonikikoyzina.blogspot.gr/
facebook - http://www.facebook.com/%CE%9A%CE%BF%CE%B9%CE%BD%CF%89%CE%BD%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AE-%CE%9A%CE%BF%CF%85%CE%B6%CE%AF%CE%BD%CE%B1-%CE%A7%CE%B1%CE%BD%CE%AF%CF%89%CE%BD-386558588039898/

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Exiting the euro

There's no fear of exiting from the euro, especially when you don't have any. This is a translation of a conversation (as it appeared in protagon) overheard on a bus.

The bus was empty when two men entered it carrying plastic bags. Wearing clothes that looked like they had been through heavy use, their faces looking down towards the floor, unshaven to a degree of resignation - forget about a bus ticket... One was fifty and not much more, the other sixty and not quite. They sat in the seats right behind me and started chatting conspiratorially, in whispers, but my eavesdropping self turned on his antennas: 

"- He sucked the faith out of us, till he gave us those bags ... A fine worm that monkey was after all at St N--... 

- Yes, damn him... pauper's certificate, unemployed certificate, certificate after certificate and more bullshit ... But you know us, you karagiozi, I wanted to tell him... Nothing has changed. 

- I sent the wife last time and he didn't give her anything ... He'll be requesting a passport soon. 

- So much for the Benevolence Association - rice, pasta and toilet paper ... 

My donations of food parcels periodically to the local food banks look like this one.

- Meropi told me about an organisation in the centre ... I don't remember the name ... one of those quirky ones, ending in –ιs. They hand out oil, she tells me. 

-  Fuck it, if only, but ... If we wait for the the commissioner at St. N-- ... They hand out oil only at Christmas. Try to find out where this place is, you never know ... 

- She says... You know, she doesn't say anything unless she's seen it for herself. 

- Maybe it's one of those coupon bullshit jobs like the other time? What can I do with a 30% discount, when I don't have the 70% to start with? 

- What can I say?… Let's see what St K-- will give ... from Monday … 

- At least there, the Benevolence Association lasses are a little thick, the priest's a bit of a halva, and they don't ask for too many docs …

- Are you coming to the soup kitchen tomorrow?

- I don't know if I will be able to make it, I wanted to go first to the neighbourhood laiki (street market) when it closes … And anyway, by the time I walk from the kitchens to my house, carrying the plastic tub with the hot food, it's become ice-cream.

- I was thinking of giving you the extra packets of lentils, 3 half-kilo packs, and you can give me the kritharaki (orzo pasta rice). 

- Yeah, let's do it … that's a good swap… It's a shame to waste it, especially since the kritharaki tends to get wormy if it its kept a long time … I've got five, no wait, maybe six packets, I can't remember. Anyway, how much more boiled pulp can we take?

- Lentils with no oil, on the other hand …

- You can make lentil salad, with a bit of lemon…

- Ah, gourmet dining… If you're around until four, I'll be there and we can do the swap..."

My stop was coming up, so I got off my seat, stealing a glance at the two men as I left the bus. "No fear of the country exiting from the euro" reads a newspaper headline hanging on the kiosk near my stop.  

Have you seen worms in pasta and rice packets? They float to the top when you boil them, so they can easily be skimmed off the top of the pot. (As for flour, a sieve normally does the trick - before you intend to use it, of course.) 

©All Rights Reserved/Organically cooked. No part of this blog may be reproduced and/or copied by any means without prior consent from Maria Verivaki.

Newly impoverished (Πρόσφατα εξαθλιωμένος)

The bell at the village church was tolling in mourning mode. This is the first sign to most of us that someone in the area has died. The funeral service was for an old woman who had been bedridden for a while. One could call it a 'happy' funeral, of a person who died in old age, having been through the whole cycle of life as Greeks often know it: prosperity, descendants and a life surrounded by the love of one's family. The funeral gave us a chance to catch up with neighbours who we do not see very often. In the dearth of winter, we are all trying to keep our heads above water by staying inside the warmth our homes can offer, and we rarely venture out unless we have jobs to do.

I didn't recognise Mattheos immediately - it had been at least a year since I last saw him, and maybe two years before that. Our lives never really had much in common, apart from my husband's line of work (he owned a taxi but did not operate it) but every now and then, we bump into each other, on occassions like these. But this time, I mistook Mattheos for a very old man who had not slept in a proper bed for many weeks. His face was gaunt and hollow, he looked depressed, and his vision was more of a gazing stupor.

"How's it going, Mattheo?" my husband greeted him cautiously, aware that something was not quite right.

"How can it be going?" he replied, puffing nervously on his cigarette. "No one can work out where things are going these days. But when you're surviving on your mother's €400 monthly pension, it certainly isn't going ahead." His reply did not hide his own fate. It was shocking to hear Mattheos speak like this; we had known him in much better times, when he was living with something like a personal €4000 monthly income.

"€400? But what about your rental income?" my husband prodded him a bit more.

"Rental income? Oh, that's over. Who pays rent these days?" To a certain extent, Mattheos has a point. Tenants don't always pay up because they don't always have the money to pay. To avoid payment, they may abscond and change address. Those that stick it out are always owing in arrears. And even if landlords ask them to leave or get them evicted, who will come after them to take their place? So Mattheos' apartment block - built by his father - is now a white elephant and a costly one at that.

"But weren't you taking that businessman to court over non-payment?" Mattheos had once discussed with us taking the tenant of the ground floor to court because he had not been paying him. Many apartment blocks in Greece are often built in such a way that the ground floor is some kind of store/firm while the other flats are homes.

"Oh, that," Mattheos replied slowly. "Well, to get to court, I need to pay the lawyer €2000 to continue with the case... but I really can't afford that now." He sounded lost, as if he could not believe that this fate should have befallen him.

"Are your tenants at least paying the property tax?" This tax is tacked onto the electricity bill; the tenants of homes are still paying that on behalf of the landlord, but it is deducted from the rent.

"Well... I don't know," Mattheos said. He had already lost count of the expenses that he had to maintain and he was beginning to show signs of not understanding the situation he now found himself in.

"But your father had left you some money, hadn't he?"

