The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (11 page)

 

II. Debbie

 

At the Social Clinic of Solidarity, located in a rather dilapidated building, I have an appointment with Debbie Litsa.

Behind her glasses, her eyes are inquisitive; she looks to be in her mid-30s. We sit down in the waiting room. Beside her is a man who I figure at first is one of the doctors who works here, but he turns out to be her boyfriend, waiting for an appointment with the dentist—beside the doctor's office is a little room with a dentist's office.

“It started two years ago,” Debbie says. “Illegal immigrants who had been here for years but had never been legalized were holding a big hunger strike. There were two hundred and fifty hunger strikers in Athens and fifty in Thessaloniki. They received support from local activists. The hunger strikers came from northern Africa, most of them from Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. The strike ended after forty-four days, when the strikers received a temporary residence permit that had to be extended every six months. Some people considered that a victory, others a defeat. We figured: We can't stop now. We have to do something for the community.”

A woman comes in with her husband and child.

“In Greece, everyone with a job has health insurance,” Debbie Litsa continues. “But there are lots of self-employed people who can't afford it. Private health insurance is not at all common in Greece. We asked the mayor to give us an office, but he didn't want to do that. This building was where the trade unions used to meet to decide whether or not to go on strike. We fixed it up into a health center for people who are uninsured: the Social Clinic of Solidarity.”

More patients are coming into the waiting room now. Debbie Litsa's friend gets up and goes into the dentist's office.

“This project is greater than the sum of the people who work here,” she says. “We're not hierarchical. Here, there's no difference between the secretary and the physician. We don't provide charity, because charity assumes a relationship based on power. Patients are welcome at our meetings, too.”

“How many patients have shown up at meetings so far?”

“None,” she says. “That's disappointing, I admit. But changes in mentality take time.”

“And during those meetings, do you vote?”

“No,” Debbie says. “A vote implies that the minority is not heard. We discuss things until we reach a consensus. Everyone has the right of veto.”

“That's not very efficient,” I remark.

“
Efficiency
is a capitalist term that assumes one has the goal of achieving a certain level of productivity. That's not the way we think. Capitalism, of course, is what sired this crisis. But the crisis is also an opportunity to ask the right questions. We want to teach people that they have the power to fight back. No one can take away your dignity; that's what I tell them. No one has to be embarrassed by the fact that the system can't guarantee that everyone has health insurance. The power of capitalism lies in how it presents itself as the sole alternative. I don't have any illusions about ever seeing it disappear, but we can create little fissures in it.”

Debbie's boyfriend comes back from the dentist.

“How did the clinic get dental equipment?” I ask.

“It was donated by a dentist who was retiring.”

She doesn't want to have her picture taken, but she encourages me to take pictures of the patients. A black man refuses to have his picture taken and one woman gets up and walks away, but the other patients meekly allow themselves to be photographed.

“Don't forget the secretary,” Debbie says.

 

III. Dora

 

Nothing drives out melancholy better than music, as Spinoza knew. Orfanidou 5 is the address I was given, along with instructions to take the elevator to the sixth floor. Here I am going to meet Dora Seitanidou; I've heard that she leads a percussion group.

Dora is in her late 30s, with dark shoulder-length hair. Her boyfriend, Nick, is there, too, but Nick leaves the talking to Dora.

“This neighborhood we're in,” Dora says as she makes coffee for me, “used to have a lot of small industry. Shoemakers, for example, but they've all closed down. Not so much because of the crisis; the process started long before that. The Chinese have taken over. Nick is my boyfriend. He's a musician, a teacher, and an educator. This space is used to give dance, music, and drama lessons. Nick does the percussion group. We call ourselves Ektos, which means ‘outside.' As in ‘outside myself' or ‘outside of town,' but also as in ‘out of fashion.' The crisis has changed a lot, of course. The person living in times of crisis needs to express himself, and money is important, but if you don't have it, you have to find some other way. We're a nonprofit organization, and the course fees are low. Some courses, like percussion, cost forty euros a month. Others, like modern dance, cost thirty euros, and students and the unemployed get a five-euro discount. We made all this ourselves—almost everything you see here was found on the street. We don't do all the lessons ourselves, though; we also have teachers. But the money we make on courses isn't enough to pay the rent.”

