Help for Greece celebrates ten-year anniversary – salzburg.ORF.at
politics
The Salzburg Greece Aid is ten years old this year. It started in 2012 as a spontaneous campaign that mainly focused on medical products. In the meantime, a well-washed aid organization has emerged. It brings more than a hundred tons of relief supplies to the country on the Aegean every year.
Compared to the rest of the EU, Greece still has a very large number of poor and sick people. Erwin Schrümpf from Seekirchen (Flachgau) founded the Greek Aid as a one-man adventure ten years ago: “At the beginning I never thought that it would develop like this. It’s grown incredibly. We have 46 clients, young mothers and students who are supposed to live independently at some point.”
Burning ferry didn’t stop Shrimp
So far, the Salzburg Aid to Greece has often reached its limits – for example when Schrümpf got stuck on a burning ferry, when the Aid to Greece on the island of Lesbos was drawn into the mass influx of emigrants and refugees from Turkey: “They have a lot of work changes. We have seen where massive help is needed. How do we develop that we can help quickly at specific points? Those were the questions.”
Population abandoned by EU?
Helping quickly, without political or major bureaucratic hurdles – that is one of the challenges of the initiative. She now has many supporters. Help is needed in Greece, even if the state has meanwhile left the strong EU financial supervision behind. Schrümpf says that you hardly notice anything about this in the population: “People have to keep fighting. We need politicians who don’t just stand there and console themselves with the future.”
And so Erwin Schrümpf will soon be making his way south again with a freight transport. How often that has to be, he hasn’t dared to estimate for a long time.