"Oh, that's all gone now," Mattheos said, shaking his head. "If you keep withdrawing and you aren't making an income, then eventually, it all runs out." Mattheos' father was a hard-working family man. Over the years, he had amassed a small fortune working a licensed delivery truck, and had built a small apartment block with 4-6 flats in each one, on each of two sections of land that he had bought as he worked, earned and saved. These were inherited by his children, one for each of them, as well as some money he had put aside for a rainy day, which never seemed to come, because Mattheos' father never stopped working, even when he retired and gave up the truck work. The truck license was converted to a taxi licence by Mattheos, while his father continued to maintain the family land, inherited plots covered with olive trees, vineyards and orange trees.

"Well," my husband said, realising that the conversation was not leading to a good ending, "you must have plenty of time to spend working on the fields." My husband knew that Mattheos had given up working the taxi a long time ago; he didn't really need to work, in essence because he had rents coming in, and since he hadn't created his own family, but continued to live with his parents in their modest home (compared to the apartments they had built), he didn't really have many expenses. Most of the money he made from the rents went on maintaining an expensive car, hunting trips and taverna meals. He had various girlfriends from time to time, but no relationship lasted very long. Mattheos had inherited quite a lot of olive trees and sometimes sold the produced oil to the olive press. In fact, we had bought olive oil from Matthoes' father when he was alive, at a time when our olive trees were not producing enough olives: our fields had burnt to the roots of the trees, but eventually sprang back to life, after two decades of being carefully nurtured and tended, so we don't need to olive oil any now, as we can exist on our own supplies.

"Oh, I haven't worked the fields in the last three years," Mattheos replied. "I leased them out to another farmer because I got tired of packing 20-kilo sacks on my back."

"Ι see.. so I suppose you get a share of the harvest for your own needs?" My husband was trying to sympathise with him, as he knew what back-breaking work olive harvesting is. We don't do it ourselves, as we are both working, and we are very happy with our hired help, an Albanian family living permanently int he area. They get a share of the produce in lieu of payment, which they can then sell or keep. As they harvest many land-owners' fields, they often sell it.

"Well, this year, there won't be any olives to harvest, because our fields cropped last year." Olives bear in alternate years, which is why we needed to buy olive oil when we ran out of the year's harvest. But in the last two harvests, the trees bore enough olive oil for us to keep for two years until the trees bear again. Cretans generally use olive oil that is up to 2 years old for this reason, despite what the most learned olive oil expert will tell you, that olive oil loses its quality after 18 months. (This is true, as it is of any stored product - το ίδιο που μας κάνει: Cretans continue to use their own oil supplies like they did in the past, without any fear of loss of quality. If that is all you have, that is all you use.)

"Well, I needed to sell the oil last year to make ends meet, what with the new taxes and all that other shit we've been loaded with, so I don't have any oil left at the moment. I suppose I'll be buying some cooking oil soon, maybe when my mother picks up her pension next month." If Mattheos is living off his mother's pension, I guess he's ruined. Eventually we said goodbye to him, and left the funeral ourselves. He did not drive off in his luxury car, and I wondered if he still owned it, or at least maintained the costs needed to run it. We saw him driving off on a motorbike, his mother sitting behind him on the side.

In a nutshell, Mattheos once had a lot of money to play with. So he stopped working, and just played. He must have felt extremely rich to not be able to feel the need to look after anything he owned, as if there were a bottomless pit full of money that he was drawing from that would last him a lifetime, and he could just toss away what he didn't need, or not cover the pit for fear that some notes may fly out when it got windy. Now he may feel as though he is being defrauded by the state because it continues to ask for money in the form of property taxes, money which Mattheos is clearly not making, nor is he able to pay his dues to the state.

Matthoes is typical of the newly impoverished Greek: just like Mattheos, many Greeks find themselves in similar situations for various reasons, the main one being that when they had had a lot of money, they were not adequately educated about how to keep it or make it grow. They were not taught how to invest it to make it work for them them in the future; maybe the future did not worry or interest them, as the present once seemed as good as it could get. The main problem for these Greeks now is that they face the prospect of sliding into lawlessness as their debts accrue. No one is immune from irregularities, as the recent arrest of a former Greek minister of transport shows: he was caught driving with fake licence plates on a luxury car, which he couldn't afford to maintain now that he is a pensioner; despite having 28 properties to his name (he is related to two former prime ministers), he is now subject to hefty luxury and property taxes (supposedly when he returns from his Christmas holidays in Kuala Lumpur - he didn't even show up at the trial the other day). So he de-registered the car from use, stopped taking out insurance on it, but couldn't bear to part with it, and drove it illegally. He was detected by police during routine checks while driving through a red traffic light.

Πριν κάποια χρόνια αγόρασα το σεμνo και ταπεινo jeep που βλέπετε στις φωτογραφίες. Μου στοίχισε περίπου 100.000 ευρώ, αλλά τότε έβγαζα από μίζeς και bonus στο Υπoυργeίo μας δεκάδες χιλιάδες ευρώ κάθε μήνα. Τώρα είμαι ένας απλός συνταξιούχος, με λίγα μετρητά στη τράπεζα και μόλις 28 ακίνητα στο όνομά μου. Αυτό δεν μου επιτρέπει να κυκλοφορώ με 4.200cc και να πληρώνω 1350 ευρώ τέλη κυκλοφορίας ανά έτος, αλλά και άλλα 1000 ευρώ ασφάλεια και εκατοντάδες ευρώ για σέρβις. Αποφάσισα μετά τη χθεσινή μου περιπέτεια να πουλήσω το αυτοκίνητό μου όσο όσο για να πληρώσω τα πρόστιμα αλλά και τα δικαστικά έξοδα από τη σύλληψή μου με πλαστές πινακίδες, ασφάλεια και χωρίς δίπλωμα. Είναι σκληρός ο αποχωρισμός μου από το αγαπημένο μου Touareg αλλά δεν μπορώ να κάνω αλλιώς. Έχω κάνει το σκaτo μου παξιμάδι και πιστέψτε με θα μου στοιχίσει που θα το δώσω, αλλά έτσι είναι η ζωή. Πληρώνουμε τα λάθη μας. (This 'ad' for a used car appeared in www.car.gr/4485155 three days ago - the entry was deleted as soon as it was detected. It translates reasonably well.)

