” “A delegation from Moscow’s Caritas and other organisations from Saint Petersburg working with the homeless in partnership with Secours catholique-Caritas France will be in Athens too. In the past, meetings have been held for confrontations and exchanges of experiences between Russians and French, and in these days they want to be at the Forum to give voice to the homeless who are going to speak personally. The numerous delegations of national and diocesan Caritas groups (the Italian one includes 18 people) will be welcomed by Caritas Hellas, a small agency bringing together Greek Catholics of the Roman, Byzantine and Armenian rites. The Greek Caritas supports the program for refugees, which is based in downtown Athens and which distributes every day food and clothes to about 200-300 immigrants who can have no access to legality because of the excessively strict laws. There are no official figures about the number of foreigners who are in Greece (most of them are Kurds, Iraqis, Albanians, Afghans, Middle-Eastern and Africans) partly because many of them are just passing through. The estimated figure is about 15-17% of a total population of 11 million in Greece. Tragedies of the sea are not lacking in Greece either, “especially in winter, with the rough sea tells to SIR Father Andreas Vuccinos, directors of Athens’ Caritas agency But many come from Eastern countries and come through the mountains that are not checked so much”.
