A volunteer’s diary

Katie with the children who come to our classes

Guest blogger: Katie Jessup

Upon arriving in Prishtina, I was greeted with extraordinary hospitality, and quickly thought, “I could get used to living here”. Coffee breaks were frequent, lunches were long, and for the most part, Prishtina was a young vibrant city. I never once thought that just 5 miles away lay a place where life moved at a very different pace. The differences between Fushe Kosove and Prishtina are immeasurable. If I had not volunteered with TIP I would have never known about Fushe Kosove and the problems faced by the Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptians.

Throughout my time in Fushe Kosove, I had the opportunity to challenge myself in ways that I had never been able to do before. I learned to speak some Albanian, work with large numbers of children (while trying to speak Albanian) and adapt to an environment that was different from what I was accustomed to. When I learned to read and write, running out of pens and pencils was never an issue, but here getting such simple resources is a challenge. I realized then just how different life is for the children living in Fushe Kosove.

Never having worked with children before, I was surprised at how forgiving they were. With my poor Albanian skills, the children in Fushe Kosove spoke as much English to me as they knew, and would use gestures to communicate. They were forgiving of more than my language difficulties –  there was one incident where another volunteer and I were teaching math, and I wrote 3×3 on the whiteboard. When I drew my bags with beans inside on the white board the children kept yelling that the answer was 12. I stood their shaking my head saying, “jo, jo, jo”.  Finally, the other volunteer informed me that I had in fact done the math wrong and had drawn 12 beans on the white board! So even my math skills were challenged in Fushe Kosove, but luckily the children forgave me when I told them the answer was 9.

I have come to know the children in Fushe Kosove, and the personality traits that set them apart. Faton is constantly trying to speak English and has such a keen desire to learn. Emine runs the show in and outside of class. I will always have this image of Astrit pointing to himself every time I would enter the room wanting to be taken out for one on one lessons, and Rasime always doing what she could to help me set up for school. These little bits of my time in Fushe Kosove have been memorable, and I can only hope that September exceeds all of our expectations!

Finding the words and images to say

Guest blogger: Elisabetta Iberni

I still cannot say whether my first encounter with Elizabeth, in the Roma Mahalla of Mitrovica, happened by accident or by destiny. I have been working there for almost two years with Danish Refugee Council, in my capacity as clinical psychologist, on educational and health issues with the RAE community returned since 2007 from lead-polluted camps. So, when I found out that she was running catch-up classes for those children in Fushe Kosova, I realized how difficult and challenging her mission was. But her enthusiasm and energy proved instantly contagious and I was honoured to accept the invitation to offer psychosocial workshops in Fushe Kosova. So, I tiptoed into the atmosphere of this homemade school, where children are eager to learn new things and to improve their writing and reading skills so to decode the surrounding world. In the beginning, I just came to silently observe their classes, watching a vivid kaleidoscope of numbers, letters, colourful paintings and listening to the jingly alphabet repeated in chorus with the teacher Avdil for dozens of times. I am sure that I was more impressed than they were, looking at my notebook and wondering what I was writing on it. I can now tell you: from my notes on …July 2011 “in general, the majority of children tend to cooperate and support each other: especially the most skilled with the ones needing more time…they demand attention and constant feedback with an overwhelming rate…it is remarkable their capacity to accept constructive criticism about their performances”.

To participate in the psychosocial workshops, children are invited to fill an application and explain their motivation: Elizabeth proposes it as a proper task where children have to exercise their writing skills.   The most popular reason they mention is to learn, immediately followed by to read and to write. There are also some enthusiastic of visual arts who say that they like to draw, putting beside original paintings as if it was a competition for the best artists. And finally, the introspective ones (or maybe those who had a more precise understanding the aim of this exercise) tell that they would participate to talk and to express their feelings and emotions and someone said also because there won’t be noise so they can have a peaceful afternoon. To dedicate to everyone an adequate span of space and time, each workshop will host a maximum of eight children, so all of them will have chance to participate in rotation.