Financial security ruins you, as Nigella Lawson once said, which is why she doesn't want to leave her kids too much to inherit. She knows what she's talking about: she had so much money to burn that she herself would leave it on the toilet cistern. I suppose that if she ran out of toilet paper, she could use the paper notes instead, as money meant so little to her. The perception people have of an idea perpetuates the idea, a bit like a brand - once that idea is challenged and people's perceptions of it change, the brand collapses, with little to take its place.

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Itinerant (Επαίτης)

Last Saturday morning, I came across this array of people in the town.

Once you move past the Agora in the town centre (where all distance measurements start from in Hania), you tend to be surrounded by a variety of people whose purpose to be on the road does not always seem clear. There are beggars, peddlers and traders of all sorts, people who ask you for a cigarette or your spare coins, others who wander in and out of shops telling the same old story, holding perhaps some cigarette lighters, pens and paper napkins for sale, and still others who don't open their mouths to speak to you or anyone else, but they speak instead with their eyes. As an orchestrated group of wandering vagrants, their visibility smacks of crisis, but it pays to remember that they were there before the crisis too; their actions may look crisis-related, but before the crisis, perhaps they were simply regarded as an oddity, whereas now they serve to remind us of how easy it is to fall into the trap of unemployment, hardship, poverty and homelessness.

We don't always look at the man in the dirty clothes sitting on a doorstep with his hands hidden in his hands, a cup set in front of him to catch the passersby's coins, even though we walk right past him, and we sense his presence. He's a common sight but he isn't original. The Charlie Chaplin make-up hides the identity of another beggar, but his purpose is all the same as the man wearing the dirty clothes. Yes, he has talent; but he's not on TV where he should be. He's out of place in a Mediterranean Greek seaside resort town. Personally I wonder what brought out the modestly dressed woman carrying a heavy bag on her shoulder, walking among all the outdoor diners seated on the footpath who are having a drink or eating souvlaki. "She looks just like me," I might say to myself, as I try to imagine her with children to feed, clothe and home (maybe they are waiting for her at home), as I watch her holding up cigarette lighters, pens and paper napkins, which she hopes to exchange for some coins. She is not a beggar; she has something to sell you, something that you think you might need, and she won't just take your money - she'll make you take something for it. 

But it may occur to you that none of these itinerants asks you directly for food; they only ask for money. Are they not hungry? They must be eating something if they are still on their feet. So, what do they eat? The man in the dirty clothes looks as though he only wants a smoke and some alcohol, perhaps to forget that he is hungry; Charlie Chaplin looks like a stick figure - he has to, to fit into his costume - so he doesn't need to eat much in the first place, and the lady selling the cigarette lighters, pens and paper napkins looks well-rounded, indicating that she is well-fed, leading one to believe that if she is indeed a mother, she is probably on a hi-carb food bank diet. Their food needs catered for, they are after something else. None of them need food. 

Beggars have always been a steady part of city life through the ages - the one pictured in the postcard is shown outside St Sophia in Constantinople, about a century ago.

Where do they sleep, these people? The man with the dirty clothes is probably sleeping on the floor in his clothes - that's why they're dirty. Charlie Chaplin seems to fare better - he's got to keep his costume in good nick, and he needs to wash his face, unliek the dirty man whose apparel suits the unwashed look. And the modestly dressed lady - she's clean and tidy, she's got a home to go to. No, it's neither the rent nor the food that my fellow townspeople need. They want to do something else with that money. We may have other priorities, but at least we are not hungry. And if it is a light winter, we will not get too cold.

I don't much go into the town these days, unless I really, really need to. Country life is so much more coveted these days. 

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Selling expired food (Ληγμένα)

I could be sleeping at this hour, but Persephone is still around - there's a really noisy party going on at our neighbour's house, including a live band (no crisis in that house, obviously). The musicians aren't very good (even though they think they are), which helps me to disconnect - even though I can;t sleep, I can still read and write.  

Due to a busy afternoon at work ploughing through translations, I bought a sandwich for lunch so I could stay at my desk. The lady at the kiosk asked me if I had taken the sandwich from the countertop. I told her I took it from the fridge, as that's where I thought sandwiches were kept, to ensure 'freshness'. 

"Oh, those were yesterday's," she told me, "the fresh ones are here on the counter." So I took a fresh one out of politeness, because I almost felt obliged to; if you were given a choice between fresh and not-so-fresh, you'd have done the same, I suppose. Except perhaps if there was a difference in price. I was too embarrassed to ask; I just paid the 1.60 euro for the sandwich (and 1.50 euro for the freddo coffee, because a Greek crusty baguette-style sandwich just has to have something liquidy to make it go down), and was just about to go back to the office when the local paper's first-page headline caught my attention: "NO" to expired products, it announced.

Last month, the government announced that it would allow the sale of heavily discounted 'recently expired' food goods in supermarkets under strict terms, but local supermarkets in Hania refuse to sell them, while a survey conducted in the town reported that people are totally against their sale for various reasons: "I won't risk it", "Why should I buy it?", "They are useless", "Those who invented this measure can eat them", "I have had all the necessary vaccinations", "They want to get rid of products they can't otherwise sell", "They want to get rid of what has been left over", "I always check expiry dates", "I'd rather pay more", "They should reduce the prices on all products."

The funny thing is that the day before, my mother-in-law had specifically asked me to buy some ληγμένο (lig-ME-no, meaning 'expired') rice and pasta so she could boil them together with some bones which she had put aside for our pets. We usually give them the leftovers from our own meals - both our dog and cats eat vegetarian food, preferring it to the petfood we buy for those just-in-case times when we run out of 'real' food (of course, they are also very partial to meat when they can get it). 

Even without reading yesterday's local paper, I knew that ligmena would not be available in our supermarkets. It's a very provocative measure for a start. Imagine a special area designated in the supermarket for 'off' food. Would you want to be seen there while next to you, people are looking at the not-off fodd? Not that it hasn't been done by supermarkets before: products that are about to expire are often marked down with a heavy discount. But they don't get placed in specially designatied areas! I've bought them myself - they are usually products I would not normally buy which I would have liked to try but the regular price was stopping me (eg specialty sausages made by regional food cooperatives). I've also bought flour that's about to expire - of course, I used it past its expiry date because I bought all the packets on the shelf and wouldn't have used it all up by the end of the expiry date, but there was never anything really wrong with it in the first place, and it never felt 'off' when I used it. In fact, if you are baking with expired flour, anything that might possibly have been regarded as a spoiling factor in food would have been killed off given the high heat it was cooked in. 

