Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
considered important. They began “helping” the crowds of refugees, of
which they were no longer part. They were no longer in that position of
utter helplessness. By working as local staff, they had crossed a sort of
border, from a role where they needed help and support as refugees, to one
that provided help and support to the needy.
For Liljana, whose duty was to accompany refugees to their homes all over
Kosovo, daily life meant remembering her own experience:
You know, most of the time you just feel like it was you. The same reactions,
same feelings, and same words, which were “I could never imagine
that I will come back again” or these kinds of things. And, it also reminded
me, and the others [who worked as staff] when we arrived [at the
destinations].
As a relief worker in an international organization, Liljana was constantly
sharing the suffering of “her people”. At the same time, however, she was
no longer in their position of collective powerlessness. She was working,
and working for the reconstruction of Kosovo.
For both Suzana and Liljana, this was a first experience of work. Before
the war, both of them had studied. They could not imagine themselves
working, and in any case, there were not many opportunities available to
them. An ethnic division ran throughout Kosovo, and very few were the
Albanians who were still working in Yugoslav establishments. Since the
1990s, when many employees were dismissed from their jobs by the
Yugoslav Government, Kosovar Albanians had had to develop a parallel
economy, with their own socio-political institutions. Students were attending
classes in private houses, professors and doctors were paid through the
3 per cent tax imposed upon the self-exiled Kosovars (the number of
which grew significantly after 1991), and socio-economic support was
provided by those with better positions, or with income from family working
abroad, to those who were most in need.
This shift in status had therefore given Suzana, Liljana, and those like
them, an intermediary status, between “their people”, who were in need of
help, and the “others”; the social organizations and foreigners, who were
providing this assistance. Suzana described this position in her narrative:
Sometimes there were Albanians; interpreters from Albania and they were
very short when foreigners would say something or offer something, they
[were even more short] when they were speaking, hiding words. I didn’t
like that, so I tried to be very correct and very sure of what I was translating,
otherwise it would be very bad for my people… and it will [cause]
a misunderstanding or loosing help that others were offering us.
71