Jon Henley: We are Kicking Pregnant Women on the Streetsi

As Greece enters its fifth straight year of "recession", the cuts deepen and the dole queues lengthen, some people are beginning to fight back. On Monday, in Plaka, Athens' old town, I met Katerina Kanelidou, 42, a leadership coach who decided she had to do something one night a couple of weeks ago, when she saw a homeless man outside the station during one of the coldest winters in memory. "Then on YouTube, I saw someone had posted a video of a pregnant woman being ejected from a homeless shelter," she said. "I was just so shocked. I was thinking, how many unemployed people are going to become homeless? And what kind of society have we become, that we are kicking homeless pregnant women on to the streets?" Realizing she had neither "the power to influence the politicians, or the money to pay for more shelters", Kanelidou decided what she could do was offer her professional experience, providing specially devised, free coaching programs for the city's unemployed, aimed at boosting their self-confidence and skills. "I just thought: I have to do something," she said. "Yes, there is real depression. Huge numbers of people are taking ant--depressants, and a lot of anger at what's happened, but the time for excuses is over now. I am so fed up with the excuses: We can't do anything, we don't have the money, the time, the right paperwork. I have all I need to do something." So Kanelidou posted on her Facebook page and emailed her contacts, offering coaching sessions to unemployed people on little or no income. She wasn't sure what the take-up would be. "People call us lazy, but we have always worked hard," she said. "There's a huge stigma to being unemployed in Greece."