Charikleia Tsatsaroni – Engaging Peace

By guest author Charikleia Tsatsaroni

Mahatma Gandhi said, “Poverty is the worst violence.” Poverty is also a terrorist.

Poverty means threats of or actual loss of jobs, loss of pensions, loss of one’s home, loss of hope. It means living under the heavy shadow of a big national financial debt, constantly terrorized by the risk that your country will be bankrupted, fearful of reprisals if you protest austerity programs that bring no relief to poverty. After three years of austerity in Greece, freedom from such terror feels unattainable.

All these violent expressions of poverty can have serious consequences to people’s health and psychological well-being. For example, currently the Greek health care and education systems lack adequate materials and personnel, and have become more difficult to access, as well as less egalitarian. Unemployment has reached record-breaking rates.

Greek people seem increasingly distrustful. Such social distrust can sometimes take the form of violent social conflicts. For instance, racist attacks on immigrants and refugees are more common since the financial crisis, because some people consider immigrant groups and refugees to be the cause of unemployment in Greece. Also, for the first time since 1950, the infant mortality rates went up in 2012, as well as suicide rates and psychological problems (e.g., stress, panic attacks).

Poverty is a nearly global problem hurting individuals and communities well beyond the borders of my own country. For decades, many organizations around the world have tried to deal with it. Do they work together or compete or undermine each other? Where do their interests lie–with ordinary people or the power elites?

What can ordinary people do to stop this form of violence? Are there effective ways to help? Are there peaceful ways to protest against poverty and the terror it produces?

I have sought answers and inspiration in different places such as the thought-provoking films from the project “Why poverty?” that aim to inspire people to ask questions about poverty, become part of the solution, and bring positive change. More significantly, I try to remain mindful and engaged.

Charikleia Tsatsaroni, MSc., EdM., from Greece, is the former head of the Department of Human Resource Training and Development of the Greek Organization Against Drugs (OKANA), and is a member of GIPGAP.

By guest author Charikleia Tsatsaroni

Adult and child begging — Photo by Michael Coghlan used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Mahatma Gandhi said it: “Poverty is the worst violence.” More and more people around the world must recognize the truth of his words.

In the fall of 2008, when banks collapsed and the financial crisis struck with hurricane force, I was starting my doctoral studies in Boston. In spite of the media’s dramatic broadcasts about ordinary people’s losses due to the crisis, I was full of excitement for this new chapter in my life. For months, I mindlessly passed people begging for money or searching for a safe shelter for the night, usually outside churches in the center of Boston.

Soon reality took me out of my mindlessness. At a quiet corner at the entrance of one of the metro stations in Boston, a man in his forties, with a small boy hugging his knees, displayed a sign saying he had lost his job and he and his child were hungry and homeless. Their faces were the faces of people like me. They could be my neighbors, my relatives, my friends. It was a painful enlightenment, a reawakening of mindfulness.

Returning in 2012 to my home country, Greece, a country in great financial turmoil for the last three years, I experienced the devastation caused by the financial crisis directly and painfully. Images like the ones I had seen in Boston are common in Athens–on the streets, in the trains, in the stores. The great majority of the Greek people become poorer every day, battered by the violence inherent in loss of jobs, lack of income, inaccessibility of resources, and inability to care for children, the ill, and the elderly.

Poverty’s violence is viral; the costs of this form of violence are global. Where are the world leaders who will put the protection of ordinary men, women, and children ahead of the interests of banks and international corporations?