Angelos Tzortzinis for the International Herald Tribune
Michalis Petrakis, who is jobless and whose son Pantelis has been going to school hungry, opened his nearly empty refrigerator.
By LIZ ALDERMAN
ATHENS — As an elementary-school principal, Leonidas Nikas is used to
seeing children play, laugh and dream about the future. But recently he
has seen something altogether different, something he thought was
impossible in Greece:
children picking through school trash cans for food; needy youngsters
asking playmates for leftovers; and an 11-year-old boy, Pantelis
Petrakis, bent over with hunger pains.
Angelos Tzortzinis for the International Herald Tribune
The Petrakis family, from left: Michalis, Kostas, Pantelis and Themelina (in profile).
Angelos Tzortzinis for the International Herald Tribune
Mr. Petrakis with his wife, Themelina, and their son Kostas.
“He had eaten almost nothing at home,” Mr. Nikas said, sitting in his
cramped school office near the port of Piraeus, a working-class suburb
of Athens, as the sound of a jump rope skittered across the playground.
He confronted Pantelis’s parents, who were ashamed and embarrassed but
admitted that they had not been able to find work for months. Their
savings were gone, and they were living on rations of pasta and ketchup.
“Not in my wildest dreams would I expect to see the situation we are
in,” Mr. Nikas said. “We have reached a point where children in Greece
are coming to school hungry. Today, families have difficulties not only
of employment, but of survival.”
The Greek economy is in free-fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the
past five years. Unemployment is
more than 27 percent, the highest in
Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a
year. Those dry statistics are reshaping the lives of Greek families
with children, more of whom are arriving at schools hungry or underfed,
even malnourished, according to private groups and the government
itself.
Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary- and
middle-school students suffered from what public health professionals
call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it,
said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical
School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis,
a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation.
“When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of
some African countries,” she said.
Unlike those in the United States, Greek schools do not offer subsidized
cafeteria lunches. Students bring their own food or buy items from a
canteen. The cost has become insurmountable for some families with
little or no income. Their troubles have been compounded by new
austerity measures demanded by Greece’s creditors,
including higher electricity taxes and cuts in subsidies for large
families. As a result, parents without work are seeing their savings and
benefits rapidly disappear.
“All around me I hear kids saying: ‘My parents don’t have any money. We
don’t know what we are going to do,’ ” said Evangelia Karakaxa, a
vivacious 15-year-old at the No. 9 junior high school in Acharnes.
Acharnes, a working-class town among the mountains of Attica, was
bustling with activity from imports until the economic crisis wiped out
thousands of factory jobs.
Now, several of Evangelia’s classmates are frequently hungry, she said,
and one boy recently fainted. Some children were starting to steal for
food, she added. While she did not excuse it, she understood their
plight. “Those who are well fed will never understand those who are
not,” she said.
“Our dreams are crushed,” added Evangelia, whose parents are unemployed
but who is not in the same dire situation as her peers. She paused, then
continued in a low voice. “They say that when you drown, your life
flashes before your eyes. My sense is that in Greece, we are drowning on
dry land.”
Alexandra Perri, who works at the school, said that at least 60 of the 280 students suffered from malnutrition.
Children who once boasted of sweets and meat now talk of eating boiled
macaroni, lentils, rice or potatoes. “The cheapest stuff,” Ms. Perri
said.
This year the number of malnutrition cases jumped. “A year ago, it
wasn’t like this,” Ms. Perri, said, fighting back tears. “What’s
frightening is the speed at which it is happening.”
The government, which initially dismissed the reports as exaggerations,
recently acknowledged that it needed to “tackle the issue of
malnutrition in schools.” But with priorities placed on repaying bailout
funds, there is little money in Greek coffers to cope.
Mr. Nikas, the principal, said he knew the Greek government was laboring
to fix the economy. Now that talk of Greece’s exiting the euro zone has
disappeared, things look better to the outside world. “But tell that to
the family of Pantelis,” he said. “They don’t feel the improvement in
their lives.”
In the family’s darkened apartment near the school, Themelina Petrakis,
Pantelis’s mother, opened her refrigerator and cupboards one recent
weekend. Inside was little more than a few bottles of ketchup and other
condiments, some macaroni and leftovers from a meal she had gotten from
the town hall.
The family was doing well and was even helping others in need until last
year. It was able to afford a spacious apartment with a flat-screen TV
and a PlayStation.
Then her husband, Michalis, 41, was laid off from his shipping job in
December. He said the company had not paid his wages for five months
before that. The couple could no longer afford rent, and by February
they had run out of money.
“When the principal called, I had to tell him, ‘We don’t have food,’ ”
said Ms. Petrakis, 36, cradling Pantelis’s head as he cast his eyes to
the ground.
Mr. Petrakis said he felt emasculated after repeatedly failing to find
new work. When food for the family ran low, he stopped eating almost
entirely, and rapidly lost weight.
“When I was working last summer, I even threw away excess bread,” he
said, tears streaming down his face. “Now, I sit here with a war running
through my head, trying to figure out how we will live.”
When the hunger comes, Ms. Petrakis has a solution. “It’s simple,” she
said. “You get hungry, you get dizzy and you sleep it off.”
A 2012 Unicef report showed that among the poorest Greek households with
children, more than 26 percent had an “economically weak diet.” The
phenomenon has hit immigrants hardest but is spreading quickly among
Greeks in urban areas where one or both parents are effectively
permanently unemployed.
In rural areas, people can at least grow food. But that is not enough to
eradicate the problem. An hour’s drive northwest of Athens, in the
industrial town of Asproprigos, Nicos Tsoufar, 42, stared vacantly ahead
as he sat in the middle school that his three children attend. The
school receives lunches from a program run by Prolepsis, the public
health group. Mr. Tsoufar said his children desperately needed the
meals.
He has not found work for three years. Now, he said, his family is
living on what he called “a cabbage-based diet,” which it supplements by
foraging for snails in nearby fields. “I know you can’t cover
nutritional basics with cabbage,” he said bitterly. “But there’s no
alternative.”
The government and groups like Prolepsis are doing what they can. Last
year, Prolepsis started a pilot program providing a sandwich, fruit and
milk at 34 public schools where more than half of the 6,400 families
participating said they had experienced “medium to serious hunger.”
After the program, that percentage dropped to 41 percent. Financed by an
$8 million grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, an international
philanthropic organization, the program was expanded this year to cover 20,000 children at 120 schools.
Konstantinos Arvanitopoulos, Greece’s education minister, said the
government had secured European Union financing to provide fruit and
milk in schools, and vouchers for bread and cheese. It is also working
with the Greek Orthodox Church to provide thousands of care packages.
“It is the least we can do in this difficult financial circumstance,” he
said.
Mr. Nikas, the principal at 11-year-old Pantelis’s school, has taken
matters into his own hands and is organizing food drives at the school.
He is angry at what he sees as broader neglect of Greece’s troubles by
Europe.
“I’m not saying we should just wait for others to help us,” he said.
“But unless the European Union acts like this school, where families
help other families because we’re one big family, we’re done for.”
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