Quote of the Day: "If you have never been hugged by a dusty little Albanian boy in the middle of a town square, it is hard to describe." -- Bobby in Kosovo

Journal of a Sabbatical

June 29, 1999

refenestration part 1 & a note from BiB

Today's Reading: Before the Dawn by Shimazaki Toson, The Storm Petrel and the Owl of Athena by Louis Halle.

Up early after a night of reading in bed. The Storm Petrel and the Owl of Athena is a collection of lyrical essays about birds, mostly birds that nest in the Shetlands. It's much better bedtime reading than Before the Dawn - birds make better bedfellows than masterless samurai. Also it's considerably shorter and easier to hold in the hands. Anyway, I stayed up too late reading about the nesting habits of arctic skuas so it was a challenge to be fully dressed and somewhat caffeinated before the re-fenestrator came to look at the window.

So the re-fenestrator came, looked, evaluated, will get back to me with an estimate. He took the springs back to the office with him to match against a catalog. They have to be special ordered so he'll have to get at least 6. I only need two for the window in question. So I was right, they don't have these at Home Depot. And now I get to wait two more weeks for the parts.

Much later today, umm that would be tonight, I finally managed to connect to world.std.com and retrieve my e-mail. There were 2 messages from BiB (by way of La Madre), who has made it to Kosovo and is very busy and very tired.

Also two messages from István about my upcoming trip to Hungary - actually that was two copies of the same message. Time is ticking away and I still haven't booked my flight. I have this huge ambivalence about traveling. I love it once I get there, but I have to pry myself out of my home life with a crowbar. I am definitely not footloose and fancy free (whatever that means). I like to imagine myself just taking off into the unknown whenever the spirit moves me, but that isn't the way I really do it.

Anyway, I never had any desire to visit Budapest before I met Zsolt and István. It just wasn't on my list of travel fantasies the way the Galapagos, Japan, Iceland, Russia, and Antarctica have always been. In fact I've never fantasized much about Europe - not even Paris, well maybe during my existentialist period but only about the Paris where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir are philosophizing at Les Deux Maggots....

The guidebook I picked up last year lists all these train connections to Skopje and Belgrade and other places I bet I couldn't get a train to now. Things change.

Very tired, it is 9:15 PM and we just got back from a very busy day at "K-Mart". We are all exhausted and are all sleeping late tomorrow, we got a lot done today.

Speaking more with the interpreters today, the savage acts they described were far worse than depicted on CNN. We saw some of the devastation today that would make your hair stand up. The Serbs were not fooling around, they were out to kill. The stories about Arkan's Tigers, the Serb paramilitaries were incredible.

The good side is that the people are absolutely ecstatic over us being there, I feel like Santa Claus in a department store, the kids, the teenagers, the young adults and the grandparents come up to us and shake our hands, they smile with affection and gratitude, they wave and give us the thumbs up when we drive by, it grips my heart and makes it very hard not to cry. If you have never been hugged by a dusty little Albanian boy in the middle of a town square, it is hard to describe. A boy about 6 or seven came up to me in front of the town hall and he was smiling and clapping, he ran over from about fifty feet away and grabbed my waist and kept repeating in very good English "thank you I free".

I asked one of the interpreters about it and she started to cry, she said "after months of hiding from them we were forced to leave for even more months in camps, they stole everything we had and killed many of our loved family; now America and the world make us freedom that we never had for 10 years; the boy speaks for all of us". I was stunned into silence. This all has given me a look at life and it makes me wonder at the way different parts of the world perceive things here. Have they aver seen 20,000 people in a line to get back in to their home country, most having to apply for new papers? The papers situation is being mostly by UNHCR people with help form the US Immigration agents. The daily drive by the refugee camps near the border, drive home the reality of it all; the interpreter told me a lot about camp life, she said it was bad but better to be away from the killers.

I have not had time to work on the computer entries of my journal, but I am keeping notes, while others drive and in my spare moments before I sleep.

Please feel free to pass it on to anyone, the world needs to know what it is really like.

For now, please send my love to all, I need to go to the hotel ( that I will never complain about again) and get some sleep.

Bobby's been sending us an e-mail journal sporadically since the war began and now during the peace. With his permission, I'll include excerpts from his journal in mine from time to time as peace develops.