We drink our coffee at a makeshift bar. Dora sits across from me; Nick is sitting beside me.

“Most people feel betrayed by the state, and their attitude is like: If you don't help me then I won't help you,” Dora says. “Look at the garbage. Look at obesity, and you'll see that the problem is education. That's the big problem here in Greece. You have to teach yourself; there's no other way. All the parties have tried to push reforms in the Greek educational system, but it hasn't gotten any better. For example, now there's a law that allows the police to go onto campus. That wasn't legal for a while; it led to lots of rioting, but better education? Roughly speaking, you can say that Greek education is aimed at making children and students learn a lot of things by rote, but no attention is paid to teaching them to think.”

She sips her coffee.

“If we become increasingly fascist—and Greek society
is
becoming increasingly fascist—you have to put the blame not only on the crisis but also on the educational system. The whole system is sick. Until recently everyone wanted to work for the government in Athens, because working for the government meant security, and it also meant you didn't have to really work—it meant you could just set up a business for yourself on the side. Security is an obsession that was passed down from grandfather to father to son; maybe it can be explained by the fact that here in Thessaloniki, we're almost all the descendants of refugees.” (Many of the inhabitants of Thessaloniki are the descendants of Greeks who were run out of Turkey.) “Take my uncle and aunt, for example; they're not incredibly rich people, but they have five houses. They have the house that they live in, three houses they rent out, and they also have a vacation home. The Greek is obsessed with property because he sees property ownership as security. My uncle and aunt have a son who's confined to a wheelchair; they think that those houses are going to guarantee his financial security.

“Or take Fena, the department store, where you can buy the most expensive brand clothing on credit. People from the lower classes were suddenly walking around in Armani suits because the down payment was so low and they didn't ask any bothersome questions. Everyone could buy fancy clothes on credit. They took out loans for everything.

“You could get a loan to go on vacation, a loan for Christmas, a loan for your own funeral—there was a loan for everything. We were taught to borrow money; we weren't taught to be productive. But you've seen it already: at Christmas the department stores are packed. Life on the installment plan has never stopped; maybe it never will. It just moves from one place to the next. But Athens is meaner and bigger than Thessaloniki. We have the sun; we have family; we don't need much.”

I decide to take the plunge and ask: “How much do you earn?”

“I work for the university,” Dora says. “One of the things I do is teach classes in Greek culture to foreign students. I gross eight hundred euros a month. The university holds back twenty percent of that, and twenty-three percent goes to taxes. If I had to pay rent I could never get by, but we live in a house that belongs to Nick's parents. Like I said, we wouldn't be able to pay the rent for this place from the money we get from courses, but we also have to pay municipal taxes that are included along with the electric bill, and we can pay those taxes only because we sell coffee and tea to our students, and drinks under the counter. Otherwise it would be impossible.”

“Have you two ever thought about going away?” I ask.

“Of course. Lots of our friends have left. They live in Wales or in Sweden now. They have more money, they have a better life, but the Greeks there aren't happy. We have friends who went to Sweden. Financially they're doing well, but they tell us: ‘The Swedes are as cold as the weather. If you laugh out loud on the street in Sweden, they think you're out of your mind.'”

Dora is quiet for a moment. She seems to be thinking about Sweden, where she doesn't want to live.

“I know a lot of Greeks,” she says, “who drive to Bulgaria to go to the dentist. The dentist in Bulgaria is five times cheaper than in Greece. Coca-Cola just closed down a big plant here and is going to open a new one in Bulgaria. Bulgaria is going to be the new Greece.”

“But don't you think Bulgaria will learn from the recent history of Greece?” I ask cautiously.

