Austerity through my ten-year-old's eyes.

• Author: Carrion, Maria
• Position: FIRST PERSON SINGULAR - Essay

Madrid

On a recent afternoon, I found my ten-year-old daughter, Gabriela, in her room, busily writing a list. Leaning over her shoulder, I read the title: "Things I wish didn't exist." Aside from the usual suspects, such as school cafeteria food, wars, and earthquakes, she had also added unemployment, poverty, cutbacks, riot police, Lehman Brothers, and the minister of education. And the list went on.

One could argue that these are things a child simply regurgitates after hearing them at home or seeing them on the news (in the interest of full disclosure: As a journalist's daughter, Gabriela is a news junkie). But Gabriela, like all Spanish children, is living in turbulent times. These days, it is impossible to walk the streets without running into soup kitchen lines, homeless people rummaging through trash containers or sleeping pressed against buildings, and protests, thousands of them, taking place in every corner of Spain, every day.

Our central Madrid neighborhood is disrupted daily by the unsettling hum of police helicopters overhead. A short walk to the store sometimes means taking a special route to avoid riot police. Nowadays we are just as likely to bump into our family doctor carrying a protest sign on the street as we are to see her holding a stethoscope in our public health center. Not surprisingly, the economic crisis often tends to find its way into our dinnertime conversation.

Gabriela and her five-year-old sister, Estrella, are lucky. Although our livelihood has certainly been affected by the crisis, still they are not part of the 26 percent of children living in poverty in Spain, nor are their parents standing every day in long unemployment lines, as one of every four working-age people must do here. It is something my husband and I often remind them about as we try to teach them about social justice and solidarity, about giving and sharing in times of need.

The debt crisis, the massive dismantlement of the public sector, the privatization, and the impoverishment of an entire nation are, of course, not just a thing of the present. They will have grave consequences for Gabriela's and Estrella's future and that of an entire generation. It is our children who will pay the hefty price tag of this global financial crisis and its bitter remedies. I wonder whether Gabriela had an inkling of any of this when she wrote her list.

As a journalist, I often come home with new stories and must figure out how much information to dish...