The Canadian writer Charlie Wilkins, now a resident of Paros, will lead us on an illustrated travelogue – not an overland or seafaring adventure this time but rather a healing journey, a dramatic and impassioned trip into the salvaging of a body and soul (his own)… and from there into the recesses of Athens’ most mysterious and storied old hospital.

With live music by Matt Coldrick and Karen Solomon.

“Healthcare, we are frequently reminded, is about responsibility, obligation, money. It is sometimes about politics and, perhaps too often these days, about profit…. But it is also about something else… A good public health-care system, I had by this time deciphered for myself, is, at its most intricate and inscrutable depths, about love… by which I mean the love of a people and a culture for itself; and, in the case of Greek healthcare, for a handful of strays such as I.”

“I was able to laugh because, in reality, I was, just then, feeling extremely good about Greek public healthcare. As a long-time documentarian, often of the bizarre, I was being hustled, with privileges, to an orchestra seat at precisely the sort of opera beloved of the freelance journalist: which is to say a crowded old hospital, a Greek hospital no less, for people living out the ultimate Greek drama — to be or not to be — in the land of Homer and Socrates and Sappho (and Callas and Antetokounmpo and Kiki Dimoula).”

“For the first time in nine days, I felt a rush not so much of relief as of release – from a situation that a few days earlier I had feared was going to kill me. The reason it didn’t of course was that a detachment of highly devoted strangers,many working for perhaps 30% of the pay they would have been earning in the health system in my home country of Canada, and who when I left the hospital would never see me again, had saved my life, made me whole, and wanted nothing in return.”