I have been sincerely surprised by the curiosity and spontaneity that children shown for exploring the immaterial dimension of their feelings and thoughts. Even the unleashed triad composed by Avdush, Gazmend and Afir, (which together resemble balls in a pinball machine), were sitting composedly at the working table holding in their hands a sharp pencil. They listen carefully the main objective, oriented to develop their creativity and imagination to better understand both the external and internal world and to learn how to know themselves. Presentations start and everybody says his/her name, age and name of brothers and sisters, so that I propose to draw their family. Feebly a tender protest rises up: they have too many people to draw if they want to represent realistically their family members. But they are already absorbed in their work; the most industrious complete the family portrait with names and ages.

Children’s drawings have a great power of unveiling emotional movements of their internal world, adaptations and responses to critical events such as the loss of an important caregiver or abandonment and terror instilled all day by the evil eyes of some adult living in a domestic environment deeply contaminated by violence. Sometimes the details revealing the unsaid may be the characters’ dimension, or their spatial distance, colours’ use, omissions and pressure on the sheet.

Florinda, 12 years didn’t draw her mother, who died a few months ago, and she neither wants to talk about it, though in a corner she drew and then cancelled the profile of two human figures closed and confused in a hug: it is a powerful symbol which can give off the deep meaning of a relationship that can’t be forgotten but also remembered to not feel pain for that place left empty. Children take a breath when finished to draw and some of them express a wish to talk about their fears and the future. And if the future is (almost) always bringing positive things, the present is often marked by death and roughness. Ajsha finds space to tell us a detailed and precise story where two boys had a fight and one died. I feel that there are many things that need being worked through, and probably it is not necessary to touch upon everything.

What matters more is to find words (and images) to tell them. The workshop came to its end and Erhan, 10 years old, approaches us smiling and sits, making himself well comfortable, on a chair in front of me, and says: “I want you to ask me questions, about who I am, what I like and what I don’t like, what I want and what I’m afraid of”. In my mind an insight pops up: this is a good stating point, the talking cure conquered the children of Fushe Kosova.

Registered! Gjelane’s going to school :-)

So Friday was a great day, the Hollywood shot, as the children stepped out en masse across the mahalla to claim the education that was theirs by right.

But what was done at the ‘big school’ on Friday was only the assessment. The plan agreed with the municipality and ministry was that by yesterday we would receive the assessment conclusions for each child and that at some point before 20 July the children would then be officially registered.  The best movie director would be hard pressed to make a compelling scene out of such a process, but as time passed following our jubilant assessment day at the end of last week, even without a Hans Zimmer soundtrack I found I was on the edge of my seat.

When the end of the working day passed yesterday, without any assessment data sent through to us, and then midnight passed too, I started fearing conspiracy theories and doubting that we were going to keep to the timetable before all education staff went on holiday on 20 July.  This morning, however, I got a call from the school director.  The assessment data was ready and I should go and collect it.

In his office he handed me the list of names with a recommended entry class for each child.  It was signed by all members of the commission, and had a reassuring big school stamp on it. Great.

‘And when might the children be registered?’ I asked politely.

‘They are! This is the official confirmation.’

Hans Zimmer’s orchestra crescendoed and the camera whirled around the room, my grinning face, panned to Gjelane out in her yard playing with their new puppy and looking up with a small confident smile, wiped to Ajnur saying ‘ueh!’ which is Fushe Kosove speak (now adopted by me) for ‘wow’, and then went wobbly round the edges so we know that this is an image of the future showing Besmire, who always wanted to be a doctor, all qualified and standing in the door of her surgery in 2030 welcoming a different generation of children for their vaccinations.

All this while I was quietly, jubilantly shaking the director’s hand.   It was a milestone moment – the end of an extremely long and sometimes wearying process.  But it’s not really the end – for those 52 children this is just the beginning.

Virtual volunteering

Guest blog by Su Jones

By day I’m a senior design manager for a high street retailer, and in my evenings and weekends I am a virtual volunteer for The Ideas Partnership, working from the UK to remotely support the fantastic work the team in Kosovo are doing. Having worked with Elizabeth in a more hands-on capacity for the last 2 summers where my partner Paddy and I have used annual leave to be voluntourists, and having loved both experiences I was keen to support any further work and keep involved even if we weren’t able to afford the time to visit Kosovo this year. So, I became a virtual-volunteer, offering my support with planning and admin wherever I could, in particular helping to co-ordinate the volunteers for the forthcoming summer programme where we plan to teach English in the Fushe Kosove community to anyone who wants to learn (those who are registered for school and those who are hoping to get registered).

