During the conflict, when Serb police came to arrest him, our host escaped out the back door and went to hide in the surrounding mountains. His wife and three children met him days later in an agreed-upon safe place.
There are still 5,000 Kosovars unaccounted for, and the anger toward the Serbs is obvious throughout Kosovo. They are so anti-Serbian that they refuse to speak the Serbian language, despite the fact that most of them know it.  

Our program

Husain and I were housed in the same hotel as the Italian military. We were the only guests in the restaurant, since it is too expensive for the locals, and there were no other guests in the hotel. Electricity was a problem. Sometimes it came into part of a house, and sometimes it didn’t come in at all. It was a three-hours-on and three-hours-off system.

The hotel had its own generator, so when the city system went off, there was a brief moment of darkness and then the lights came back on. Many shops in town had generators operating outside on the sidewalk. It was quite cold when we were there, and we needed to keep our overcoats on when we sat in the lobby. The rooms, however, were heated.

Zaimi now runs the Child & Family Counseling Center, which is jointly sponsored by Hope International Development and Relief Agency and the University of Missouri International Center for Psychosocial Trauma. With our financial support, he has rebuilt a damaged building into a working clinic. He is using the stress management programs we have developed, and they are working very well. The children in his groups include those who were seriously traumatized by the war and those who were not. This combination of children appears to be a good one therapeutically.

The afternoon we worked with the participants on dealing with their own trauma was difficult. We had 70 program participants, most of whom were local teachers. There was also a mixture of psychiatrists and psychologists in the group. The participants had a hard time admitting to feeling traumatized since the cultural norm is to grit your teeth and bear the pain. Fortunately, some of the psychiatrists came forward with observations about the effects the trauma of war had on them. This helped the teachers to be more open about the effects the killing and destruction had on them. We also had help from Zaimi and several of the psychiatrists in translating our exercises into their cultural frame of reference.

When we awarded the certificates, the students came up one by one to shake our hands. I hadn’t realized how depressed and strained-looking some of the people were until I shook their hands and looked into their eyes. It was obvious that it will take much time and hard work to heal the wounds of the recent conflict.
The International Center for Psychosocial Trauma expects to send teams into Kosovo led by Husain three more times this year. The teachers also asked for more psychological help with the children, and we plan to add staff to the Child & Family Counseling Center.  

The future

Behind the scenes, Milosevic is working to create crises that will make Kosovo ungovernable. Kosovars, on the other hand, want all Serbs driven out of the area and either the restoration of political autonomy or separate status as a country.

Given the hostility on both sides, it is apparent that the United Nations and NATO will need to keep armed forces in the area for some years to come.