So the real reason for the local supermarkets' decision not to sell expired food is that this is real sign of poverty for the consumer on the one hand, and a desperate measure to make a small profit for the supermarket by using the poor on the other. If you're shopping at a supermarket in the outer suburbs of a Mediterranean summer tourist resort town, it's doubtful that you will be in a position to need to make such choices. There are very money-poor people around - I know some myself - but when it comes to food choices, they are still able to eat better food than expired food. Not that expired food products should be treated with disdain - they are simply not preferred. Beingso poor that you need to buy this kind of food is just too embarassing. 

Even though I knew that there would be no expired products to buy on the cheap, I still had to buy some rice and pasta for my mother-in-law; I also knew that she would question my chocie if the packet looked like 'regular' rice/pasta ("Why didn't you buy the ligmena, Maria? It's just for the animals") so I decided to cheat a little. I bought the cheapest rice and pasta in the store, stuff that is packaged as a private label, and is often an imported product. I bought her some rice and pasta that I would never buy to cook our meals with because I've tried them before, and I know for a fact that they did not cook in the same way that I expected them to cook. They had turned sludgy, ruining the texture of my meals. Hence, I had deemed them inappropriate. Food goods don't have to be expired to be bad, nor do they need to be cheap. But cheap food need not be low quality either.

Most people either do not realise or have conveniently forgotten that once upon a time, in Crete's and the world's (relatively) recent past, there were no expiry dates on food products. People used their intuition to work out if food was good or bad. With fresh fruit and vegetables, meat and fish, your eyes and nose told you immediately if it was still good to eat; those which do not look appetising are still made use of in different ways (eg jams for fruit, and soup stock for vegetables). Dry foods sometimes got bug-ridden, but most housewives knew how to sift the bad stuff out of the good. Frozen foods were often forgotten in some dark corner of the open-top freezers, but they were eventually used anyway - what could possibly have gone wrong with them in their icy stiff state? Tinned foods hardly ever go off - and highly processed foods are so full of preservatives that it's hard for them to go off.

The reason why we have expiry dates is, of course, to protect us. Unscrupulous food traders may have had some products lying around their storage spaces for a long time, waiting to be be sold. Without expiry dates, we would be sold stale food products when there is plenty of fresher food readily available. But this is also what has led urban people to rely on expiry dates when deciding what food is good and what food is bad. And we all know how wasteful people can be when it comes to making such choices. So much food is thrown away because people rely on expiry dates rather than on true evidence that a food product has gone off.

I personally would buy certain types of ligmena, as long as they were super cheap. I don't have expiry dates on my garden-grown products (I know when they have gone off due to their appearance/smell), or my home-made jams and tomato sauces, or the meat that I freeze when I buy it directly from a farmer, and I always bulk-buy flour, sugar, pasta, rice and beans, and I always use them up without checking the date. When cheese goes mouldy, I always scrape off the mouldy bits - it doesn't just get hiffed. Expiry dates have their purpose, but most people have actually forgotten what their purpose was. So has the food industry when they print different sell-by, use-by and expires-by dates on a product. It confuses the customer, and it makes them rely on expiry dates to deem if something is suitable for consumption - it is so much easier to simply chuck something out and buy some more to replace it...

My initial reaction to the local people surveyed in Hania that were included in the newspaper report was that they were not actually poor, nor were they not educated enough to know that ligmena need not necessarily be bad food; they were often citing politically motivated reasons for being against the sale of expired food products. If we were very worried about money, we would be looking for these bargains; then again, why don't the supermarkets just give all their ready-to-expire products to the charities providing food for needy people? I'm sure they would appreciate them.

Yesterday's issue of the local newspaper also contained this month's brochure for the specials at the local supermarket. A lot of the food offers was of the highly processed packaged kind: biscuits, pizzas, salami, ready pies, chocolate powder, coffee, etc. Now that is the kind of food that I would have no worries about buying on special discount as expired products. Such food items are full of preservatives, they are generally overpriced to begin with and they are items I never buy. If I could buy an expired medium-sized pizza, for instance, at 1 euro, I would do it. Seriously, food full of preservatives never really goes off...

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Semi-rural very poor

Most of my extended Greek family in Crete is, by western standards, 'rural poor', which often means that they live in a rudimentary kind of house, living off a small income made by selling their own produce, combined with a pension of some sort if they are senior citizens; their daily routine involves subsistence farming to a certain extent. My parents came from such a category of people.

My remaining Cretan family is, according to western standards again, mainly 'urban skilled upper working class-lower middle class' - the men are employed in some kind of trade (eg mechanic, engineer) while their wives may or may not work outside the home. Most of those that work outside the home are not insured, while the others are often registered as 'farmer', due to the pension scheme they belong to (people who own some kind of land - usually having inherited it - and live in the countryside can be registered as farmers, paying into the OGA pension scheme for health insurance purposes). Then there are my Athenian relatives, who were always very difficult to classify because the western social class classification system never really applied for them anyway (Greece has never really had an established middle class). These days, in the pervading socio-political climate, it is even harder to classify them into established social strata - their property ownership does not match their income or occupational status.

The worst thing that can be said about the Greek bourgeoisie is that it doesn't exist. The Greek self-called 'aristocracy' are in reality the few real bourgeois - from well-to-do families. The nouveaux-bourgeois are in actual fact European-costumed (and bewildered) peasants. And the few remaining peasants are perhaps the only genuine Greeks. 

The word 'poor' does not have a standard global meaning; it all depends on what kind of country you are talking about: western industrialised, developing and undeveloped countries all have different definitions of poverty. Haridimos (H) and Yiouli (Y) are some of my poorest Cretan relatives with young children (the other poor ones no longer have dependent children). If I were to phrase the term in the Greek context, I would class H and Y as 'semi-rural very poor' (SRVP). They live in an urbanised village, which acts as a political centre for a large, predominantly rural area.

