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The Albanian photographer, Ernesto çela, working at a construction site in Metaxochori of Agia (Larisa), 1993.
« We’re that kind of people: we work; we’re not yet the way you are here. I mean the young guys. I am not talking about, about the older generation. And they [the young Greeks] don’t want to work. They ask every so often, at night, in the morning, "Mother, give me five euros. Give me, father." There [meaning in Albania] even the little children work. It’d be a shame for that country not to progress in the future. Here have you seen…little children, children of that age go to work? Does any child of Sotiris’ age [his sixteen-year-old son] come to the construction site? »
« Sometimes I tell them [his parents] something like "Tomorrow I don’t want to go to work." He [his father] says to me, "No." He says, "You have to go". And all right, basically WHETHER I LIKE OR NOT going to work, whether I like it or not, I must go! Because if I don’t go, who will feed me? You see? But it is also something else. I want to work to have a better life. If you work you always have a better life. If you don’t work, you’ll end up somewhere else. You’ll end up on the streets. Your parents won’t want you of course, eh, they won’t want to have a lazy guy around the house. What use would you be? That’s the way it is. But still parents are parents. They won’t tell you for example "Ah! Get out of the house." They’ll tell you that in a nice way "Go to work, because it’s not right to be seventeen years old and not work." You’ll either go to school or you’ll work. It’s either one or the other. If you don’t like either one, they’ll close the door on you and…you’ll end up somewhere else. »
The second generation
