A day to remember

By Fleur Overbeek

23 June 2022*

(Image from http://theideaspartnership.org/wp/)

 

Our last day with meetings was definitely a day to remember. Despite that everyone was so tired, I felt like this day was the perfect last day of our trip to Kosovo. We met with The Ideas Partnership, Kosovo 2.0, Elizabeth Gowing, and even the Prime Minister Albin Kurti came by to quickly meet with us. Overall, it was a day full of interesting and contrasting experiences as we met people with completely different backgrounds within Kosovo, which left us with a more nuanced view of the situation and people in Kosovo.

 

We’ve been in Kosovo for 10 days already, and we’ve been to Prishtina, Mitrovica, Prizren, and even Albania. Visiting these places allowed us to meet different people from different ethnic groups within Kosovo. Multiple organizations talked about minorities in Kosovo, and how they work on the ‘integration’ of these minorities within the majority society and we heard about the prejudices against these minorities. One conversation that stuck with me during this trip was a conversation I had on our very first day in Kosovo. While we were in the taxi on our way to meet with IOM, I saw a woman with a child sitting on the side of the road. They sat on the grass in the burning sun while the cars tore along the road. I asked the taxi driver if he could tell me more about this situation. The kind taxi driver suddenly got very passionate and talked very negatively about this woman and her child. He told us that these people are Roma and that ‘they just don’t want to work, they choose to live like this, and it’s their own choice’. The tone in his voice shifted completely into disapproval. This passion surprised me and confronted me with the deeply embedded prejudices against Roma in the majority society of Kosovo.

 

Within our group, there were mixed feelings about our visit to The Ideas Partnership. This organization invited us to show the work they are doing for the Roma, Ashkali, and Egyptian communities in Fushë Kosova, outside the city center of Prishtina. They built an education and health center for children and their parents. They focus on providing parents with the skills to financially support their own families, while the children go to school.

 

This visit caused many feelings and different thoughts. Some felt uncomfortable, afraid it was leaning towards ‘voluntourism’, and others believed it was important to see this part of Kosovo, and not to ignore these communities, especially since we have been hearing about these communities so much. And it is always better to talk with people than to talk about them. But apart from these mixed feelings, I think it was an important organization to meet because it provoked something in every single one of us. It may be in different and uncomfortable ways, but I noticed that this meeting was one of the meetings that sparked the most conversation. In the taxi on the way back, later while having a coffee or lunch, and even in the days afterwards, the conversations kept going. This was probably because we all had different emotional experiences, and meanwhile, we were trying not to relate it too much to ourselves as we are just here to understand and not to judge.

 

Meeting Elizabeth Gowing later that day was the perfect meeting to follow The Ideas Partnership. She co-founded The Ideas Partnership together with people from the communities, and now she is an advisor of Albin Kurti, who is the leader of Vetëvendosje and now prime minister of Kosovo. It was interesting to see how the same issues can be approached from a grassroots, bottom-up level, and from a top-down approach.

 

*Please note that the blogposts are not appearing in chronological order of the days of the trip.