Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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order to attend university. From the autumn of 1998, when the war was<br />
going on in my village, not only was it difficult for us to go back home,<br />
but we were also following and feeling everything that was going on. We<br />
were in the flow of the events happening there, and thus we lost our will<br />
not only to go out to walk and have fun but also to do anything. Before<br />
the NATO bombing, Prishtina was almost untouched by the war, and the<br />
situation here was as always different from the other parts of Kosovo.<br />
That bothered us… here [in Pristina] life used to go on as though nothing<br />
was happening elsewhere in Kosovo. Here life was like in<br />
Switzerland or Paris… everything was normal, you could hear music<br />
from cafés full of people, who were having fun until late in the night. 9<br />
According to Ardita, these different experiences of the war also determined<br />
the different conditions of the present:<br />
…Especially for financial aspects, Prishtina has always gained mostly, it<br />
hasn’t been destroyed, people found their houses and flats without them<br />
being burned or demolished. People fled first as soon as the war began,<br />
and as soon as it was finished they came back first. They rented their<br />
houses to the foreign organizations, they started to work in different<br />
organizations. And it is much harder for the villagers since they are still<br />
as poor as they were before. Some of them have spent the winter in a tent.<br />
Villagers in town<br />
<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
Following the war, a considerable migration flow brought many Kosovars<br />
from the rural areas to the towns, 10 as many people were then homeless<br />
and the economy of most villages, already seriously damaged by enormous<br />
pressure on the scarce agricultural land (Roux, 1992: 322), had been<br />
destroyed. Though at first people had returned to working the land, they<br />
soon had to find a means of supplementing their insufficient incomes,<br />
especially those who could not rely on financial support from relatives<br />
who had migrated to other countries. One solution available to them was<br />
to divide their time between agricultural activity and work found in the<br />
nearest town. This greater mobility, along with new opportunities for<br />
employment, seems to have fostered a greater interaction between the rural<br />
and urban economies, uniting them under the survival strategies of peasant<br />
families. Despite this, however, people living in the countryside maintained<br />
that life in the villages was still very hard, while towns were perceived<br />
as places where most of the changes occurred, especially because<br />
of the massive presence of the international community.<br />
The effects of the large-scale migrations were most evident in the capital,<br />
Pristina. Migrations occurred in the usual pattern: the former villagers<br />
were hosted by relatives living in the city for a first period of time, after<br />
which the luckiest managed to find housing and a more or less stable job.<br />
37