Kosovo Journal

Unwelcome at home

Tending the flock, as these boys are doing near Jasonovic, is a job usually reserved for children and old men

For many Serbs, Kosovo is as much home as it is to Albanians, yet now they fear for their lives

By Fran Hesser
Special to CNN Interactive

Fran Hesser, a free-lance writer from Montana, has returned to Kosovo for three months to serve alongside her husband, a physician assistant, in the International Medical Corps, a volunteer relief agency. Watch for her continuing dispatches on this site.

CULJKOVA, Kosovo (CNN) -- Living in Kosovo is not an easy thing for Serbs these days. Their lives have been dramatically altered. Once they were members of the ruling ethnic group. Now, they are a minority group in almost every village and town of any size.

In the tiny mountaintop Serb village of Culjkova, KFOR soldiers bring food for the few dozen villagers who cannot safely leave their homes to shop for groceries in nearby Pristina or Gnjilane. Albanian villages surround Culjkova, so the roads to town run through hostile territory.

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A visit to this village, and to others like it isolated in the mountains, Serb and Albanian, is like a step back in time. Except for the power poles -- rural electrification is a legacy of the communist Tito regime -- these villages probably look much as they have for centuries.

Tiny houses with red tile roofs sit on every level piece of ground. Most homes have no indoor plumbing. Foul-smelling shallow outhouses sit behind most homes and schools. Some houses have springs or wells in the yards. Other families use communal wells.

Still other villages depend on streams for drinking water. In the mountains the streams are clean. In the valleys most are polluted. The water has a high lead content. One wonders what the lead is doing to the children.

Almost every yard includes a barn for the family's animals. At this time of year a cacophony is in the air. Chicks and ducklings follow their parents around, clucking or quacking loudly. Baby goats bleat in constant search of lost mothers.

Workers cultivate a field of corn by hand near Ponesh

Solitary shepherds tend small flocks of sheep, goats and cows. They follow behind as the animals graze the unfenced mountainside pastures. Their only companion is usually a dog. We typically see children and old men performing this task, although we occasionally see a woman tending a single cow.

Women cook, clean and raise babies. They wash the family's clothes by hand. At this time of year they also help the men weed the crops.

We see the men cutting the grass by hand and drying it in stacks for hay to feed their animals next winter. A tiny field that would take seconds to cut with modern farm equipment takes days to scythe by hand. It is backbreaking labor.

We brought a mobile clinic to Culjkova for the sick and injured who cannot get to town safely for treatment. The major problems seem to be diabetes, high blood pressure and arthritis. The women almost all complain of low backaches. We are not surprised to hear this.

A Serb woman walks with her grandchildren in Culjkova. The countryside may look peaceful, but the Serb village is surrounded by hostile, ethnic Albanian communities

I asked an old man what it was like during the war. "Not so bad," he told me, through an interpreter. No one looted or burned the neighboring Albanian villages, so there was no retribution here. These Serbs have co-existed peacefully with their Albanian neighbors for decades. Now it is unsafe for them to go much beyond the natural boundaries of their mountain enclave.

People are alarmed and incensed by horror stories that traveling to Gnjilane or to Pristina to shop or for medical care can get you beaten, robbed or killed. A young girl who was shot and wounded in another village cannot safely leave her home for follow-up visits to a doctor unless U.N. police or KFOR troops transport her.

Few arrests are made by the local or the U.N. police. Authorities are hard-pressed to get much information about crimes. In the old days, under Serbian rule, the police station in Gnjilane had a padded torture chamber where information was obtained the old-fashioned way. Such tactics are no longer allowed, so much less information is forthcoming.

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