[MGSA-L] Waiting for Greece

June Samaras june.samaras at gmail.com
Thu Jul 16 08:13:50 PDT 2015


From: "Amalia Melis" <amalia at aegeanartscircle.com>
Date: Jul 16, 2025

> https://www.guernicamag.com/https://www.guernicamag.com/
>
> Amalia Melis: Waiting for Greece
>
> July 14, 2015
>
> Can the past save the future?
>
> By Amalia Melis
>
> I got a call today from an American cousin visiting us in Andros, the
island our family is from. She invites me for a swim; real world stuff. I
could get in the car with her and get whisked away to another village,
spend the day by the sea. I could put my hands on my ears and not hear any
of the headlines, not listen to pleas for rational decisions to be made in
Greek Parliament whose members never agree on anything other than Greece’s
destruction. I could cover my eyes and not see the winding ATM lines at the
closed Greek banks in Hora, the capital of the island, with weary village
faces, old and young, waiting, and waiting.
>
>
>
> In Andros, everyone knows everyone else. Most people I recognize on the
ATM line are my parent’s age and don’t know about debit cards, some wait
for hours to figure out what is happening, some push to get inside the bank
to talk to a teller only to be turned away. The ATMs run out of money,
panic sets in, tears. I have never lived through anything like this before.
I have never been told I am allotted only fifty Euros from the bank per
day. Because of this I panic, I think I need more. In general I never need
more but the denial feeds my fear. Need to keep the car filled with gas,
need to get bread, need to get milk, remember to eat.
>
>
>
> Two days ago I went to the municipal office to pay fees for my mother’s
upcoming art exhibit. She keeps sane in this financial chaos by painting
the Andros landscapes, the mountains and village where she was born. I ran
into Mayor Theodosis Sousoudis, who is a childhood friend. He invited me
into his office and expressed his worries. He said he didn’t know how the
situation would go. His hands were tied. He told me that municipal
employees are working with no salary, no money available to replace worn
town water pipes, no money for gas to fill the garbage trucks. He mentioned
that some cultural events were cancelled and the Goulandris Museum and
other art centers on the island have fewer visitors this year.
>
>
>
> Reporters swarm the streets of Athens, only miles away, seeking the true
interview, the “honest point of view.” There are those who pass by here
briefly, for a summer’s respite, and claim they know Greek experience. They
may have waited one day on line at an ATM but they want to own the drama,
the ruins and the repercussions of living here, working here, trying to
raise a family here. It is not their experience. It is not their moment. It
is the Greek public’s moment. The painful austerity measures we have been
living with since 2010 are ours. We don’t get paid on time or at all. I am
a freelance writer and many of us who worked for one magazine remain in
limbo; the publisher left the country and has changed professions. What’s
left of the magazine office staff had nothing to say to out requests for
payment. How are we to make a life decision about something simple like a
doctor’s appointment with invisible money? We put it off. We don’t
prioritize even the priorities.
>
>
>
> Last week, the Greek public was urged to vote in the Greek referendum and
the results showed 61% in favor of no more austerity measures even if it
meant leaving the Eurozone. I was not one of those who voted no, I want
Greece to remain in Europe. Yet with those results the Prime Minister went
back to Brussels with a new finance minister and is negotiating right now
for a more painful austerity program and is bowing to political pressure
from the European Union. He is playing with our lives. Just like all these
Greek politicians who have come and gone for the last forty years after the
military dictatorship collapsed of its own mistakes in 1974.
>
>
>
> Yet I want to hide this country’s vulnerability, this pleading for cash.
It is embarrassing. We are exposing the family’s dirty laundry. The begging
of my country combined with this particular Greek government’s arrogance
while it begs is like a neighborhood bully huffing and puffing at the feet
of Europe. We scare no one but ourselves. A photo of an old man crying
makes its way around the world in the media. After going to three banks he
was unable to get the allotted pension money for his wife and he broke down
crying, falling to the ground. I don’t want to see this kind of
desperation. Not in this country, not again. I was weaned on these stories:
neglect, austerity, poverty. The healing from WWII and the Civil War that
followed has taken a long time to happen, it has not happened completely
and continues to divide us.
>
>
>
> Am I communicating with ghosts of my father’s generation? He and many
villagers like him grew up with little to nothing. Barefoot, hungry and
desperate. Children who turned into men who turned into sailors who sailed
away from Andros and worked on ships forever to feed families left behind.
Some died on the boats, some returned, all are prisoners of poverty.
>
> My family fled Andros; each member in his or her own way. Both of my
parents worked hard in New York to raise a family, make ends meet, and, of
course, to fulfill a lifelong yearning to save enough to return to the
homeland. They did. But there is a twist in their loyalty to Greece. Since
Citibank closed operations earlier this year in Greece, their American
