Poverty-stricken parents abandon children

I was so shocked by the article below that I couldn't stop myself reading it, again and again. As if to make sure it was true. Then I just had to translate it - to tell someone about it.
It was just the kind of jolt I needed to start this blog.

I won’t be coming back for Anna. I’m sorry.

Destitute parents ask to leave their children at the Greek 'SOS Children’s Villages' *

By Marili Margomenou

Anna was still at the day care. It was late afternoon and her mother had still not shown up. The teachers didn’t know what to do. Then the little girl pulled something out of her pocket. It was a note: “I won’t be coming back for Anna. I’m sorry. Her mom.”

The man who tells the story as if it were something common is Mr. S. Sifnios, head of the social service at the Greek 'SOS Children’s villages'. “The teachers called the local DA, who sent the child to us.”

The story is not an excerpt from a Dickens novel. It took place in a quarter of Athens. Anna’s mother is not crazy. She is a young woman who lost her job and panicked. There are more than five hundred other stories like hers. Today, in Greece there are five hundred families in such dire financial state that they asked the SOS villages to leave their children there.

“Until up to two years, 95% of requests there had to do with abuse. The DA decided that the child was in danger” Ms. P. Vastarouha, the villages’ social worker, tells us. “Now half of requests are from parents in extreme poverty. Eight out of ten parents are Greek, most of them single parents, usually without other relatives”.

Mrs Marina has been a mother in one of the villages for 19 years. She lives the story from the other side. “The new child is brought to us by his or her mom. She shows the child his bed, his room, and me. Then she says ‘I love you,’ and goes away. The child stays at the door.” Marina's voice breaks.

They stand and stare

Mrs. Marina makes an effort to continue. “None of them scream or shout,” she says. “They stand at the door and stare until their mom is out of sight. If it’s two of them -or more- you can’t keep them apart that night. You put them in their beds and ten minutes later you find them huddled together in a bunch.”

Normally SOS villages do not take children whose families are simply poor. For those families there is a program of support at home. But extreme poverty is usually accompanied by other problems. “A child was brought to us and I thought she had some disability. At three, she spoke barely 15 words,” says the social worker. “She was checked by doctors who found nothing wrong. Her father was a vendor in open-air markets, her mother was blind, the child was neglected. When the child is not spoken to, how is she going to learn how to speak?” Poverty leads to neglect, even abuse. Before things get that bad, some people opt for another way out, extreme though it may seem to us.

Mrs. Marina continues: “I was on my way out of the village to get some milk for my children. At the gate there was a woman with a girl. She didn’t know that I was one of the SOS mothers, she didn’t even see me. There she stood, holding her child by the hand and talking to her: “Don’t you think that mom doesn’t love you. Mom adores you but she has no food to give you. These good people here will…’ She thought she’d get in, find someone to leave her child with and go.” Mrs. Marina pauses, puts her hand on her forehead. There are some things one cannot get used to, no matter how many years one has spent here. “She was holding her hand,” she says. “And the child didn’t make a sound. She was just looking up at her mom, staring. I don’t know what happened next. I had to go fetch milk for my own children.”

* SOS Children’s Villages: An international organisation for children in need. More information here. For a look into life in an SOS village, see here.

(Article from Kathimerini newspaper, Dec. 18th, 2011, original in Greek here.)