Everywhere I go I see people rising up to the occasion to help each other. Amid all the destruction in the area, there is so much care, cooperation, and joy. I spend most of my time at the billowy tented refugee camp on the hill in Cegrane. The large stand-up tents fill a field and hold more than one family each. The camp is down to about 5000 people. At its height, the U.N. reported it held “57,000 displaced and emotionally shattered people.” They received humanitarian aid as they hid from the war and neighborhood gunfire.
As I walk around daily life seems organized and quiet. From the village below I hear the chanting of Muslim prayers. I am here with three other U.S. women in our group and we are invited into a tent by a woman who seats us on pillows and makes us some Turkish coffee at a gas burner. Her family’s possessions are neatly folded in their section of the tent. There are mats for beds. How long can people live like this? They have nothing, yet they give strangers a cup of coffee? We offer sweets that we brought as presents. We show her our Albanian dictionary and point to words that she pronounces for us. I don’t tell her I speak Serbian.
Our women’s group does several workshops at the camp: one with teenagers on violence; another with women on advocacy and trauma; another with children on art therapy and on having fun. The situation must be so confusing and hurtful to people driven out of their homes, with destruction surrounding them and strangers descending from other countries. We keep hearing from young people about their strong desire for education. Albanian schools were closed in 1992 and many kids have not felt comfortable in schools where they don’t teach in Albanian, so they stopped attending school. The kids enjoy playing bumper tag and doing an affirmation pyramid.
We go to the tents for a workshop started by Burbuqe, a young woman organizer who speaks English. It’s a special group for the women who hold a regular crocheting circle. We join; they teach us. Fifty women in several shifts quietly and diligently participate. The older women wear dark kerchiefs, the younger women come with babies. One woman says she gave birth in the forest. A sleeping baby boy has an Albanian name that means Resistance. We learn lacework, a tradition in every ethnic group in Yugoslavia.
I look around at the women all busy with with their lacemaking, just being together. Two young women who wear the same top and similar necklaces sit very close to each other. Burbuqe’s mother starts dancing at one point, and others join. They bow to us indicating they are happy we are there, inviting us to dance too. We give them gifts we have brought with us. An eleven-year-old boy who tries so hard to communicate with me in English gets my radio.
At the domestic violence workshop at Cegrane, my friend Sharon, a psychologist by profession, gives women trainees some simple lessons on how the young women at the camp can continue to work on trauma issues on their own and with others. When one of the trainees hears that Sharon is a psychology professor, she looks at her eagerly: “Did we do alright?” Sharon smiles; “Of course.” My heart has been captured by these people who have experienced so much, the young people too wise for their age because of the war. My parents’ nationalities, whether I am Serb or Croat, is not a question for them—only the war divides. The extremists are the killers and perpetrators.
We have lunch the next day with Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues, who is visiting Cegrane. She asks us to tell her some of the stories we’ve heard and arranges interviews with some of the women. About ten of us sit in a temporary tent restaurant. The food is not the focus, of course. Eve leans forward to hear, attentive as a bird in danger. A narrative we heard at the lace workshop is about an old woman and her daughter who feel torn about leaving the animals behind when they have to flee their home. The mother is so worried about the cows being left tied up and in possible danger that she goes back to untie them. The daughter cries and says through tears that her mother never made it back—she was caught in a bomb explosion. There are minefields everywhere in Kosovo and throughout the former Yugoslavia as a result of this war.
Eve hears the story and wants more. We arrange for a translator to go around with her and talk to the women we met in the lacemaking circle especially. I see her perform this piece years later in San Francisco.
We go to other places—Tetovo at the foot of the mountain and sparkling Lake Ohrid. We hear how people want to preserve their Albanian culture and language. As we drive, we see the huge lake from the car, the silvery mosques and homes lining the shore. It is hard to believe such a fierce struggle is going on. In Struga, a town at one end of the lake, we meet with a women’s rights group to help them with organizational questions and international funding. In the workshop we bring up the idea of being and knowing yourselves. It is odd to the women; they have puzzled looks. Some of them are overworked, taking care of refugees, and going back and forth to Pristina. When we ask them what their dreams are and to visualize their futures, they are silent, maybe a translation problem or a culture clash or the war. Valdete volunteers that she never thinks of herself separately from her family. The art workshop, however, is appealing to them, something they can do with their hands. I think of how egotistically Americans are raised in comparison. Here community comes first—their family, clan, the Kosovo Albanians.
I am tired and want to go home. The shingles have pretty much disappeared—it has been three weeks. The communication in different languages tires me out, although I love learning about Albanians and their culture and spending time with the women as they teach me their names—Melihate, Shqipe, Ajnete, Nahine, Lovideta, Valdete. Some are Muslim/Arabic names, they tell me. The discrimination against Albanian women is very serious, not only because of their ethnicity but because they are women. Nearby Tetovo, the unofficial capital of Kosovo Albanians, has the only university offering degrees in the Albanian language, but these are not recognized by the government of Macedonia. The scenery here is breathtaking but one can’t enjoy tourism when talking to people about trauma and war. We go back to the Cegrane tents.
As we prepare to leave the camp, we dance outside the tents, like the Roma people. Igo leads us. Such beautiful energy and laughter. The children join us with their boundless glee. I have fallen in love with the little boy I gave my radio to at the workshop. We look at each other and he hugs my legs. I wrap my arm around his head. Hetema and the little baby called Resistance are in the crowd. I go up to the baby, we look at each other, and I kiss the top of his head.
How I want see Hetema and her family again someday, Burbuqe who gave me a cherished book in Albanian, Igo with her incredible spirit, an Amazon sister, her love and comradeship so special! I don’t have words for these beautiful people I have bonded with. They stand around us and sing about Kosovo and sprinkle us with water, the children clutching us as we try to walk away. “Don’t forget us,” shouts one young woman in English.
I don’t forget.
South Africa: For Nelson Mandela
I had dreamed of this conversation when I was a young radical 25 years ago. I never thought I would go to South Africa, much less sit talking with a small community of black people who had to go to a spigot to collect their water.
Visiting our friend Susan, a white South African who had returned to her native Plettenberg Bay after the revolution triumphed and Nelson Mandela became president, we felt privileged to come with her to a township near the very tip of South Africa. While it was close to the most incredible vistas and scenery one could imagine, the people lived in dire poverty on a dry little hillside with one water source in lean-to shanties and huts.