By guest author Charikleia Tsatsaroni
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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?
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.