Prosfigika neighborhood hosts people from the entire spectrum of the oppressed and our biggest bet is to succeed in terms of self-organization into everyday needs and issues of survival, education, medical care and legal support, working at the same time a social and political charter that won’t promote a model of offer – take. It is at stake to move forward together and to conquer a collective consignment in the struggle for land and freedom. A struggle in which the entire interdisciplinarity of the movement’s fights opens. We are poor, refugees/immigrants, workers, unemployed, aged, mentally ill, we are women, and we are alone with children.
Women café is a new structure in the Prosfigika neighborhood, which was created through the needs of the community. In the beginning, we needed to create a reference point for every woman in Prosfigika to know, that she can find us at any time, if she wants to talk. At first, we were fewer, in our last assembly though we reached 22 active members. Triggered by the second incident of abuse that we had to deal within a short period of time from our creation, all the women in the café, regardless of our different starting points or language, expressed their authentic and original experiences and for one more time the political words took flesh and bones through the community. For that we are a café and not a team or a collectivity. Because we did not want to submit a feminist theory in the gathering of the community’s women. Something like that would have come from above, we would not be able to understand in the same way our multicultural Babel and in simple terms, it would be a useless tool. On the contrary, we started from nothing, from a café. From our collective gatherings around an aspect of oppression, and that seems to work. From simple to complex, from down to up, from the collectivization of experience inside a fighting field. One step at the time, but it includes us all.
Specifically, it is a structure that was built upon the need, voice to be given to all subjects as to express themselves, to feel comfortable and free. It is true, that inside the limits of the freed land of Prosfigika, women immigrants/refugees have silent needs of socialization, politicization, education that fade out in the stream of events. However, whatever we do brings us closer. In a gathering for the registration in the public health system, three girls came to the café for the first time. And they will come again. Action brings unity and through our deeds, we will find the theory that express us. Women café as a gathering and as a ritual, beyond the fact that it helped open up subjects that were in the shadow, it also works as a bridge between women and the central process of SY.KA.PRO. It is a channel of communication and a representation that makes the neighborhood even stronger. In order for it to function correctly, all its members need to be in correspondence. Naturally, we face some alienation problems inside our house, but we need to learn to care for one another. One of our basic elements of a fighting community is to overcome these problems because even if there was no state, people would still have to find solutions concerning food, shelter, health, education, organizing their defense. We can’t create the society of tomorrow if we do not built the communities of today.
Women of Prosfygika live under very difficult circumstances. We organize collectively, and we show solidarity to one another without the help of the state. Against the constitutional bodies to the state’s and capital’s enforcement we chose self- organization and resistance. We share experiences; we find solutions to every-day problems. Most of us are immigrants/refugees and have suffered economical exploitation, sexual and psychological oppression, inside a constant and unsure reality. We fight for the asylum, we fight to reunite with our families and we fight so that our children get to live. We are in danger of getting arrested, beaten, die because of a lack of access to the health care system. We are in danger not to be able to be the mothers of our children. Our under-aged children don’t have access to free health care and can’t go to school because vaccines are obligatory but also not given without AMKA. And still, you have to wait, afterwards to worry that you can’t achieve all of the above.
Women of Prosfygika come across a hostile environment of the Greek territory and don´t go to the gynecologist, don´t learn how to read… don’t, don’t
This text is a call for solidarity, economical or any other kind of help. A call that will help us do surgeries that we need, vaccine our children, be strong and give power to this beautiful society.
They asked 3000 euros from K. in order to operate on her in a private clinic for multiple fibromyomas. The public hospital won’t assume.
F. and M. will give birth really soon
A. and R. don’t have papers and need to go to a lawyer. One of them has 4 kids and the other a baby that has only had its first vaccines.
S. has been kicked out of her country for not wearing a hijab.
B. and D. are raising up their children on their own.
And the list goes on and on. We gather every Friday at 19:00 at our “house” and try to bring coffee…