pension is no longer available from Citibank but it is now deposited in
Alpha Bank, a Greek bank, so they too are trapped in the Greek senior
citizen loop of getting only 120 euros out every two weeks since Greek
banks remain closed. I worry about them. I worry about my husband. I worry
about my child. I worry about everyone I know. My parents are over 80. What
if they need more money for something I can’t predict or plan for? What if
we do?
>
>
>
> I decline my cousin’s kind invitation and send her off to swim alone. I
can’t be in the here and now and I am in no mood for suntans and lunch. I
want to curl up and be silent but I get in my car instead. I know where I
am going. I don’t know why it is calling me so strongly today but I must
go. I am going to be with the dead.
>
>
>
> I want to be with family today – the family that has already left this
place. Perhaps the howling wind has some secrets I can hear. Perhaps I can
make out an answer to my questions, to what I feel, this overwhelming sense
that no matter what decisions are made in Greek Parliament and then with
the Eurogroup, we have failed. We are The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the ultimate
Aesop’s Fable and the strongmen of Europe are wagging rigid fingers in our
faces telling us, We don’t believe you. You are liars. What will this mean
for our future? My daughter is scheduled to go study in the U.K. this fall.
She turned around to her father recently and said, “Dad thanks for raising
me Greek.”
>
>
>
> I gaze out at the view from the cemetery; the sea and Stenies village
stretches out far ahead, the deep green cypress trees, the white houses
with terra cotta rooftops. Small paths cut into the villages. The wind is
so strong it howls into my ears. No one is here but me.
>
>
>
> The cemetery is situated at the edge of town. If I could draw it I would
imagine the setting for Our Town only harsher because right beside the
cemetery is a small building that houses our ancestors’ bones in small
boxes with the person’s name on it. We have an old ritual here – every
three years, the villagers take the remains of their loved ones, wash the
bones with wine, wrap them in savano (the white cloth of the dead) and
place the remains in these small boxes.
>
>
>
> I open the small church door, all is quiet. My legs start to shake a bit
when I open the door to walk into the room with the boxes. I scare myself.
I find the wooden box with my grandfather’s remains, there is a small black
and white photo of him with his sad eyes. Those eyes have been inherited.
They are my father’s eyes, my aunt’s eyes, my eyes. I find my uncles,
aunts, my great grandfather, my great grandmother; her name has been
carried on: Franseska, my mother, Franseska my niece.
>
>
>
> The family names Raissis and Valmas are scattered all over the cemetery,
common names in this village. I think about this island and how it has
changed, how it has stayed the same. Sariza the mineral spring is a blessed
constant in our village and runs continuously from the mountain. The marble
lion head at Sariza is worn at the spout from where the water pours out
forcefully. I remember the water as a child on my first visit to Andros
from New York. Sariza was like holy water to us, to be held, to be taken
in, to be had as often as possible. As if drinking it would keep us
satisfied every time, we, the family of immigrants, left on our journey
back to the working class world we came from in Astoria.
>
>
>
> I want to believe that today’s visit to my ancestors at the cemetery, to
the wise villagers of long ago might have something to say. We have gone
too far away from where we came from: the soil on this earth and the sea. I
visited all of them today. I remembered each and every one of them in the
room with the dead, how they lived, how close they were to the earth they
tilled, the sea they sailed. We are no longer connected to either in the
cities we live in. We acquire and acquire but feel empty just the same. Is
that what Greek politicians suffer from? The European Union funds poured
into Greece in the 1980s and 1990s, farmers stopped farming and most sit in
kafenions drinking coffee, drive their BMWs and employ Pakistanis as slave
labor to till the earth that was theirs, their grandparents. In many
sectors it is the same, while 1.5 million Greeks are unemployed there are
immigrants all over the country doing drudge work no Greek wants to do
anymore. Something is wrong with that picture. As a daughter of immigrants
I watched my father work two jobs his whole adult life, no work was beneath
him, if it was honest. That lesson one cannot buy, family teaches us that.
My ancestors taught my father, he taught me. These last forty years or so
brought us to the current breaking point. Is the disconnect to blame for
where Greece stands today?
>
>
>
> I can only write about all this as I live it.
>
>
>
> We chose the story, we chose the plot, the ending is upon us. We are the
Greek drama; the Greek tragedy and comedy all rolled into one. The world is
our audience and the critics soon will judge.
>
>
>
> Amalia Melis is a Greek-American writer. She is the founder of the Aegean
Arts Circle writing workshops held in Andros, Greece. Her short stories,
essays, and poetry have been published in Glimmer Train, KYSO Flash
Magazine, Ducts Magazine, Sojourner, and Poet & Critic. Follow her on
twitter: @amaliaandros
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
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>
>
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