What does it mean to be SRVP in the Greek context? For a start, it doesn't mean that you go hungry. In Crete, that's hardly likely. Y keeps a garden in the back yard of their rented home and also raises chickens on inherited land. Secondly, to be SRVP does not necessarily entail debt; rural poor Greeks generally don't use loans, let alone credit cards. They are, generally speaking, money-poor and resource-rich. H's work has now been reduced to 2 or 3 days a week (alternately) at a small private enterprise. Y never really entered the work force; apart form irregular stints in cleaning and packing jobs, she has been, for the most part, a housewife.

On the question of their heritage, I would separate the Greeks into three categories - the aware, the semi-aware and the unaware. Those (very few) in the first category have first-hand knowledge. They have felt the awful burden of their heritage. They are aware of their ancestors' inhuman level of perfection in both word and form. And this crushes them... The second category (the majority) do not have direct knowledge. but they've 'heard say'. They are like the sons of the famous philosopher, who are unable to understand his works, but see that those who do know them respect them and prize them. It bothers them, yet the same fame flatters them. They always swell with pride - when talking to others... The third category - the unaware - are chaste and pure (meaning uneducated...) They've heard about the ancient Greeks in myths and legends that they have absorbed like popular folktales. It is these pure types who created the folk tradition and folk art. These alone lived without the anxiety of their heritage.

But SRVP does include notions often included in international standards that describe similarities among very poor people, eg 'low educational background'; neither H nor Y finished junior high school. H and Y also exhibit other features associated with the western notion of being very poor: they smoke a lot, they eat a lot (Y is now obese, which doesn't help her diabetes), and they like to drink, albeit their own home brew (but they are also food-and-drinkers - drinking is never just about the alcohol). They tend to have company on most nights at their home, or to be entertained in a similar way at someone else's home. They send their children to school, but admit they have problems keeping up with their schoolwork. They don't send them to extra-curricular activities, apart from afternoon English lessons (in Greece, private afternoon language lessons are generally regarded as just as compulsory as state school lessons - but special times call for special prices, and even these have fallen). They use the free public health services at all times, but don't necessarily maintain medical check-ups; dental work is delayed, postponed or simply cancelled, judging from Y's periodontitis, which the doctor blamed on her smoking (there are some habits you cannot stop, Y says). They don't own computers, and they don't have internet - this can be partly explained by the fact that they don't have a landline (to cut costs, they only have a cellphone, which is cheaper to maintain). They use one (old) car between them.

The wood-fired heater - knowing Y, she probably painted it to clean it up before she started using it.

Paying the rent is sometimes a struggle, Y told me, as H earns very little from his combined income from the (now) part-time job, together with some agriculture-related income (avocado and honey sales). They recently moved into a new rental home, because the previous landlord didn't want to lower their rent, nor would he let them drill holes into the walls to allow for the installation of a wood-fired heater. During the long harsh very cold winter of 2011-2012, they did not use heating oil (due to the high cost), and they had great trouble keeping themselves warm (the one electric radiator they had broke down). Their present ground-floor semi-detached home suffers in similar ways to other village houses: it is generally not well maintained, with cheap materials used in its construction. But the rent is cheaper, it is bigger and it contains a wood-fired heater (it came with the property), which uses the wood from their olive grove. Y uses it for all her cooking needs in the winter (it has both a top element and an oven). Holidays away from the island are non-existent of course, but they regularly go to the beach, treating themselves to a styrofoam coffee, and they visit friends and relatives on other parts of the island when the opportunity arises.

If anything goes really wrong, Y said, they can always move in with her mother in law, whose house is far from modern - it's more a cluster of rooms that don't connect with each other by a door, only by a wall. But it's a house with a roof, Y says, and it'll keep us dry and comfortable. Things can go wrong so easily, as the Greek saying forewarns: Υγεία πρώτ' απ'όλα. (Health before everything else.)

My recent visit to H and Y was on a happy occasion because Y had been asked by a neighbour to look after her toddler, now that childcare services have closed down for the remaining summer. It means a little extra money coming into the household to lighten the burden. I'll buy myself a new pair of flip-flops, Y said, laughing, as she showed me a hole in the pair she was wearing. We talked all night, over home-made 'fridge cake' (made with chocolate cream over custard cream, topped with jelly), crisp garden-fresh lightly salted cucumber and raki. We asked them to come over to our place one day too so that we can reciprocate their kindness. But my visit also left me with a sinking feeling of helplessness. H and Y can'o improve their lot; neither can the state help them at this period of time. There are hardly any state benefits available for the SRUP in Greece, apart from some tax relief (eg they don't pay property tax because they don't own a home, or any solidarity tax), a small family benefit and some kind of rent rebates.

Part of H's and Y's view - the neighbour's house isn't in a much better state than their own. The brown door is the main bathroom, an outside toilet next to the outdoor seating area, below the washing line.. The stark concrete walls are supporting columns that were built over the existing property to construct another level over the old house.

On the face of it, H and Y sound like other poor people around the world struggling to pay their bills. Cretan poverty could be said to be charactersed by an attempt to maintain a dignified lifestyle, in the same way that the very poor of the rural sector were raised in: the previous rural generation represents the transition in Greece from rural to semi-rural, when many villages were urbanised, or completely deserted as people moved from the countryside to the city. The Cretan poor still maintain and apply that set of skills, knowledge, practices and traditions involved in the Mediterranean lifestyle, which comprises diet to a large extent; many of these skills and traditions are centred around the way of growing, collecting and processing food, preparing and eating it communally. Bringing food from the landscape to the table, which encompasses the experience and transmission of this set of knowledge, involves a psychology that is inherent in the formation of the Mediterranean identity, ensuring the future of shared cultural heritage. Home cooking, whether using cheaply bought not-so-highly-processed ingredients or homegrown produce, is still a common practice.

The lack of any system in Greece prevented the proper development of even the class system. The abruptly urbanized peasant is the saddest creature in Greece. His life has completely degenerated. He has lost all his traditional patriarchal background – without having acquired anything in its place. Nor did the Greek bourgeois class have any tradition of note to offer him – and even if it had, a few thousand bourgeois couldn’t possibly absorb a few million peasants in the space of one generation. And so the urbanized peasant lives in a void... 

In the meantime, I can only offer a bit of help to H's and Y's kids in their English lessons, some short-term relief for a long-term problem. Some situations are irreversible.

All quotes taken from "On the Unhappiness of Being Greek", Nikos Dimou, 1975, reprinted in 2102, first in German, then English and French when writing about Greece and the Greeks came in vogue.