“No one learns from history. We don't even learn from our own history. Before the war there were almost fifty thousand Jews living here. Who remembers that these days? The university is built on the old Jewish cemetery. You can still see the gravestones in some of the walls, because the marble was recycled.”

 

IV. George

 

At nine o'clock the next morning I find George Kastanis waiting in front of my hotel. George is a young, energetic man with a quiet voice. We stop in at a nearby café to pick up his girlfriend, another Dora. She is wearing a gray wool cap and matching scarf. We go to an old military base, about half an hour's drive from the hotel. This is where the PERKA project is being carried out. PERKA stands for “Peri-Urban Cultivation Team,” a gardeners' collective. Where soldiers once marched, PERKA now plants vegetable gardens.

“We started in January 2011 with forty people,” George says. “Now there are one hundred and fifty people active in the collective. This is what we call ‘suburban farming.' You don't pay for it. You cultivate your own garden.”

We walk past the gardens. Some plots are neater than others.

“There's no electricity here,” George says, “and no fences. We accept the fact that some people in the neighborhood come and steal our vegetables. The only fence you see here is to keep the dogs out. In fact, the army wants to build here. But now we're working on a proposal to preserve this place as a park, maybe as a campground, too. We're going to present the plan to the mayor. You've probably noticed that there aren't any parks in Thessaloniki. Experts say that if this green lung disappears, the temperature in Thessaloniki in the summer will go up a few degrees. Along with another army base a little farther up that way, the ground here is worth one billion euros. So, as you can imagine, there are big interests at stake.”

We walk on.

“I'd like to show you the room we made from one of the soldiers' dormitories—that's where we hold our meetings now,” George says.

Everywhere around the green lung there are dormitories, more or less in ruins.

“I'm thirty-two,” George says when we stop at a spot with a view of this part of the city. “Dora is twenty-nine. I'm unemployed, but the important thing is not to leave solidarity to the fascists. The extreme right-wing parties go into the working-class neighborhoods and hand out food. You can't combat fascism with weapons, only with education, but the schools in Greece produce people with no political awareness. That's why you have to be self-taught. Anarchism is creativity; anarchism is democracy in the true sense of the word. At PERKA, we don't vote; we reach a consensus. There are days when we're not ready to reach a consensus. But another day always comes along.”

“Things weren't any better before,” Dora says. “But now people are less motivated, because they have so many problems. They're depressed. But there is a small, dynamic minority that really does do something. We meet two times a month.”

“And what about the EU?” I ask.

“Being in the EU or not being in the EU is actually not the real issue,” George says. “The issue is: IMF or no IMF. We want to keep this spot green. We want to protect our seeds. Everything we grow here is organic and for our own use. It's a struggle for freedom, and for the country.”

The man with the key shows up. They show me around the renovated dormitory.

“We built a kitchen over here,” Dora says.

The kitchen is simple, almost Spartan, but they are proud of it.

As we head for the door, Dora says: “The people in northern Europe who say we're lazy don't realize that one day people will say that they're lazy, too.”

 

V. Yiannis

 

You can walk right into Thessaloniki's city hall; there's no security at the door. One of the mayor's assistants, whom I've contacted by e-mail, says the mayor is running a little late because of a wedding.

I take a seat. The people walking around, all of whom work for the mayor, are young and hip. The atmosphere seems more like that of an Internet start-up than a city hall.

The mayor makes me wait for an hour and a half. He has the air of a rock star, and for a rock star an hour and a half is nothing.

In
One Step Ahead,
Dimitris Athyridis's documentary on the 2010 municipal elections in Thessaloniki, the then mayoral candidate, Yiannis Boutaris, talks frankly about his alcohol dependency, his marital problems, and his conflict with Anthimos, the archbishop of the city, whom he accuses of hatemongering because of Anthimos's outspokenly nationalistic speeches. It's hard not to feel sympathy for Boutaris after watching the documentary, even though it's clear that the mayor, after the electoral close call, has not been able to solve all the problems before him. Garbage continues to pile up on street corners.