My role has been fairly small compared to the teaching commitments made by others, but I hope in some way the regular skype meetings, emails to volunteers, application form processing and information packs, along with the newsletters and campaign flyers that I have been able to use my design background to create, have helped to ease the pressure of those at the chalk-face (or should I say whiteboard) doing the real hard work, and it has been a real privilege to be involved and be asked to create guest blog to talk about the part I have played.

There have been times where my demanding day-job has eaten into my time, and when I have hastily driven back from work to jump straight onto another computer for a 2 hour skype meeting, whilst Paddy has placed food and drink in front of me with a look of patient understanding. And I’ll admit that once or twice during my skyping and scoffing I had questioned whether I was over-complicating my life, but then I’d read the emails and this blog and be humbled by how much Elizabeth and the team were pushing themselves to achieve their mission and my busy day would pale into insignificance. I also have a great reality check from the school stuck onto my fridge; it’s an early faleminderit poster from Selime (one of the first letters sent out in response to a donation I made to the project and probably some of the first letters of the alphabet Selime ever wrote). As a virtual volunteer it was lovely to receive something that was actually from the school, something tangible to have in our house and it’s a great advert for the project for our friends and family to see. Every time I go into our kitchen it reminds me of the progress that has been made since those letters were carefully scribed out back in the early days, to last Friday’s big day before the commission, and, after a long day at work it helps put things into perspective: I am really lucky to have had an education, to have been able pursue my career aspirations and I should never take that for granted.

I guess the moral of my blog is that volunteering is good for you and good for your stress levels, so no matter what time you have and what capacity you can work in (virtual or real) you should offer up some of your time for good causes like this because it makes you feel good too. And before I get too Jerry Springer on everyone, I would like to take this chance to plug the summer programme which starts on 18th July through to the end of August, I can highly recommend the tourist experience Kosovo provides and doing something worthwhile whilst you’re there. You don’t have to be a student, a teacher or have to take a sabbatical from work to do anything like this; it is possible to have a mini gap adventure with a 1-2 week break from any job. So if anyone fancies taking time out to do something different as well as getting a tan then please get in touch, it’s not too late to do something amazing with your summer break.

Fifty two! And shall I count in fives or tens?

Gjelane's dad watches her being assessed

Fifty two! That’s how many children came with us to be assessed for school on Friday.  Out of the 70 children who’ve been coming to classes with us for the last four months, I’d reckoned that 37 would definitely make it to the assessment – these are the children who’ve come almost every day, who’ve greeted me each morning with ‘and when are we going to the big school?’ Daily attendance at school is now part of their mental model of how you live.

And then there are the other 33 children who come to us less regularly, who have greater demands made on them by family for working or begging.  Would they make it to be assessed? Would Mentor come? It meant arriving at our classes an hour early that day. It meant walking a mile out of the mahalla, and into a large echoing state institution; I didn’t know how many of them really had the stomach for it.

Fifty two! The first ones were already waiting when we arrived at the rented flat where we’ve been running classes.  Florinda was wearing a startling flowery dress I’d not seen before. The sisters Mirjeta and Arjeta were wearing new matching pink Tshirts with sequin designs (matching clothes for siblings are particularly prized here, I’ve discovered, because it shows that they were bought new – not hand-me-downs or handouts, or lucky finds in a rubbish bin). Everyone had blown their nose (Astrit showed me two packets of tissues in his pocket, and Fidan standing by looked rather crestfallen). I went to Elvira’s house to check she had remembered that today she needed to come early.  She was washing her face at the standpipe in her yard. ‘I’m cleaning myself up – I don’t want anyone at that big school to say that the kids from Elizabeth’s school are palidhje‘, she reassured me. Palidhje is one of my favourite Albanian words – it means ‘stupid’ or, literally, ‘unconnected’. It struck me as a good metaphor for today, when the kids from ‘Elizabeth’s school’ were being connected up to the mainstream system for assessment.

