Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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These accounts were thus usually focused on the details of living conditions<br />
in Serbian enclaves, descriptions that yielded causes and actors they<br />
could blame for their individual and collective suffering. Such a testimony<br />
was given by Dragan, an elderly teacher of Gorazdevac, a Serbian village<br />
very close to Pec. According to him, before the war people could hold various<br />
jobs in town and work in the fields only for their own consumption,<br />
but the restrictions on movement beyond the village, which came after the<br />
war, created a high rate of unemployment which could not be absorbed by<br />
the area’s agriculture. As a village patriarch, Dragan expressed his worry<br />
about the consequences of the situation: “There is no work, there is no<br />
work and this is not good. What can young people do without work? They<br />
don’t have anything to do. Without work there is no life, no peace.”<br />
Dragan repeated this phrase many times: “No work, no life, no peace”, and<br />
repeated it once more to end his conversation.<br />
Another resident of Gorazdevac interviewed was Tamara, the 36-year-old<br />
mother of three daughters. She began her story by bearing witness to the<br />
gap between the reality she was forced to live and her desires:<br />
The reality is practically the place where I’m living. That means the beehive.<br />
I would like to go out of this limited place but reality is like this; I<br />
am so sorry that I cannot allow myself to go out. My wish is to walk<br />
freely. To go with my children to the parks, to the cinema, to be<br />
employed. Just to walk freely without any feeling of fear.<br />
Biljana, another interviewee, was 25 and worked for an international<br />
organization in Mitrovica north. In describing how she spent her free time,<br />
she told the interviewer how much she missed the cinema, but continued<br />
on to say that these feelings were certainly common to most of the young<br />
people living in town:<br />
I guess I’m not the only one that would like so much to go to the cinema.<br />
Life is not just working, eating and sleeping. We need something<br />
else. Despite the fact that there is quite a lot of money around – because<br />
of all the international organizations present here – people cannot have<br />
the normal life we need. What is bothering me, in particular, as a person,<br />
is just the lack of a normal life. Here, even if I earn a fortune, there is no<br />
way... not to spend it, because you can always spend money, but to spend<br />
it and to feel something... something fulfilling. No, it’s not just...<br />
“Suffering in the soul”: a woman’s task<br />
<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
To the Kosovar Serbs, suffering, as it appeared in their accounts, was most<br />
often psychological, rather than “material”. <strong>International</strong> and non-governmental<br />
organizations stationed in the Serbian enclaves were present to<br />
25