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Living below the line

You may have heard about Jack Munroe's story (from the UK) of how she found herself unemployed with a two year old son, with no food in her house. To save herself from losing her rented home, she began to sell everything in her house that she knew she didn't need, she turned off all the electricity that she felt she could do without and she had cold showers. She blogged about her life and her frugal recipes, documenting how she found food on the cheap, using the benefits she was paid until she found herself a job. 

Living do frugally is not easy, but Jack Munroe realised that with a young son to look after, if she did not prioritise and behave morally responsible, she would lose her home and no doubt her son. So she bought the healthiest food she could afford and she prepared home cooked meals for her and her son. Her story was highlighted in the BBC recently, and she has now been given a  £25,000 advance to write a recipe book. 

As I read more about her through her blog, I realised that she was motivated by her will to survive without complaining that she was not being given enough by the government to support herself and her son. I liked that about Jack: she wanted to show everyone that she was capable of standing up on her own two feet. We read a lot about people struggling on benefits, but mainly in the form of a whinge that they are not getting enough. Few people are bold enough to make public that they are trying to cope, even if it means they are going beyond the bearable. 

Jack's biggest problem was of course keeping her son and herself fed healthily on a daily basis. She was very frugal in her shopping purchases and never wasted any food. When her story became public knowledge, apart from the praise she received from some people congratulating her on her effort to make it through despite adversity, she was also castigated for her frugality, accepting a challenge to live off a pound a day on food, because many people believe that this is impossible. Sure it isn't nice, but life isn't always nice. It seems that there are some in society that take a dislike to frugal people because they are pretending to be modern-day martyrs. They even go so far as saying that frugal people who become famous for their modest lifestyle are actual;ly some form of government spy spreading state propaganda. 

When the BBC ran a series of recipes living on just £1 a day for five days, as part of a campaign by the Global Poverty Project, the article was rubbished by commentators who insisted that such a claim is untruthful because you can't compare prices between supermarkets because you won't be able to afford the transportation costs to do so, and you have to buy in bulk to eat so cheaply so you can't have spent only one pound a day but much more, and the food you buy in bulk will go offso you will throw it away, and the cooking costs are not included nor is the washing up, and so on, ad nauseum. These commentators made me realise just how prejudiced people are against frugal living which is simply not fashionable in a market-driven world where money is getting harder to come by. Excuses, excuses, excuses: maybe they don't like to hear about a person's frugal success story because it puts them in a bad light.

But that is the horrible truth about being frugal - you make do with what you have got, and you use things wisely. You don't necessarily buy in bulk and you may just chance on a frugal purchase when you are shopping. Why should food go off in the first place if you are storing it apporpriately? People who do not cook much or who have been taught to always check sell by dates are generally not well versed in home economics.

Don't we buy salt and pepper, sugar and flour, tea and coffee in bulk? Tinned and dry goods last a long time; vegetables last very well when properly stored; cheese can be stored safely too - meat and fish are the main problem, and frugal people avoid them anyway because they are the most expensive food items, or at least they eat them less often. When I'm preparing my own cheap frugal meals, they are virtually 'free' - eg eggs from my relatives, greens from the garden, frozen vegetables from our own harvests. But I appreciate that Jack Munroe (the blog writer in question) cannot do this. If I lived in an urban environment and I had those wacky supermarket offers that they have in the UK (they don't exist here), I would take a different approach to being frugal. My hosts during my recent trip to London created a good feast of a meal with organic chicken, roast potatoes in duck fat and salad for the six of us when we arrived, spending just 3 pounds - they know how to shop in the same way that Jack Monroe does. 

I'm not sure if the recipes that Jack posts on her blog could work out as cheaply for me as they did for her because we simply do not have those super-dooper discounts - but I would still supplement cheap store bought staples with my 'free' food (wild greens, herbs, fruit and veges) and my meals will cost just as little to produce. Last year, I ran a cheap'n'Greek'n'frugal section in my blog, where I proudly presented meals costing me on average 50 eurocents a serving. I was cooking for the whole family, doing just what Jack was doing: using what I had available cheaply to me to the best of my ability. 

Being frugal in this crazy money-driven world is not easy. But it can be done if you want. And if you hear of someone who tells you how they fed themselves on a home-cooked meal that cost them less than a dollar/euro/pound, they are probably not bragging: they are just saying "You can do it if you want".

Time for a blogging break so I can get over a bad case of tonsilitis and have a little rest over the holidays - I should be back by Easter Sunday.

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From Athens to Papakura by Nikos Petousis

There was a documentary recently broadcast on Greek TV, which presented a snapshot of the Greeks currently residing in NZ. I hesitate to say that it presented the Greek communities of NZ, because it was a rather disjointed programme. All in all, very interesting, as I saw some familiar faces, and heard some stories from the newcomers of Greek immigrants to NZ. It's not easy to go to NZ as a Greek, as some desperate people believe - you need to know the criteria very well for entry.

Because the programme did not present the Greek community as I knew it, I did not feel much nostalgia as I watched it (so far, it has been broadcast in two parts: you can see them here (for Part 1) and here (for Part 2) even though I had been born, raised and educated among this community. Only towards the end of the second part of the documentary was I moved in any way by the feelings expressed in the show, when Mr Nikos Petousis was interviewed.

Born in 1936 (only 1-3 years younger than my parents), he came to NZ in 1956. Greek immigrants at this time were often poorly educated, unskilled and often from rural backgrounds, making Mr Petousis an oddity for his time (the 1950s), as he explained in the documentary:

"I had just obtained my engineer's licence... I was ready to embrace the earth, the world, a 19-year old youth, with a diploma which I regarded as having a very important value, and my good luck finally brought me here, finally I had left Greece. And that is the thing: with a passion and the utter need to leave Athens, where would you go? No one really knew, a young person doesn't know where he's going to go, all the world feels like it belongs to him..."

Mr Petousis had expressed a higher need in Maslow's hierarchy of needs that he was looking to fulfil in his desire to leave Greece. This is not the same need that my parents had felt when they decided to migrate. My parents came to NZ to work in the jobs that New Zealanders didn't want to do (cleaning, factory work, cooking), whereas Mr Petousis was a trained professional looking to work in his field. It is this factor that differentiates Mr Petousis from most other migrants: he sought a new place to build a new life as a professional away from the grinding poverty of an urban warzone, whereas my parents left a rural environment as unskilled labourers to seek paid urban employment opportunities.

