Societal impact of the international community

By Adriana Scribani

 

 

As someone else might have already mentioned in their own blog entries, from the second week of the course onward the whole class was busy creating group projects, in pairs or groups of three to four people. I worked with Antonia, Malena and Parthivi, and we decided to take history education as the main focus for our project. We created a documentary-style video, which includes parts of the interviews we conducted with 12 people, and some historical and theoretical background for our claims. Here is a link to the final product: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1adVxwXcq7u00PkMtKHmPRtrQVCGJFNZp/view.

 

As the video shows, my group and I had the chance to go visit the International Learning Group (ILG) School in Pristina. Here is the story of how it went, and what I learnt from it.

 On our first Thursday in Pristina we conducted our first three interviews, all with people we found in the Mother Theresa Boulevard. There, we met Ali, a Turkish expat living in Kosovo, sitting on a bench with his two children. After an interview which made him very curious about us and our project, he invited us to a barbeque party at his children’s school the next day. After discussing it with our teacher, we decided to accept the invitation. On Friday the 17^th, at 4:30 in the afternoon, the girls and I were in front of the ILG School, in the outskirts of Pristina. As we stepped out of the taxi, a thunderstorm suddenly covered the sky, and thick rain started pouring on us, drenching us completely while we were trying to convince the “guardian” of the entrance to let us into the school, unsuccessfully. 

 

After many attempts, two of us we found refuge in a nearby gas station, while the others managed to get in contact with Ali, who eventually came to pick us up and let us into the school. Inside the ILG, we got to know a reality we were not expecting. After a quick stop at the bathroom where we tried to dry ourselves as much as possible, we got immediately introduced to the school administrator, a middle-aged woman who looked extremely happy to have us there. 

 

At the same time, I got the feeling rather than getting to know us or finding out what the purpose of our visit was, her top priority was showing us how amazingly progressive and functional the school was. Afterwards, we got introduced to three Kosovar-Swiss girls who are currently working in the school as interns. We had a lovely interview with them, and it was very enlightening to hear their perspectives as members of the Kosovar diaspora in Europe. They seemed quite critical of the school and talked a lot about the elitist nature of its crowd.

 

Their critiques immediately resonated with what my group and I had observed in the little time we had spent there. In the parking lot, all cars looked quite posh and most had UNDP or EU license plates. Moreover, as we walked in, we had the feeling that the international environment built around the school came from a very privileged foundation.

 

After that interview, we had the chance to walk around the school, talk to some of the parents we were introduced to or whom we spontaneously approached. Most people we talked to told us about their occupations, and it was easy to recognize the names of the international organizations we had studied and visited (KFOR members, EULEX clerks, and others), together with other private corporations. When talking with the three interns, they had also mentioned that the community ILG proudly serves is extremely detached from the local Kosovar reality. The children are completely immersed in the school not only for academics, but also for extra-curricular activities, making the whole institution into a sort-of fortress that isolates the “internationals” from the local community. 

 

Albanian is not taught in the school (only to the Albanian students), making the distance not only cultural and physical (the school is far from the city center) but even linguistic. A teacher told us that right before Covid-19 happened, the school had made some efforts to create some shared events with other local schools, but found little interest on their side. Considering what we learnt about the perception of the international presence in the area, it is quite intuitive to see how the antipathy, or simply the wariness that it caused is reflected in many spheres of the society.

 

Something that particularly struck me from the interns’ comments is the stark comparison they observed between the ILG and the local schooling system. Their relatives living in Kosovo, they said, know nothing of this reality, nor can they even access it. They referred to local schools as backwards and problematic in their means. They mentioned that old-fashioned punishment is used, and that children are not respected. One interviewee mentioned that also at ILG children are not validated as they ideally should be, but at least the educational program is more up-to-date, and children can rely on a modern infrastructure and modern education tools.

 

 During our afternoon in ILG, I could not get rid of a feeling of forged happiness, probably because I was surrounded by circumstantial smiles and extremely kind, high-class people. These were all things we were never exposed to on the other days in Kosovo, which instead were characterized by the most welcoming and genuinely friendly interactions with any stranger I interacted with. 

 

Maybe the stark contrast I perceived between these two realities is influenced by the words of the Kosovar-Swiss interviewees, but the fact that Parthivi, Malena and Antonia had the same impressions reinforced my convictions. I am still glad we had the chance to get in such close contact with the international community of Kosovo, and I am happy that we approached it with a critical eye. A few days later Ali sent us this picture (above) of the school yearbook, showing us that they had included a photo of the four of us and him, which we took a second before we left the place. We found it quite ironic, considering how we had perceived the whole situation.

 

The feeling of detachment that I got at ILG returned a few days later, right at the end of a meeting we had in Mitrovica with the NGO New Social Initiative. I really enjoyed talking to the women who hosted the meeting, Milica and Milica, as they seemed very prepared and proud of their work. Before we said goodbye, one of them gave us a specific piece of advice: “Please guys, if you ever come to work here in international organizations or institutions, don’t forget to be knowledgeable, informed about the history of this place, and about what people really need. Don’t forget to be in direct touch with Kosovo in the first place”. Probably she used different phrasing, but this surely is the message I received. These words echoed in my mind, and I kept thinking back to ILG: the lack of interaction or contact with the Kosovar reality, the choice of not teaching its students the local language. Why was this distance created? How does it shape young Kosovars and residents of Kosovo (even if they won’t stay there permanently)? How is it going to create a positive impact for the already very divided Kosovar society?

 

These questions made me realize the societal impact of the international community in Kosovo, and more in general, of the risks of the presence of international sub-cultures in a territory. Just as much as it is fundamental to bring Albanian and Serbian kids together, it is important to avoid such environments of elitist segregation.

 

I really hope that the international community in Kosovo will take steps toward becoming first-hand involved with the local public, which would surely bring benefits in all of its areas of action and would stop a further (discriminatory and elitist) division in Kosovar society.