Children of the Stoplights: Part 3

This is the featured weekly post from Discarded Lies at Winds of Change.NET. The Children of the Stoplights series is about child trafficking in Europe. Here are parts one and two of Children of the Stoplights.

There are so many of them, and they were closer to home than I imagined. My neighbourhood has changed over the years. Albanian people have moved in the apartment buildings; walking down our narrow streets I hear other languages, I see faces that are not Greek. This is all fairly new, there were no Albanians in Greece before the mid-90s. Hanging out with the guys in the neighbourhood "taverna" I hear the familiar immigrant story: the longing for home, the struggle to find work in an unfamiliar and often inhospitable country not used to immigrants, the discrimination, the lack of papers. I think the reason they felt free to tell me their stories is because I'm an immigrant too.

But the truth I learned from the children. My then seven-year-old neighbour Maria confided to me that her cousins were selling little paper icons every night along with other children. Alexandra was six and her brother was five. An uncle would pick them up every evening and bring them home in the early morning. "They're very poor," she said. "They need the money."

A few weeks later Maria started disappearing in the evenings too. I wondered if the same "uncle" was picking her up.

Maria is an only child. She and her parents immigrated to Greece from Albania in 1997. They were Muslims but like most Albanians they converted to Christianity when they came to Greece, it was easier for Christians to find jobs and sponsors. A neighbour baptised Maria and offered her father a job painting apartments. They live in a very small basement apartment across from me.

I first met them in 1998. Maria and I became friends very fast, she had a big, bright smile, dimples and a few missing teeth. Her parents are quiet people, friendly but reserved. Their Greek was not very good back then, but they always smiled and said hello. In the one bedroom basement apartment lived Maria, her parents, her two cousins, Alexandra and Constantino, and their mother. Maria's mom cleaned the building and her dad would do odd jobs here and there.

I remarked to my dad's girlfriend that they seemed like very nice people. She smiled and said they had sold their baby a couple of months ago. I didn't believe her. I said "how would you know that?" She told me Maria's mom went to the hospital, had the baby and came home empty-handed. Then a couple of weeks later they bought nice furniture and a washer. And the dad quit working and his sister and her children came from Albania.

I still didn't believe her. She said it happens all the time, "the gypsies do it too, they sell their children." I asked Maria if she had any brothers or sisters. She said no. She said her mom had a baby a few months ago "but it died, the poor thing."

Child labor was a problem. The Greek chapter of UNICEF estimated that 5,800 children were illegally employed in the streets of the country in jobs from windshield washing to prostitution and that they generated approximately $3.5 million (3 million euros) in revenue yearly. The Government and NGOs believed that the majority of beggars were either Roma or Albanian. There were reports that approximately 1,000 children from Albania were trafficked and forced to beg. Some parents forced their children to beg for money or food.Country Reports on Human Rights Practices - Greece