A quick internet search revealed that Mr Petousis had recently published his memoirs. I decided to read his story (it is available as an e-book - it's cheaper on amazon.com than on amazon.co.uk). You never know what you will read in a memoir: perhaps a glorified account of a simple life, a pompous narration of ordinary events told by someone with an inflated ego. My verdict is that Mr Petousis' story is so unique and his descriptions of grinding poverty and hunger so gut-wrenching and nothing like the way poverty and hunger is perceived in crisis-ridden Greece today, that everyone should read it this book to put a few things into perspective. Above all, it is the story of a man with a very strong Greek identity, who did not want to live in Greece, and he had decided this from a very early stage in his life. A Greek man who did not fit into Greek society, a Greek soul and spirit who knew he had no place in the land of his ancestors; I recall the words of Harriet Ann Jacobs: "It is a sad feeling to be afraid of one's native country."

Mr Petousis' harrowing experiences as a young child caught up in the Nazi crossfire of Athens (and the subsequent Greek civil war with its devastating consequences in Athens and Northern/Mainland Greece) do not make light reading. But he has a way of downplaying the severity of the conditions under which he grew up: he tells his story as one of survival, as someone who was determined to come through this destruction alive. No matter how much I would like to think of my parents' life as difficult when they were young children in Crete during WW2, I cannot equate the fear of losing one's life with a subsistence lifestyle. My father never had to sell cigarettes at brothels, while my mother never ate filthy orange peels lying in the gutter to stave off hunger. While Mr Petousis was sailing to NZ, he abhorred queuing for his self-service economy class meals: it reminded him too much of the last time he queued for food - in some cases, the food would run out and he wouldn't get any.

Despite his origins, Mr Petousis had a taste for finer things in life. He knew they existed because he had viewed them from up close in Athens - but he never experienced them. Take ice-cream for example. As an engineering graduate, he came across some American soldiers guarding a building. Although he didn't know English, with the help of some imaginative gestures, he understood that they wanted him to go buy them a couple of ice-creams. They gave him the money, and he brought them the cones, as well as the change. They began to lick their ice-creams as he watched them, but they never gave him any, nor did they give him a tip. At that moment, Mr Petousis battled with his conscience - wouldn't it have been just as righteous to take the money and never return to those soldiers? This dilemma plagued him for many years after the incident occurred.

On arriving to the town where he would be hosted by a New Zealand WW2 veteran, he came off the train, where he saw a sign on what looked like a chicken coop, stating that he had arrived in a place called Papakura. His image of Papakura was not the one he was now looking at. He thought he was coming to the land of his dreams, but on seeing where he arrived, he realised that he was not the country of his dreams: eventually, he came to understand that he had arrived in a country where he could build the life of his dreams, if only he wanted to.

Mr Petousis was an avid fan of classical music, and he came to love theatre and opera, hardly a pasttime of the average Greek migrant of the time. He knew the history of his country very well, and made a concerted effort to connect his modern life with the ancient world of his ancestors, despite the glaring differences between the two societies. He kept clear of any religious groups, as he had seen the destructive power that the church had over his own family. Despite acting as honorary consul for Greece in the Auckland region, he purposely kept himself away from any kind of Greek migrant community as he felt that he had nothing in common with them. They had come to NZ to continue living like Greeks, never fully grasping the opportunities that lay before them in a country that could let them be who they wanted to be.

As he later states in the documentary, gone are the days when an unskilled migrant can pack up and leave with just the clothes on his back, to work in manual labour in another country; the world economy has little need for them in our days All Greeks migrating now are highly educated, with skills and qualifications obtained not just in Greek universities but also in foreign countries. He has this to say about them:

"Inside me, I grieve for these people, they were the ones living a wonderful life in Greece, and now they have felt the need to leave, to go - go where? To New Zealand! If you go a little further than that, you fall into the ocean, the Antartctic, it's so far away, we are at the end of the world."

In a sense, this illustrates the desperation felt among Greeks as they leave their country. The difficulties are not immediately apparent to them; this knowledge sinks in much later. It is not easy to return home, even for a short period, a brief holiday, even in modern times. In a sense, the journey is a one-way trip.

I never met Mr Petousis during my years in NZ, so I am honoured to have met him so many years later, electronically through his book. Unlike him, however, I have chosen to live in Greece, but I am lucky in one major respect. I have come to a country that has been completely reshaped since the crisis. Forget the post-war period, forget EU entry - the crisis is the defining moment that Greece had to change.

We generally cannot go back to the past: only last night, the Greek PM Andonis Samaras said that "Yesterday doesn't fit in our tomorrow". Greek people need to be constantly reminded of the truth in this statement. I feel that these days, with the internet and so much more global connection, we can be who we want to be. Even in crisis-ridden Greece, we really can do this. Imagine a Greek telling the world publicly over the WWW not to buy Greek strawberries like I did in yesterday's post. I fear to think what would have happened in the cushy state-imposed past when a person spoke her mind.

We don't have to accept anything; we can express our anger in a way that we never could, and more importantly, we have support for this, whereas we never did before. I truly believe that the future holds good promise for Greece, because Greece has no other choice but to move forward. It is hard for most people to see this now. But Rome wasn't built in a day, and neither will Athens be.

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Greek spending habits (Αγοραστικές συνήθειες)

It was World Consumer Rights Day yesterday, with the local press publishing a report about how Greek people's shopping habits have changed with the economic crisis. The findings are based on a recent survey conducted by the Harokopeio University.

Here are some of the findings, in brief, translated from the report:

• 82% seek specials
• 80% compare prices
• 77% prefer Greek products over imports
• 74% use a shopping list
• 71% buy only what they need
• 70% buy the cheaper alternatives
• 93% have limited their 'eating out'
• 63% buy less meat
• 60% buy less fish
• 51% buy fewer sweets
• 48% buy less alcohol
• 70% eat more rice, beans and/or potatoes than they did before
• 46% eat more vegetables than they did before, and
• 50% eat more bread than they did before.

