--Saturday, 11 March 00--
Alan Pearson, the head of the CFA, arranged for a small party to celebrate the coming of 17 new Kosovar employees on Monday and the upcoming departure of a number of the people who had contributed to the success to date. He gave a brief and effective speech and the group ate hors d'oeuvres and drank local wine. It was a pleasant event.

I had an 8 PM Dinner with Ishmail and Kimeta. I had fretted over finding a nice place that would be nice but that won't overawe them. Ultimately I settled on Leona's, a pizza (and other things) restaurant near the office. The dinner was fun and very comfortable.

We walked back to the hotel and passed the office on the way. I pointed it out and they told me it was formerly the headquarters of the Central Bank. It would appear that the building has quite a history.

Kemeta told me that when Milosevich stripped Kosovo's autonomy (in violation of Tito's constitution), Albanian Kosovars were fired or forced out of their jobs swiftly. She thought that perhaps 50% of the working population became unemployed in just three months and the others not all that long afterwards.

The language of teaching in the schools was changed from Albanian to Serbian, if only because the new Serbian teachers could not speak Albanian. (It seems to me that the intelligentsia of the Kosovars spoke Serbian fluently but not the general population.)

Because Kosova had been self-governing for decades, this purge left the personnel of an entire governmental administration, top to bottom, simultaneously unemployed and without a future for them or their children.

Since the primary activities of the Kosova government were health and education, the leaders, the implementers and the beneficiaries of these two services were simultaneously in the same boat. The response shows an immense creativity. Rejecting violence, the Albanian Kosovars quietly created a "parallel government" dedicated to providing these essential services.

Each family was asked to contribute five marks a month and each business 50 marks. The money was used to pay the former teachers to teach the former pupils and to provide for the health needs of the community. They met in homes and mosques and wherever they could. The meeting places were changed frequently and groups were kept small so that the Serbs would not notice the activity. Thus, quietly, 90% of the population provided for their basic needs for survival as a group.

The question inevitably arises about how unemployed people pay for anything for long. The answer is that hundreds of thousands of the Albanian Kosovars emigrated to Europe to seek work in hard currency countries. In addition, several hundred thousand became legal and illegal refugees in countries from Norway to Italy. They did not forget their families, friends and country. Remittance payments from wages accompanied their wishes home and supported relatives, thus lubricating the parallel government's activities.


--Sunday, 12 March 00--
My weekend off. I slept late, if you care to call 8:30 am late. I looked out the window and realized that it had been raining lightly for a while.

Ishmail came buy at ten, as promised, and told me that he had to work at Noon. We settled into my room for some intensive language training and kept at it for an hour. Very intensive and exhausting.

Afterward we took a short walk and had a cappuccino at my favorite place. He seemed very quiet and he spoke very softly while we were there, perhaps because he recognized someone when we entered. This town is a small place, a place so small that I have never walked up the street with a Kosovar but that they ran into at least one person they knew.

We walked back to the Grand and then up and down Mother Theresa Street, the most popular promenading street in the city. Then Ishmail left to go to work.

I got my camera and decided to walk up the hill to the north of downtown. Rain here causes the sidewalks, where there are sidewalks, to become coated with brown puddles and, where there are no puddles, a brown slime. When you walk away from downtown, gradually the sidewalks get smaller, the mud thicker, and the going slower. And so it was, as I walked toward the American Compound and KFOR headquarters (which seem to be contiguous).

The brown mud that flows in the water here.

The mud here requires some comment. We have all experienced mud, it is a condition of anyplace that is not 100% covered with concrete or asphalt -- on second thought, that definition might exclude a significant number of Americans -- but the mud here is truly special: it dissolves into water to turn it a uniform tan brown, it absorbs water and distributes it in such a way that when you step into it, it clings to any surface with a ferocious tenacity. You lift your foot and discover another kilo of weight attached to your extremity. You scrape your foot on some hard surface and you can only get rid of the bottom of the mud, leaving a thick fringe of mud surrounding your foot like a tutu surrounds a ballerina's waist, only a lot heavier and a lot less pretty.

After scraping the edge of your sneakers on street signs and anything that has a sharp edge, in desperation, you look for puddles to dissolve the residual load. Scraping works for the largest gobs but you have to take a jack knife to the accumulated crap in the grooves of your sneakers. I use the bottle opener attachment of my Swiss Army knife; I avoid the blades for fear of serious injury.

This isn't all. Because sidewalks are used for parking lots, you are often forced onto the street where cars drive by much faster than they should, sending out a brown spray on each side. On the wet days, eventually everything below your knee has a brown scum on it.

I guess the bottom line is that it is unwise to go for a walk after even a light rain. Of course, you can wait until everything has dried. Then there's no mud, just dust, dust floating in the slightest breeze. The dust that covers everything. Balkan dust.

Joe