I am sorry to hear about what you are going through and have sympathy for you and everyone else in the same position. I wish you and your family all the best in getting work and hope you will be able to stay in Greece. Even if you do have to leave, you should be commended for being brave enough to go to a country with a different language and culture and staying there for so long. Too many people just can’t be bothered with the effort it takes. Your blog is great with a lot of neat people on it.

Gurmit

This latest entry of yours touched my heart. Every word you posted resonated with me and I felt that now was the time to step back into the blogosphere after almost 4 years absence to respond to such a heartfelt entry from wonderful woman who made my life in Greece just that much brighter every day. I still think of you often and wondered how you were doing in the land I left behind.

I am so very sorry to hear that things haven’t been going well for you. Your family, along with many others in Greece also caught up in the same economic nightmare, deserve nothing short of happiness.

It’s at times like these that you must focus on what’s important and what’s good in your life. Jobs, money, houses—all come and go. Material things can always be replaced and often quite easier than you would expect. I speak from experience and I assure you, that if you want to stay in Greece badly enough, you will find a way to do it.

You may have to find a job that you might not have considered prior to this current state of affairs. You may have to live in a smaller flat. You may have to make a lot of concessions and compromises but they don’t have to be permanent. (I have lived quite healthily for the past 30 years on nothing but a diet of vegetables and lentils so I know you can’t die from it. LOL My son is 16 and he’d have you believe he’d die within 24 hours if he didn’t have meat 7 days a week. He’s still alive and I haven’t been carted off by social services.)

Our parents and grandparents have lived through worse times and come out on top. I truly believe you will too. The hardest part about having to go through things like this is making the decisions about what you’re going to do. In my experience, once you’ve made the decisions, you adjust your life accordingly and get on with it. I don’t know about you, but being the granddaughter of immigrants, I grew up hearing the words ‘I came to this country with not two nickels to rub together’ from them and just about everyone else I knew. They said these words with pride and not regret.

Whether you decide to stay or leave, you will get through it and that’s what you have to keep reminding yourself. I have absolute faith in you…you should too.

I hope it doesn’t come to that for your family. I hope something turns up. I hope for Greece and all the people who hold it in their hearts whether they are my friends struggling in Athens or the homesick in America.

Good luck.

I say “We MIGHT have to leave…”

If you leave, then I wish you Good Luck on your move.

Don’t forget, we have no family here to help us out.

Don’t worry, you have Greek friends and they won’t let you starve. One thing you can be sure of, the people of the Southern Med are the most hospitable people in the world, they’ll always invite you to eat at their table even if you’re too proud to do so, they’ll pull you into their home and force you to eat with them if they have to. And that’s just your neighbours, your friends will be even more helpful. That’s my experience in Italy anyway. I’m sure you know what i mean – you won’t starve. You’ll be fine.

And i’m sure that you’ll stay in Greece, you know which side your bread’s buttered. You know that the UK is no place to bring up a child, especially one which is the prime age to be inducted into a street gang.

I’m sorry to hear of your poverty and hardship but there are many people in the same boat (many people much worse than you) so instead of playing the sympathy card and suggesting you might have to leave Greece due to financial hardship, it would have been more honest of you if you just asked for a writing job on this thread.
It’s quite clear that you don’t want to deliver pizzas, you want a writing job and your husband wants another job, so just ask the bloggers reading your blog if they know of a suitable job to offer you, instead of going for the sympathy vote.

There are many people in a much worse position than you and they don’t mind delivering fast food or waiting tables. I wonder what makes you feel too good for those kind of jobs to the extent that you are contemplating leaving a country you claim to love?

I say “We MIGHT have to leave…”

We are not jumping ship. We have worked hard here and contributed to this country in many ways. We very much want to stay but it looks increasingly as though we might be forced into returning to Britain. Fair enough, everyone is struggling and our case is just one and we have the possibility of moving elsewhere. So I don’t want your sympathy or your advice actually.

Of course we are looking for “lower-ranked” jobs and of course we have lowered our living standards. We are not snobby or too proud.

Don’t be disappointed. We haven’t given up before and we’ve been through our fair share of hardships here. Don’t forget, we have no family here to help us out.

My love of this country has been strong enough to keep us here through those times and hopefully we wil make it. As I said in the post

But what people often don’t realise is the connection I have here. The fact is that I care about this place and want to stay. Desperately.

but you chose not to read that.

Anyway, I’ll keep people posted.

Oh well, as the title of your blog says, you never felt that Greece was “your country” anyway.

I am a little disappointed that you’ve decided to leave Greece having enjoyed living in Greece during the good times but shipping out as soon as the going gets a little harder. It seems your “love for the country” doesn’t stretch enough for you to stay and help it get back on it’s feet.

Have you or your husband considered taking a lower paid job than you usually work? Perhaps he is too qualified and experienced for the jobs he’s normally used to, but i’m sure there are plenty of other jobs that he could apply for which aren’t may not be was he’s accustomed to but will pay the rent and put food on the table – i once worked as a pizza delivery man to tide me over until i found a better job.

Things will improve, it’s just a question of lowering your living standards and not being too proud or snobbish to seek a lower ranked job until they do.

I can’t wait to read your Human Rights Blog about the UK but i don’t think you’ll find enough time to hold down a job in the UK AND write about what’s wrong with Britain. You’ll need a whole lifetime just to cover the institutional racism, crime, gang culture, disrespect of elders, knife culture, miserable people, cold damp weather, growing nationalism, Islamophobia, etc….

^THIS IS OUR COUNTRY

Thanks. I have to watch it though. I usually think before I speak, however, when it comes to writing, I think as a I write. That is why I refuse to be on facebook, never have been on MSN, and email in a personal capacity only to a couple of good friends over in BC. I stumbled across this blog one evening ,and it was so easy to post stuff. I got into the habit, but it is the only blog I participate in.

