More of Greek’s Poor Abandoning Their Children
January 10th, 2012Via: BBC:
Greece’s financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all – their children.
One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.
“I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her,” it read. “Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother.”
In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city’s poor, has found four children on his door step – including a baby just days old.
Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.
Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable – they feel to Greeks like stories from the Third World, rather than their own capital city.
One of the children cared for by Father Antonios is Natasha, a bright two-year-old brought to his centre by her mother a few weeks ago.
The woman said she was unemployed and homeless and needed help – but before staff could offer her support she had vanished, leaving her daughter behind.
“Over the last year we have hundreds of cases of parents who want to leave their children with us – they know us and trust us,” Father Antonios says.
“They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need.”
Requests of this kind were not unknown before the crisis – but Father Antonios has never until now come across children being simply abandoned.
