actions have now moved beyond the Greek frontiers, have an impact and receive support from Eu-
rope, but also stem from the US, Canada, Australia and every corner of the world where beats a
Greek or Philhellenic heart. This support comes with complete selflessness and is based on the crite-
rion that we should all be partners in the eradication of human pain and daily suffering.
Sometimes we think that we cannot do anything other than struggle for what is SELF-EVIDENT!
This is truly another “SELF”, whichshould constitute an integral part of human nature... has now
become a rare attribute!
Today’s society has given rise to a new class of people who live without work, without housing,
without wages, without documents, without a doctor and medicines, without a family, without an
allowance, without fundamental dignity, without a future! Without anything that is SELF-EVIDENT!
This is the new class that is being created: “those without a tomorrow”!
It is for these people that the agony felt by PRAKSIS, with the will of the Stavros Niarchos Founda-
tion, to create the program SYN STO PLIN: a program with two axes. One interventional one and one
preventive.
In its interventional part, the program SYN STO PLIN provides immediate relief to the homeless
population
(in Athens as well as in Piraeus, and soon, we hope, in Thessaloniki).
Its preventive part
(rare that we discuss the word preventionin the social-welfare network of our country!), targets
the average Greek family
who, although up to now had been the center of social transfers, suddenly
found itself inactive, unemployed and unable to meet the burdens and obligations imposed by the
systemic consumer model. What this program is actually doing, is to actively “test” for the minimum
guaranteed wage which should be in force in Greece (as it is in most European member states),
rather than weighing the population in terms of poverty limits.
Social Workers, Labour Counsellors,
Financial Partners and Lawyers, are all assisting approximately 650 families every month, trying
not only to help them pay their family bills, but chiefly to reinforce and reintegrate them in the
labour market
. Although one may well expect this to be a utopia, (in a Greece where there are 1,000
newly-registered unemployed daily), in PRAKSIS we have made it a reality. For us, figures are no
longer static and regain their strength and magic!
Today in Greece, where people are literally “hunting” for cheap food, the centers distributing cooked
food as well as the “Social Groceries”, are full of people, Greeks as well as foreigners.
Hunger does
not distinguish between people, it being a common “fault” of everyone! Besides, it seems, for
these people, whether Greek or not, no society supports them and no country “embraces” them.
What gives me sorrow is one of the leading cultures of the world (as ours is) accepts such a change,
the extent that our people can expel a great segment of society (which is ever-growing) to the depths
14
InRetrospection
By Tzanetos Antypas
