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Read more about the article WSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country WSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country
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WSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country WSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country

As Greece stages its second parliamentary election this year on Sunday, many Greeks have given up waiting for their politicians to find a way out of the country’s long economic crisis. Instead, national recovery and renewal will come about through the sum of ordinary people’s efforts, more and more people say.

Athens-based photographer Myrto Papadopoulos traveled the country in the week before the elections and asked Greeks from widely different walks of life how their country could finally leave its crisis era behind it. What she discovered was a mixture of resignation about Greek politics and belief in the innate creativity and resourcefulness of ordinary Greeks.

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Continue ReadingWSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country WSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country
Read more about the article Dendropotamos — Thessaloniki -Lighthouse

Dendropotamos — Thessaloniki -Lighthouse

“Our bus trip back to Thessaloniki was long.  Thankfully, it provided us opportunities to rest and or simply to enjoy fellowship with one another.   With great skill and after a delicious lunch in Kalambaka, we returned to our hotel to check-in, only to return to the bus to depart for the Church of St. Nectarios in Dendroportamou, which would be an experience that many of us would not soon forget.

… Much of our group arrived in Dendroportamou, just outside the courtyard of the magnificent Church dedicated to and seeking the intercession of St. Nectarios.  This Church was stunning and built by the poorest of the poor in an essentially crime ridden, cutoff western region of the city that has approximately 3,000 families, 2,000 of these families being Roma.    As their name suggests, they have roamed from place to place from country to country, carrying little, but often inheriting a ghetto laden with crime.  Their city here is no different.

What is different in this community though is the presence of extreme joy, a joy that radiates from the Sanctuary, through the nave and far beyond the confines of this Parish!  Of course, this joy is ultimately founded in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  Here though, where the vast majority of the community was not welcomed to the Church and unable to find joy – Christ – amidst the crime, the poverty, and the hopelessness, simply because they were “Roma”, joy came to their community some ten years ago and it came in the form of a youthful, humble and ever smiling priest with a vision to serve, Fr. Athenagoras.

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Continue ReadingDendropotamos — Thessaloniki -Lighthouse
Read more about the article WSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country

WSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country

As Greece stages its second parliamentary election this year on Sunday, many Greeks have given up waiting for their politicians to find a way out of the country’s long economic crisis. Instead, national recovery and renewal will come about through the sum of ordinary people’s efforts, more and more people say.

Athens-based photographer Myrto Papadopoulos traveled the country in the week before the elections and asked Greeks from widely different walks of life how their country could finally leave its crisis era behind it. What she discovered was a mixture of resignation about Greek politics and belief in the innate creativity and resourcefulness of ordinary Greeks.

(more…)

Continue ReadingWSJ In Their Own Hands Greeks Look to Their Own Initiative to Rebuild Crisis-Racked Country