Greece, Bulgaria Bulgarian children everywhere in the streets of Thessaloniki

Project : MARIO 26 Nov 2010 |

Thessaloniki, Greece: The situation really changed compared to last year: the Romanian families nearly disappeared and the Bulgarian children are everywhere in the streets! says Valbona Hystuna, the most experienced street worker of the Greek NGO Arsis. We have high expectations with the coming of our Bulgarian colleague. She will of course help us a lot to communicate with the children and their parents, and then we should better understand their situation on a case per case basis and try to answer some of the needs, the most urgent ones.

Always dynamic and positive, Valbona is leading her team with great enthusiasm. She knows perfectly the field; she is detecting and taking care of the children in street situation in Thessaloniki for more than seven years. I started with the Albanian children, a great number of them were victims of child trafficking at this time. Today, still some of them are working in the streets but they are nearly integrated, they are going to school, their rights are respected. This is not the case of the Bulgarian minors, and it is high time to react!

And… the original framework of Mario project allows such transnational cooperation… Ulyana Matveeva, social worker at the Alliance for Children and Youth just arrived from Sofia and will be working for one month together with Arsis team. The program is quite impressive: daily street work, coordination meeting with the stakeholders active in the street, regular contact with the Bulgarian consulate, daily social reporting, data gathering for the research, collection of anonymous witnesses, communication with the team in Sofia to double check in the locations of origin the pieces of information collected in Greece.

The objective is to analyse the situation of Bulgarian families living and working in the streets of the Greek harbour, to evaluate the degree of vulnerability of the poorest and isolated ones and to check if the risks of exploitation are tangible or not. And if yes, the mixed team of social workers, assisted by an international expert, will determine the consistency of a potential trend of trafficking between the two countries.

Already the information collected in the first days of street work is showing appalling situations of young women with their children. Some traces of deception have been collected through few interviews and the mixed team of street workers will try to look into this direction.

The Greek and the Bulgarian social workers have one month to collect data and compile them into a report. The Arsis coordinator concludes: with this evidence-based information, we hope to convince donors that a full project is needed. These families have specific needs and we should be able to provide them with adapted services for at least a year!

Winter is already there and it is raining on Thessaloniki. The Bulgarian children are spending long hours in the streets, the youngest are begging, the teenagers are washing the windscreens at the main crossroads… [VT]

Read as well: We need Bulgarian street workers to work with us in Thessaloniki