I feel embarrassed about saying identical things on the Nancy Drew alias post. It didn’t go through for quite a while and then did after the second post was already up.

Re income tax invasion: In Canada we have quite a bit of that too. I remember television ads telling to turn in construction workers working for cash and that they make something like a billion dollars without paying taxes on any of it – in the province of Ontario alone. A new tax coming up will increase under-the-table construction work even more according to a Revenue Canada spokesperson. I’m sure it isn’t the only industry responsible for tax evasion. Sometimes at big name franchises, I get asked if I want a receipt for my sandwich or pizza slice and I wonder why they don’t just give it automatically. The richest happened just some months ago. Some Revenue Canada workers were caught filing bogus tax claims and cashing the tax return cheques themselves. And get this, in the spring of 2009, a former Canadian Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, had hearings for tax evasion. Apparently, he took something in the neighbourhood of $300,000 cash secretly in hotel rooms from a German crook for helping him set up some businesses. He hid it in his wall safe for years. Because he finally declared it and before a certain date (the German guy’s secret accounts being discovered by German authorities had apparently had something to do with him taking this action. He even sent a request to this guy to give to him in writing that he had never given him any money and that request ended up with the German guy’s lawyer) he only had to pay taxes on half of it. Fine message that is for the rest of the country. Tax evasion clearly is not just a Greek problem but a problem, I bet, in every country (my goal, of course, is not to try to minimize any of Greece’s possibly unique challenges). I believe Canada currently ranks number 7 (in the top ten anyway) on that list that ranks countries in terms of transparency, with the least corrupt getting the lower number. I think most politicians are honest here though some things that are corruption aren’t considered as such. For instance, as a student I used to babysit for this family and they had this really nice umbrella that would last them a life time. They got it from an MP friend in Ottawa. Apparently, the MPs are supplied with such stuff and can get it for friends too. They have no business doing that even though I did not turn my employers and family friends in for having the umbrella.

A personal story on federal government waste. One time, in my early twenties, I was living in a university dormitory and asked my father to get me a hotplate the next time he came to Vancouver for making hot chocolate late at night. Well, my father is quite a thrifty guy (degree in economics) and picked one up at a garage sale in a small hamlet for five dollars during the eight hour drive to Vancouver from my hometown (a routine not a special trip for me). It was probably the granddaddy of all hotplates and besides being dirty and rusty, it didn’t look that safe either. I refused to take it and said I would do without hot chocolate while cramming for exams late at nights. So, my dad took it back home. My mother yelled at him for trying to give such a thing to me but he still just kept it. I guess he told this woman, who was sort of his business partner. I will call her CD2 in respect for her privacy. Well, not too long after, CD2 showed up at our doorstep asking if she could have the hotplate. She even offered the five dollars but my dad didn’t take it nor did he ask her why. Later, she told him. She was working for a project with the federal government that was to last three years. They needed a hotplate for the staff. Well, they rented it from her -for $50/month. That is $1800 over three years. Even now, almost twenty years later, you can buy a brand new stove for a few hundred dollars and a refurbished one with a warranty for a couple of hundred. A new hot plate can easily be picked up for less than fifty dollars and even a fancy one with two elements for fifty dollars. If this much can be wasted for a crummy hotplate, I hate to imagine just what other waste goes on.

Yeia sas

Nice to see your comments again.

The Koran may prohibit war against Muslims but that doesn’t mean they don’t war anyway, look at the whole Shea and Sunni split and the Kurds always getting attacked. The Taliban also attacks Muslims. Then America also gets some Muslim nations to go along with it against other Muslim nations.

A while back you said the new tax reforms wouldn’t work and the government would need to find a new source of income other than taxes. That sounded so bleak. What other income would the government come up with and surely at some point down the line, people will start paying taxes without being forced. You’ve got to have some hope. Just recently I heard some stuff in a news report (I don’t know how old it was) about your politicians, in general not anyone specific, not caring about the people but just about making themselves richer and selling corporate interests to foreign companies who don’t care at all Greeks or giving them adequate wages. There was also a component about all these young people who do not get a good job in spite of being well educated until their mid-thirties. There was also something about sixty thousand of the brightest minds leaving Greece every year to study in other places and many not necessarily coming back. If all this about the governments not meeting people’s needs due to their own greed is true, then well your country is indeed in for a bad time and the governments should be blamed more for people evading taxes than the people.

I heard of the protests in Greece against the new austerity measures. I hear of “anarchists” causing destruction always. Is anarchists just bad terminology for leftists of many leanings with some angry, violent youths who set fires and destroy property?

Yeia sas dudes and dudettes (I’m Gurmit, just changed the name because of being a little embarrassed of always coming on to this blog. Nancy Drew was one of my favourite fictional characters in childhood.)

The Quran prohibits wars against muslims: Persians, Turks, Arabs, Mongols, Saudi Wahhabis,Afghanis, Pakistanis, Algerians etc did not get the memo

I am very glad you made this question. The Greek people are being bombarded with misinformation and "anti-racist" propaganda tk create enough guilt in order to pass this unacceptable bill.

From all bews reports and all newspapers you read about the "plights&quo6; of the "poor immigrants" and how Greece doesn't have the right to deny them citizenship. It's simply disgusting.

I, as many Greeks, believe that this multicultural model can't work in this country. Maybe it in Britain or Sweden or Canada, but you know what? THOSE COUNTRIES DON'T HAVE TURKEY, NATO'S SECOND BIGGEST BULLY(I mean seriously it's been less than 30 years that they invaded Cyprus), THREATENING THEM. If Greece wants to survive it needs to remain homogenous and racially pure.;