And we set off – a straggling, giggling line of fifty odd children strung out across the mahalla. When we reached school we were greeted carefully by not only the school director but also the director of education for the municipality.  Later staff from Unicef and from the Ministry came too. It wasn’t just the kids who knew this was a big day.

The children were sat in a classroom (sat in a classroom! Even if the system somehow fails us for their registration next week, they’ve done it now.  As I watched them taking their place at the desks I thought how these children come from families who know a thing or two about squatters rights.  They’ve each made a part of that school their own now, and I think they’ll be back) and I was introduced to the Commission.

The Commission was made up of three kindly teachers from the school, the deputy director and a community representative.  The organisation Terre des Hommes which works with children at risk, including some of ours, had heard about the assessment process to be held and had got permission from the municipality to be in the room, along with me, as a friendly familiar face for the children from their caseload.

In fact the children scarcely seemed to need reassurance of that kind.  I was dispatched to collect each child one by one from the waiting room and bring them in.  On the way they skipped down the huge corridors, and only the occasional one snuck their hand into mine for a brief moment of reassurance.  That’s what struck me most about the day – their self-confidence, in their learning and in the rightfulness of taking their place in this school.  As I walked Astrit to the room for the assessment, I said to him, ‘don’t worry – they’ll just ask you what you know of your letters and numbers.’

‘I know up to 100′ he said. ‘Will they want me to count it in fives or tens?’ The children couldn’t wait to show their skills. And over three and a half hours, the commission conscientiously took notes of what each child could do.

So now we’re waiting. Tomorrow we’re due to receive the report from the commission which will identify for each child the class that they will enter school in.  And then, according to the action plan agreed by the Ministry and Municipality and Unicef, and submitted to the European Commission, the children will be officially included on the school’s register next week.

By the way, one of the children on that list will be Mentor.  He did turn up – late because he’d been working; and no new sequined Tshirt for him.  But he made it up to the commission’s blackboard, showed off his mental arithmetic, barked at the print (on Friday I heard 52 children stammer out the sentence, ‘my mother works a lot’) and then asked if he could go because his wheelbarrow was outside.  He should be on the register by the end of the week; the next challenge will be keeping him there.

Our Big Day tomorrow

I’ve not done much blogging over the last few weeks but please don’t think that not much is happening in Fushe Kosove. It’s probably been the most significant week since we started classes.  Here’s what’s been going on since I last wrote:

Saturday, Sunday and Monday: along with Kaltrina, a recently-joined volunteer, I visited every family whose children have attended our classes. We had been given a deadline by the municipality to submit the details of all the children to be assessed for registration by Tuesday.  They needed name, date of birth and form of ID so we knocked at doors, called into empty hallways, interrupted weddings and bumped into people in the street until we had a neat spreadsheet showing the details of 70 children who didn’t register in the first two years of school, have since been denied access to school by the Ministry’s policy but whose parents say they want them to go to school.  We watched 70 birth certificates being unfolded from careful storage.  In most cases the mothers (it was usually mothers who reached for the carrier bag filled with documents hung on a nail on the wall) handed a sheaf of birth certificates over to us and asked whether we could help tell them apart because they didn’t know how to read their children’s names.

In some cases parents, even of those who have attended our classes very regularly, said they wouldn’t allow their children to start at the ‘big’ school.  The reasons were varied, mainly unfounded, and we had gentle debates before leaving those houses.  Was it really true that the Albanian kids would beat their children up? Were they sure it was too far to walk? Plenty of children manage it every day. Yes, Nerxhivane has an eye infection, but that shouldn’t stop her going to school. If Lume needs to help his dad with scrap metal collection, couldn’t he fit it round a few hours of going to classes every day?

On Monday afternoon Nerxhivane’s mum came to school.  She’d brought her daughter’s birth certificate. ‘I’d like her to register on Friday,’ she said. We chalked up one small victory.

By Monday evening we had the 70 children’s details compiled, along with a fiendish bit of Excel work by Young Rob showing the attendance details for each child: we have 37 children who’ve attended on more than half the days we’ve held classes. We sent the details off to the Municipality, and waited to see whether they would stick by the agreement we’d made that we could bring the children to be assessed on Friday.

