Greece’s financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all — their children.
One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.
I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her,
it read. Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother.
In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city’s poor, has found four children on his doorstep — including a baby just days old.
Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.
Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable — and it’s not happening in a country ravaged by war or famine, but in their own capital city
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