Getting to Athens was made somewhat logistically challenging by the fact that we had to schlep about 100kgs of donated clothes with us.
Franz sent around an email to his work colleagues last week and in a rush of Christmas spirit, or just general good will, received a mountain of donated clothes and shoes for us to bring with us. At 2am yesterday morning we’d finally finished sorting and stuffing the donated goods into bursting suitcases. Our taxi driver was similarly overwhelmed by the bags when we got to Athens. Eugene ended up having to take the bus because he couldn’t fit in the particularly small uber car.
We were a bit cautious about telling the driver at first that the bags were full of donated stuff for refugees. He spent part of the drive telling us that he does 10 hour taxi shifts earning 2.80 Euro per hour and that official unemployment in Greece is 25% but in reality much higher as people who work just one day a month are also considered employed. After hearing about the situation here, which I did already know about – although not in detail – I wasn’t sure how he would feel about us saying that we’d come to help refugees…I mean there are plenty of people here who are also struggling. But after his perplexed musings that we must be moving here or staying for a month or that he would usually give us his number so we could call him for another trip, but if we’re going to bring all that luggage again he’s not sure he wants to drive us, we told him that the bags were full of donated things. He didn’t seem annoyed and didn’t display any of the anti-migrant sentiment that you could possibly expect to hear, his response was for surprisingly accepting. When Franz had asked him earlier what he thought of the refugee issue in Greece, he told us, or at least I thought I he said that Greece has 3 million refugees and a population of 10 million. After a quick google though it seems like there are more like 57,000 refugees in Greece. Mr Uber said that the refugees have different issues to the Greeks, that they didn’t see Greece as the promised land, rather just a transit point along their routes to Germany, France, Holland.