The key words describing Greek shopping habits are 'comparison', 'Greek products' and 'specials', which is basically an ethnocentric form of 'smart shopping'. Specials are found through advertising leaflets and the internet, while both shopping trips and the internet are used to make price comparisons. In 2012 alone, over 2 million Greeks made online transactions worth over €2.5 billion. This figure is quite significant when compared with the number of Greeks who use the internet, which is 6 million; in other words, of those who use the internet, 1 in 3 Greeks are now shopping online. 

The bread data given above are also a cause for confusion: the report mentions that Greeks eat less bread now than they did before. This may be due to having fewer members in each household/family, and dietary changes (mainly for health reasons). 9 out of 10 bakers report lower takings, which could be due to the higher prices of flour and petrol. Nevertheless, 39% of Greeks still buy bread on a daily basis, 25% buy bread every two days, while 28% buy it once a week. 86% still buy it from the local bakery rather than a supermarket; the main reason being stated for this is the better perceived quality, taste, freshness and aroma.

Attiki (also known as Attica), the administrative region of city of Athens, is one of the smallest administrative regions in Greece, but it has the highest population than any other. A very interesting finding of the survey concerned bread consumption in Attiki:

"The greatest daily consumption in the Attiki basin take place in West and East Attiki, in the southeast suburbs, Pireas (the main ferry port) and the western suburbs, while average daily consumption is noticed in the Municipality of Athens and the northern suburbs."

Such data give us a hint about the history of bread consumption. Bread is often associated with poverty, tradition and low education. The Western regions of Athens have always been the poorest, the northern suburbs are associated with the wealthier class, the eastern suburbs sprung from the need for more housing during the refugee crisis in 1922 (the population exchange between Greece and Turkey) and the southeast regions are less urban than they are rural.

In short, Greeks have made radical changes in their spending habits, with logic prevailing within a framework of a hierarchy of needs.

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Soup kitchen (Συσσίτιο)

Soup kitchens: that's a scary phrase - it means poverty, misery, κακομοιριά. Unless we need them, we don't know anything about them. If you need to use the services of a soup kitchen, you have reached the lowest level - you are unable to feed yourself, whether it is because you cannot afford to, or because you are unable to.

Cook up an oily vegetable-based sauce with some cheap meat cuts (in this case, frankfurter chunks were added), pour some water over it and add the pasta - this is quick and easy to cook, and it provides a lot of servings with little effort.

So what do the poor and disabled eat when someone else provides them with their meal? I can only imagine it is something cheap and easy to cook, which can be made in large batches, to provide many portions. Those who cook the meal must procure the ingredients in the cheapest way they can. They are not running a for-profit service - they are serving hungry malnourished people. In Greece, cooking for others is guaranteed to involve large pots of something cooking fresh over a fire - the idea of packaged food does not hold, even among the poor and those who provide food for them. Packaged food is regarded as crap - not only that, but it;s expensive in a country rich in agricultural products. When you know someone is unable to feed themselves, you try to give them the best food you can afford. A hot meal is symbolic of love and sympathy; it will warm up the soul of the impoverished even before they begin to eat.

The people in need come to the parish church, slide open the aluminium window and leave their empty clean container on the mantelpiece. Not all soup kitchens have communal dining areas, but there is another reason why these people may not wish to dine with others - disability may impede them from doing so, while poverty is sometimes best suffered in silence.

Few people would be able to guess who is receiving soup kitchen meals. Most of the people who receive soup kitchen meals do not look as though they are living in discomfort. The area of St George's church in Katsifariana is not built up, there are many green fields full of orchards surrounding the church, and there are no homeless people to be seen inthe area. The people who come to the church with their empty plastic containers do not all come from the area: some walk from Souda; others use their motorbike to drive in from Hania; some come in battered cars. Distribution is the biggest problem in feeding the poor, who are all from different walks in life, but have one thing in common: an empty stomach. Your home keeps you sheltered, but it does not feed you. You can own your own home forever (who cares if the electricity is cut off?), but to keep yourself nourished, you need 2000 calories a day, spread over at least three meals, and there is never a point in your life when you will be able to say that you have enough food to keep you alive forever.

When the meal is cooked, the bowls are taken to the counter and filled. The bowls contain multiple servings. Bread is also provided, as is fruit as well as salad.

The wife of the priest cooks the meals herself, with the help of some girls and women who peel potatoes, chop vegetables and clean the kitchen. These women are not in employment themselves, but may be in a better economic position to keep themselves and their families nourished. Different meals are cooked every day. The meals are offered to families where both members have lost their jobs, and hence have no income apart from what may be needed to pay the basic utility bills: electricity, water, telephone, rent, heating fuel - it probably won't be enough even for all of that. Some meals are also offered to immigrants who will not be entitled to any benefits from the Greek state. Their existence hangs on a thread.

The people who use these services will not look much different from me. They will live in a similar house to my own. Every morning, they will get up and splash some water on their face, and comb their hair, and make a cup of tea or coffee like I do. But unlike me, they will not leave the house to go to work. I imagine that if they leave the house at all, it will be in search of work, or a hardship grant, or some food.

Before the economic crisis, this parish church used to cook up to 40 meal portions. This gradually doubled to 80 portions; it is now serving 135 portions daily - that's a 240% increase since 2009.

Many people who have recently lost their source of income use the services of this soup kitchen. But the fact is that this soup kitchen had been started well before the crisis. The economic crisis may sound like a new concept, but in reality, many of our fellow citizens have been living through some kind of crisis well before the economic crisis broke out. Churches have always been there to help them through difficult times. 

This is the kind of cooking I enjoy doing myself. If I were unemployed, I'd want to work in a soup kitchen because I know my food would always be appreciated. Plating fancy salads and hearing the first-world complaints of diners with too much spare cash and not enough sense and knowledge to cook a meal for themselves would probably not give me job satisfaction. I can imagine tipping their plates over their heads. I like cooking real food for real people.

I have never been to a soup kitchen. It is not my job to go to one, except as an onlooker, a kind of nosy-parker, and this is neither possible, nor welcome. Thanks again to Eirini who goes along to help at this one when she has time; her photos show how the system works in a non-descript area on the outskirts of the town of Chania, concealing the problems of the area in such a way that no one will ever suspect what may be hiding behind the picturesque facade of our Mediterranean coastal resort town. 

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