On the occasion of Human Rights Day, Valia Savvidou, SolidarityNow’s Communications Officer, writes the article “What are all these people becoming?”.

“(…) Are we apathetic? Seconds we show a safe compassion and then forget, or is life smarter, in its speed and violence, that we are forced into this behavior?

All, probably. Life happens, is fast and each person tries their best, as they mean it. But there are also the inherent oddities, the apparent deviations of a world that moves but at varying speeds, not the same for everyone, and certainly not such as to drive everyone forward. On the contrary, in too many cases speed translates into an ever-worsening situation, a situation that holds people back, or at best stagnant.

Where one is born, whether one is brought up in democratic or non-democratic conditions – family and social -, whether where one grows up has access to basic goods for human existence, whether one has access to human fundamentals, is decisive.

And this is where the human being comes in again. The one who is in a more advantageous position than the other but cares.

The above, possibly utopian, one might say (but why not after all?!), is what drives SolidarityNow’s work, which has found a way to make it tangible through the Solidarity Centres it created a few years ago, precisely for this purpose. To stand by people and their needs, to listen to them, to give them a voice, hope, perspective and solutions. To leave no one behind. (…)”