Monday, April 22, 2013

(239) Human suffering in Greece

One of my brothers work in a Bank. We were discussing about such countries like Greece, Cyprus, Spain, France ... According to him, the problem in Cyprus is unique because it is part of the European Union. While  it might not work for Cyprus to opt out of EU, it is not feasible for the single common currency to keep bailing out one country after another.

He read somewhere that one Greek Headmaster said that there were children in the city that went to school with no food in the tummy. Parents could have been unemployed for at least two years, have little marketable skills and could no longer subsist on social security that have been cut drastically. People who were formerly civil servants usually do not upgrade themselves thinking they have an iron rice bowl (unbreakable). I find urban children going hungry shocking. On our TV screen we see that refugees in Africa were fed. In fact I just saw ethnic Muslim Myanmarese walked into refugee camps on one of the International news channels. Sure, during WW2, my mother's family(one widow with five children) survived on sweet potatoes and other roots. But at least they had one meal daily. My father was old enough to run errands for the Japanese soldiers, his family had rice to eat throughout the Japanese occupation.

Pulling my view finder from Greece to my country, we also have a huge civil servant population. Similarly our debt to earning ratio is not exactly healthy. I certainly hope that the coming election would change deep seated problems like that so that we would not face in the future what Greece faces now.

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