Today, Dave and I took advantage of the nice weather and visited a few more sites in Prishtinë. He describes our adventure well: http://davidmctierinkosovo.com/2012/04/22/dragodan-qendra/. The pictures below are ones he took of yours truly during our outing.
The NEWBORN sculpture and the cafe where we had dessert are near the futbol stadium.
Cover of Southworth's The Last Kosovo Serb Won't Leave
Susan Southworth’s 2007 novel uncovers, as the title promises, the horrors that always transpire whenever one people, usually in the name of liberty, redefines another people as objects, a reclassification that characterizes ethnic cleansing as patriotism. But this beautifully written novel does so much more. Peeling back the labels resulting from centuries of warfare and hate, Southworth shows us the fears, yes, but also the dignity and nobility of Others, a revelation that should inspire us all even as we weep for their pain.
Map of Kosovo (Source: pbs.org/newshour)
By end of the novel, we follow Donald, a retired American linguist, into southwest Kosovaran town Prizren, where the Kosova Liberation Army celebrates its 1999 triumph over the Serbs, a victory made possible by NATO bombing. Absent from Prizren for a month, Donald expects to find what he left five weeks before: his Turkish friend and fellow linguist Bayram, with whom Donald can share his experiences living with Serbian peasants and resume their discussion of the Albanian language and culture.
Instead, he finds Bayram’s house trashed and valuable manuscripts scattered all over the grounds, acts of the new owner, an army thug. Bayram himself Donald finds in a make-shift jail, cuffed and beaten, lying on a floor littered with feces and surrounded by walls splattered with other victims’ blood (100-108). Though beaten himself, Donald escapes the Kosovaran violence via Macedonia, but not before witnessing Serbs shot in the street (120). In the final chapter, the narrator shows us the fate of the Serbian peasants that had welcomed Donald: Petar has been beheaded, and his wife Leposava wonders off in a daze, looking for the “home”—their cabin and their country—now a “bloody mosaic,” the work of soldiers, not much more than boys, intoxicated by liberty and by a culture of retribution and guns (122).
Before this bloody ending, however, primarily through Donald’s eyes, we learn to see Albanians, Turks, and Serbs not as oppressors or victims but as human beings worthy of our understanding and respect. Through Donald, for instance, we learn to revere the ancient Albanian language and culture (33), and that respect helps us understand how Donald can look at an angry Albanian soldier and see a scared boy, a “sweet-faced teenager” (104) with baggy fatigues on his “skinny frame” (100). Through Donald we also learn to relish coffee, dates, water pipes, baths—all things Turkish, especially his courteous friend Bayram (32-40).
Serbian Gusle & Bow (Source: Wikipedia)
Through Donald we learn as well to respect Serbs who “won’t leave.” Bogdan the Serbian policeman, for example, earns that respect by risking his life daily helping peasants to steer clear of the Liberation Army (5-15, 88-96), as does the young Serbian mountain man by hiding Donald, suspected of being an enemy courier (56-59). Through Donald’s month-long sojourn with the Serbian farmer and his wife, we also come to admire Petar and Leposava, their spiritual intimacy with the land, their domestic harmony and peace, their generosity. Revering their American guest, they feed him hearty bean soup, fresh eggs, and oatmeal cakes; they teach him to hoe the garden and to trap rabbits for supper; they show him how to bathe in the rain-water, how to dance with abandon, how to smell the seasons and fish in the stream (64-86). They also share with Donald their Serbian epic poems, accompanied by Petar’s gusle, a one-string instrument that can come to life “like a snake” (83) under Petar’s bow and moan “like a sad wind” (77). All Serbs, Petar sighs, “have too much history,” and he relates to Donald their own stories of grief over a grandfather lost in the war with Bulgaria, over an infant son who should not have died (80-83).
Possessed of these histories, we can no longer vilify oppressors and count victims; we can only acknowledge human beings and cry for the Balkans.
Cover of The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo
Nine years have passed since Paula Huntley published her superb memoir, The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo. Narrated in journal format, Huntley’s book records her experiences in 2000-2001, just one year after NATO troops drove Serbian forces out of Kosova. Naturally, after a decade of civil war, most Kosovarans had suffered all the horrors that go with urban warfare and displacement, and when the shooting stopped, many Kosovarans found themselves homeless and jobless, and everyone found that the educational and legal systems had suffered the same battering. So when Paula Huntley and Ed Villmoare chose to come to Pristina, they did not come as mere observers. Instead, they came to help, Paula by teaching English as a second language to Albanian students, Ed by working through the American Bar Association to help Kosova to rebuild its legal system.
Paula Huntley, author of The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo (Source: Ms. Huntley's website--click image to view)
Having just re-read this inspiring book, I must applaud the way Paula and Ed came to help. Eschewing know-it-all posturing, they couched their offer to help in compassion for those who had suffered so much and in full awareness of their own limitations. Describing Ed’s need to “do something” in response to the wide-spread agony, Paula records her doubt that “Ed really believes he can do anything of great significance here. He is a man of few illusions. But he is also a man of character and compassion. He can’t just do nothing” (29). Similarly, three months into her teaching, Paula wonders if she has “really [done] anything to help” (129).
