Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici<br />
provide indispensable items in order to satisfy at least the basic needs of<br />
the population, and at the same time they offered opportunities for<br />
employment, but the conversations on suffering tended to describe a different<br />
void. This absence was identified as the cause of the affliction, grief<br />
and anguish that permeated the Kosovar Serbian daily experience. The<br />
void thus became brick and mortar to the construction of their collective<br />
self-representation, as is evidenced by Tamara’s words: “Yes, psychological<br />
disturbances are very common, we all suffer from this situation<br />
here in Gorazdevac”, she said. Milica, another interviewee, similarly<br />
referred to the situation in Mitrovica: “All here have this anguish and… I<br />
saw people that have been disturbed, mentally disturbed because of it… I<br />
saw them in the street”, she said. In her narrative, Tanja presented her living<br />
conditions in Pristina as particularly difficult, but then immediately<br />
extended this same experience to all the Serbs living in the region:<br />
Here in Pristina the space of movement is very limited, is really very limited.<br />
Home, the way to go to the place of work. Just a few hundreds<br />
metres, nothing else. It’s really claustrophobic… but it’s true that also in<br />
the enclaves people don’t have better conditions… they also suffer a lot<br />
because of the limited space of movement.<br />
Thus elevated to an experience common to all of the Serbs still living in<br />
Kosovo, the psychological suffering acquired the characteristics of an<br />
endemic illness, the evidence of which would emerge as physical symptoms:<br />
Tamara described how she had lost almost 20 kilos since the end of<br />
the war so that even her friends could not recognize her. Biljana complained<br />
of continuous stomach pains due to gastritis, and Tanja spoke of a<br />
chronic headache. The psychological suffering was more often felt by<br />
female interviewees and its “somatization” seemed to be experienced<br />
mainly by women. In Gorazdevac, women constituted 78 per cent of the<br />
360 patients given medical assistance by the KFOR between March and<br />
June 2000, for diseases due to stress, depression and hypertension. 4 This<br />
phenomenon is often explained, both by the local community and the medical<br />
staff, as a consequence of the women’s domestic isolation. According<br />
to Lazar, our translator: “Women [of the village] stay at home all day, they<br />
think all day long about their situation, they have less opportunity to<br />
relieve [their thoughts]”.<br />
This reason, however, did not apply to the routines of men and women of<br />
Gorazdevac. Tamara, for instance, had been a housewife even before the<br />
war, and would care for her children and tend to their home. Even after the<br />
war, when she could no longer go into town to run errands and visit friends<br />
or relatives (some of her neighbours had in fact fled to Serbia), Tamara still<br />
had a social network. She had not entirely lost the stable pattern of her life<br />
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