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 | | Even through the winter, families continued using tents for shelter.
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I returned to Kosovo in late January. Not only was I keeping a promise to the CARE team that I would visit during the hardship of winter, but I also very much wanted to measure the progress of the province personally. The trip was a difficult one for me in many ways.
The winter certainly had set in strong and I was greeted by a foot of snow and sub-zero temperatures. The snow was not the welcome mantle of white presenting the postcard quality of mountainous landscapes. It was dirty and a nuisance, it iced up the streets, made doing normal work much more difficult and brought hardship to everyone. Electricity outages were still a frequent occurrence, and as this was the usual source of heat in towns, it meant people were cold. Water supplies were sporadic in many parts of the city. The smell of burning coal was pervasive, and the power plant cast a steamy, dark shadow on the outskirts of Pristina. The rural communities suffered even more -- regular transport was suspended and communication was now virtually impossible. The daily routine was to cut enough firewood to get you through the day of meals and sharing coffee with the neighbors. The difficult work of trying to rebuild went on in the only way possible -- steady determination and very hard work.
 | | CARE staff delivering materials in the winter.
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I had a chance to visit Chabra one afternoon, in the middle of a classic winter blizzard. The storm proved a complete "white out," nothing but the driven snow and the tracks on the road could be seen from the car. But the welcome we received in Chabra was a warm one. Mustaf was not there, but his son received me with the same hospitality -- Turkish coffee in one of the new prefabricated homes set up by the United Nations with Japanese funds. Though tiny, the house was nonetheless warm and dry. The CARE warehouse tent was still up (against all the odds with so much snowfall), but housed supplies instead of school children. I could see the outlines of other progress in the snow -- containers of reconstruction supplies, rubble cleared away, a new power line. Though my visit was short, I was glad to have made the effort to see the follow-up of earlier work and get a real sense of the community's determination to move forward.
 | | Even after winter set in, KFOR vehicles continued to patrol Kosovo.
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The CARE team was running full throttle with all the work and coordination meetings. MineTech operations were down to winter minimum, but the dogs were being kept in tip-top condition on real ordnance test courses behind the camp. The distribution of winter wheat seed to local farmers had been wrapped up, and plans were already under way fornext year's agricultural assistance campaign. The shelter program was almost concluded -- 11,000 homes fitted with winterization kits. CARE was continuing to help with the distribution of food commodities in the southeast of the province. The internet system was up, and running and communications with the rest of the world were now relatively easy.
The programs had grown bigger for a while in the fall as we had raced to beat winter. But now they were winding down with the inevitable end of the relief part of our operation. Hard-core development work is a slower and more measured investment, and the CARE staff were trying to determine their future role and how they would help support the nascent Kosovar institutions with their own programs. I would hardly call my work glamorous or the trip an adventure. I reviewed administrative and financial matters and talked to many staff about "What next?" They had other lives to return to or prepare for themselves. Still, it was great to visit the team, sense the spirit and take news of the work to CARE offices worldwide.
 | | Winter weather made transport difficult on Kosovo's roads.
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It might have been easy to leave it at that, slip into the car and head back south to Skopje. But the night before I left, a United Nations bus was attacked with grenades just down the road from Mitrovica. Two Kosovar Serbs were killed and five others wounded. I would follow events from afar as I continued my travel, but the successive weeks of violence in that divided city caught up all sides and NATO as well. Attacks and reprisals have wounded and killed citizens from both ethnic groups. Serbia has been accused of orchestrating the violence from Belgrade. Radical Albanian elements in Kosovo have been accused of manipulating the communities under their control. It's all possible. It's all very complex. The tiny Serb community I passed regularly last summer was now empty, the last of its houses burned before my visit.
The military response has been to beef up the security presence, control the access around towns and go house-to-house looking for weapons. The tensions have not eased. Kosovo continues to be a dangerous environment where the conflict will not be easily forgotten. It prompts an immediate response -- we get more careful and we add resolve. The imperatives requiring the world's humanitarian response are illuminated now even more clearly. Equally, there is a responsibility to help look and work for a sustainable peace. I am hopeful that international organizations like CARE will stay the course and help find the sustainable solutions that all of the people in the Balkans need.
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