Poverty and gender gap strains Eastern Europe

Ukraine's harsh economic situation has left many children homeless Keystone Archive

The Swiss charity HEKS has been holding its annual conference on Eastern European countries.

This year the theme for the one day conference was, “Tradition and Change; Emerging Tensions in Eastern Europe”. HEKS; which supports aid projects all over the world on behalf of Switzerland’s Protestant church, invited local representatives from a variety of Eastern European projects to Zurich to talk about their work and their lives.

Armin Rieser, European Officer for HEKS, explained that the subject for this year’s conference was chosen because of the extreme contrasts many aid workers now witness in eastern European countries.

“Travelling in Eastern Europe is always a very intense experience,” Rieser told swissinfo. “I’m always amazed at seeing such wealth and such poverty side by side, or seeing illiterate people, and then an Internet café.”

Rieser added that HEKS hoped the conference would help people to understand what life is like now in eastern Europe. “But,” he said, “we should be able to see the things we have in common as well as the problems.”

Journey of contrasts

Aid worker Irina Belyavskaya, from the Transcarpathia region of Ukraine, highlighted the widening poverty gap in Eastern Europe. “I’ll try and take you on a journey from the Hungarian border to my home town of Uzhgorod,” she told swissinfo.

“On the road from the border you pass lots of luxurious mansions,” she continued. “They often belong to customs officers. But right next to them you will see little huts, with no water or electricity.”

“In the smaller mountain villages, you might wonder what century you were actually in.”

Belyavskaya works on a HEKS supported project teaching English to underprivileged children. The aim is to give even the poorest children some of the educational opportunities that are becoming the preserve of the rich in Ukraine.

Belyavskaya also works on a project helping Transcarpathia’s Roma community, which up until now has been largely neglected.

Too poor for school

Meanwhile in Romania, the level of poverty in his small village near the border with Hungary is a matter of great concern to church minister Barnabas Balogh.

“I can’t afford the luxury of just being a minister and writing a sermon each week,” Balogh said. “I’ve got to be a social worker too. One of our main projects is to help children from poor families get an education. Some of them don’t even have the shoes and clothes to go to school.”

Balogh says people in Romania are disappointed that the decade since the end of the cold war has not brought them more prosperity.

“I expected much more back in 1989 too,” he admitted. “Now I wish we could go back and start again, and really plan the development of our society. Instead we have been just fire fighting.”

Democracy in a year

The slow pace of improvement is something that concerns Albanian aid worker Fabiola Egro too. “Back in 1991 we were full of confidence,” she remembers. “We thought we’d change Albania in the space of a year.

Ten years on Egro is one of Albania’s most energetic campaigners for the rights of women and children. Her organisation “Useful to Albanian Women” is supported by HEKS; and has a network of 17 groups across the country. Members work with street children, and with women forced into prostitution.

There is even a project aimed at ending northern Albania’s notorious tradition of blood feuds.

On top of all this work, Egro herself deals with the daily difficulties of life in Albania. She rises at two in the morning to do her housework and wash the clothes, because at eight, when people normally get up, electricity and water are cut off across the country.

Egro points out that the fall of communism has not necessarily done women any favours. “When the factories closed down, the women were the first to lose their jobs,” she explained. “Meanwhile the end of communism has meant a return to some old traditions, including a very partriarchal system.”

Catastrophic population loss

The poverty and unemployment that has gone hand in hand with the transition to democracy and a market economy has caused catastrophic loss of population in some eastern European countries.

In Armenia for example, which in 1989 had only four million people, 25 per cent of the population has left over the last ten years.

Hayk Minassian, a physics professor from Yeravan, is now working on a HEKS supported rural development project aimed at keeping rural communities alive and profitable.

Minassian is encouraging farmers to turn organic; he believes Armenia’s huge apricot crop could earn money from Western consumers.

“The problem is the farmers are nervous about trying anything new,” he told swissinfo. “They need to be convinced that they will make a profit. So our project is getting the land from the government, and letting a number of farmers from lots of different villages try the organic way on small patches of ground.”

“Once they see that the organic crops will fetch good prices,” he continued, “they will start planting them on their own land.”

Change needed in West too

Despite the many problems in Eastern Europe, HEKS’ Armin Rieser does not believe the countries should be viewed in a negative light.

“All these countries are European too,” he points out. “They don’t need to be just like the West – they are already European.”

“It is very important for us in the west to understand that Eastern Europe is Europe,” he continued. “Europeanisation certainly does not mean westernisation.”

“As a consequence of accepting that these countries are part of Europe,” said Rieser, “the west will have to change too.”

By Imogen Foulkes