Tuesday: an email from the Municipality inviting us to bring all 70 children at 10 o’clock on Friday to go before a Commission of three members of staff at the school.  The Commission will then decide in which class each child should enter in September.

Wednesday: a phone call from Vlora Citaku, the Minister for European Integration.  She had chaired the conference called by the European Commission Liaison Office in Pristina where we had raised the issue of our children’s difficulty in registering at school.  ECLO have been pursuing this issue, and Vlora was calling to reiterate her commitment to getting the children into school.  What’s more, she said she had just come from a meeting with the Prime Minister where he had said that ‘the children in Fushe Kosove should have their constitutional right’.

Thursday: Fidan buys a pack of tissues. Our Kosovan teacher, Avdil, spoke to all the children yesterday about how they should present themselves when they go to school.  ‘Clean faces, clean clothes, nails neatly trimmed,’ he ordered them. ‘And you need to bring a tissue with you so that if you need to blow your nose you don’t use your sleeve.’ This morning Fidan greeted me by patting his pocket ostentatiously.  ‘What have you got there, Fidan?’ I asked.

I’d seen Fidan in Pristina at the weekend, cleaning car windscreens at the traffic lights. I guess it’s some of the money he earned there that he used to buy himself a pack of tissues so that when he turns up at school tomorrow no-one can judge him because of the way he wipes his nose.  This is a boy on his way to his future; I almost needed to borrow one out of the pack myself.

And Friday… Who knows? I know that not all of the 70 children will make it to the school to be assessed.  Friday is mosque (= begging) day, when our numbers are always down.  It’s summer and state school holidays, and wedding season has started.  Some children will be caught up in family celebrations. And some will be sick and some will discover they’re needed at home or to go and help their dad, and maybe some will get cold feet about this state system that has been readied for them. I really hope that the 37 regular attenders will get there, and I’d love it to be more. We have a squad of volunteers ready to knock on all the children’s doors an hour before we’re due to set off for the commission, to leave them no excuse that they forgot or overslept. And after that it’s in the hands of the kids themselves.

Gjelane’s dad says he’s coming with her.  I know Fidan will be there with his newly blown nose; Afir wouldn’t miss an outing; Gazmend can’t wait to tell someone his times tables; Besmire wants to be a doctor when she grows up. Those are the things that get children to school all over the world, and now the system in Kosovo has adapted so that those are the things that tomorrow will get a gaggle of Kosovan children to school for the first time too.  I can’t wait!

What the twelve year-olds taught me

Guest blogger: Kaltrina Kusari

I initially wanted to be a part of the catch-up classes in Fushe-Kosove because I grew up in Kosova, but I was rarely exposed to the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities. I wanted to immerse myself into these communities in order to understand where their traditions come from, and how they ended up in Kosova. I also enjoy working with children, so this was the perfect opportunity to do something that I have been interested in for a long time. After two weeks of working with our students, I have learned more from them than they have learned from me.

These students keep reminding me that education does not only happen at schools. The students that we teach know a lot, but because this knowledge is different from that of other children their age, they are not appreciated as much. For example, Hamide, one of the students who helped us clean up the school one day told me that it is important to do a job the best we can, no matter what job it is. I was amazed to hear this coming from a 12 year old, who has to pass many bureaucratic challenges to attend mainstream schools in Kosova.

The students have also taught me that patience is a virtue. I tend to get frustrated when I do not understand something, but these students keep trying to spell a word, pronounce a letter, or solve a math problem no matter how many times they fail. They listen to the lessons with attention, and I can see how they process the information by just looking at their eyes. They are always hungry for more knowledge. When Jetmir was having particular difficulty remembering the letter X, I asked him to associate the letter with a word that started with X. Ever since, he has learned to associate other letters with words that he already knows.

Helping these children gives me a sense of fulfillment. Every time they learn how to spell their names, or write a number I know that they are one step closer to joining the schools that I was able to attend. Going to these schools might be difficult for them because of the prejudice they face, but they are taught enough to handle it. I know why the Roma, Ashkali and Egyptian communities are not favored in Kosova, but these are only kids, and we can shape them to be an integral part of the new country that we are all building.