Ed Villmoare, Paula Huntley's husband (Source: Ms. Huntley's website--click image to view)
They also came to help as partners and peers with the Kosovarans, fully expecting to learn as much as they teach and to receive as much as they give. This respectful stance, their doubts about effectiveness notwithstanding, earned Huntley and Villmoare the trust they would need to help Kosovarans build a future on a foundation of justice and learning
We can see that earned trust in the stories that Kosovarans come to share with Paula and Ed. In working with his legal assistant Blerta, for instance, Ed hears the story of her mother’s gang-rape, a war crime that has silenced her mother permanently (179). Similarly, in teaching stories such as Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Paula engages Ermina and other students in eager discussions of marriage as a relationship shared by “equal partners,” not by a jailer-husband and his prisoner-wife, too often the case, says Ermina, in Pristina (183).
By starting her book club in her Pristina home, Paula also used Ernest Hemingway’s stories to generate more discussions on the power of language to assert human dignity and to effect positive change for Kosova. In reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, for example, Paula and her student-guests reflected on the old man’s wisdom: “It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.” Naturally, this quote led to discussion of the old man’s tremendous suffering as he battles the great fish, then, thanks to the sharks, his failure to bring the great fish to the dock. But once again, the old man’s words—“a man can be destroyed but not defeated”—helped her students to realize that the old man had not been defeated, that, in Paula’s words, he had “won self-respect and the renewed respect of the villagers. He maintained his dignity and showed courage in the face of overwhelming adversity” (167).
First meeting of The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo (Source: Ms. Huntley's website--click image to view)
With such courage placed within reach through language, Paula’s students began to think of “overcoming” their Kosovaran “adversity” as a realistic goal, particularly if, like the old man, they became “ready,” a condition made possible by education and a willingness to use their “new words” (204). Without these new words to “express their fears, frustrations, angers, desires, and ambitions in ways other than violence,” Paula concludes, Kosovarans can have no hope for the future (150). Neither can we.
OK, it’s 5:00 Friday morning, January 27, and I feel much better, even though I can’t brew any coffee in my room. No water pressure, a daily Balkans phenomenon owing to complicated power-grid issues (even the basics root in politics here). But let me interrupt my spoiled American whining long enough to say how happy I am to be here. Why? For starters, mountains. Flying south of Munich (southern Germany) yesterday, I experienced again the ecstasy of flying over the Italian/Austrian Alps. Forget snow caps. These truly awesome peaks wore snowy cloaks that reached to the ground. Then as the bus drive through Macedonia and into Kosova (as the Albanians spell it), the land featured lesser but still steep slopes that rose right from the edge of the road, transforming the highway into a Byronesque pass.
And the people. I love them. Perhaps because they endure every day the annoyances and deprivations that wring whining so readily from spoiled Americans, these Albanians in Kosova—just like the Albanians I met in Albania in 2003—invariably display patience, good humor, and self-sacrificial kindness. For instance, as I fumed in indignation when asked, again, to produce my passport, the Kosovarans on the bus joked about the snow and the self-important posturing of the border guards. And as I mumbled “what next” beneath my breath when the fender-bender brought us to another halt, the young men on my bus hopped off to help separate the tangled bumpers and to push vehicles out of knee-deep drifts on the road’s shoulder.
When the bus finally made it to Pristina, an eager young cabbie grabbed my 50-pound suitcase (lots of books) and my 45-pounder (more books), and then wove skillfully through the streets cluttered with people and slush. As we reached my hotel, I asked “sa kushton”; he responded in English far better than my Albanian “five Euros, but for you good American, nothing.” I gave him 10.
I pulled into to Pristina at 3:30 pm today, not in a plane but in a bus. My flight should have landed in Pristina at 10:30 am, but heavy snow and near-zero visibility forced the pilot to head south for Skopje, Macedonia, where landing seemed less dangerous. Maybe. But after skidding on the runway, we deplaned, cleared customs, and boarded a bus for the two-hour drive back to Pristina.
That two-hour drive took well over three hours, the result of heavy snow, which began just after we landed. We also encountered officious guards at the Kosova border, who felt compelled to check all bus passengers’ passports—three times—even though the airport customs people had just cleared us; a traffic-jamming collision between two trucks and two cars also slowed us. I imagined the headlines in the Starkville Daily News: “MSU English professor dies in Kosovaran snow drift.”
I have much more to report, but it will have to wait. I haven’t really slept since January 24.
January 26, 2012
From Judy Raymond
Rich left Houston early, only to sit on the tarmac for two hours because of the weather. He had no problem in Newark and got over the Atlantic as expected. He even made the short connection to Adria Air in Munich. There is too much snow in Pristina, however, so his plane landed in Skopje, Macedonia, and then he had a long bus ride to Pristina. Unfortunately, he lost his US driver’s license at border customs.
Now for the good news: he has all 150 lbs of luggage to haul in the snow, and so far he has been able to send those expensive international text messages to me. However, his phone has lost its charge, so we won’t know if it works in Pristina until he can recharge it. He was still en route as of 6:14 am CST this morning.
He is certainly going to need a little nap once he makes it to the hotel today!
The journey has begun: I landed at Hobby International Airport in Houston, TX this afternoon. I will spend the night with my daughter Anna and her family. The overseas leg of the journey begins about mid-day tomorrow.
Reflections on Kosovo 