Among the countless cafés serving macchiato, and restaurants cooking traditional Kosovar dishes in Prishtina, a few tucked-away restaurants seem somewhat out of place. They smell of rich Asian spices and are adorned in photographs and flags of faraway lands.
Thai Restaurant, serving cuisine from Thailand, and Himalayan Gorkha Restaurant, serving dishes from Nepal and India , are just a block away from each other. While some restaurants in Prishtina come and go, these two have maintained a steady presence and flow of local and international customers throughout the years.
In Thai Restaurant, Chintana Siripreedanukul, 46, spends most of her days greeting and serving customers. When she’s at work, she wears traditional Thai dresses and ends almost every sentence with a cheery “thank you very much.”
Siripreedanukul left her home in Thailand and has been working in Kosovo since 2006. She had connections with a friend and an employer who had found their ways to working in Kosovo. Her friend told her she would make three times as much as she was making in Thailand.
“In that time, my friend worked here,” said Siripreedanukul. “I knew about the war, and I said,
‘No, no. I will not go.’ But he said, ‘No problem now, it’s safe.’”
So Siripreedanukul has been working in Thai Restaurant in Prishtina for nearly 10 years. She makes the trip to Thailand to visit her family every two years or so.
“In this year, I plan maybe December, because December is holiday season,” said Siripreedanukul with a hopeful look. She is brought back to reality quickly. “We cannot go whenever we like, because we have to work.”
Gopal Singh Khadka, 35, owner of Himalayan Gorkha Restaurant, has had similar experiences. Khadka is from Nepal and has also worked in India for six years, but came to Kosovo in 2003. A private company that hired Indian and Nepalese chefs sent him to Kosovo.
Khadka, Siripreedanukul and others from Asian countries represent a miniscule portion of Kosovo’s population. In fact, many are not even citizens of Kosovo. They are fewer than any minority groups, but seem to maintain thriving business lives.
Khadka explained that many foreigners started coming to Kosovo after the war. Though Khadka was not in the armed forces himself, an increased presence of peacekeepers and other organizations in Kosovo raised international awareness of Kosovo. Siripreedanukul had a similar perception, and like Khadka, she continues to enjoy her time in Kosovo.
“After war, I heard that a lot of Thai people here—they had to do the business. After some time, business slowed down, so people went home,” Siripreedanukul said. She then smiled. “I hope Kosovo will continue to develop more. I really want to see Kosovo develop because Kosovo is a nice country.”
Though most people moved to Kosovo soon after the war, thousands more continue to come to live, work or study in Kosovo every year. According to a report published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs, 3057 requests came in for temporary residence permits last year. Out of the 2643 granted permits, 41 percent were for work.
However, getting to Kosovo is not always easy. While Kosovo offers travel documents for foreign nationals, as well as refugees and stateless people, Kosovo’s lack of international recognition can cause a roadblock in the migration process. Khadka would like his family and friends from Nepal to visit, but it’s not easy. Nepal and its neighbor, India, are two of the countries that still do not recognize Kosovo, so getting from Nepal to Kosovo is a roundabout process.
“It’s difficult because we don’t have an embassy of Kosovo, so we have to go to India to get a visa for Turkey,” explained Khadka. “For us, Nepalese people, it’s difficult to go get a Turkish visa in India.”
Thailand recognized Kosovo on September 24, 2013, but Siripreedanukul had been working in Kosovo long before that. She left Thailand to find more job opportunities in order to support her family. Though Kosovo may seem like a far distant land in regard to Thailand, an immigrant’s choice of destination is often dictated by known opportunity, and which opportunity looks the best.
“In that time when I got a job, the only other option for me was Afghanistan, because I had a friend who worked in a Thai restaurant there,” said Siripreedanukul. “But at least this is closer to Europe. And after time, it is safe.”
Though Siripreedanukul and Khadka have experienced success and relative happiness in Prishtina, they miss an integral component of their lives—their children.
Both have children who attend school in their home countries. Opportunities for jobs may be better in Kosovo, but education is cheaper at home. Khadka struggles to know if it is best to stay in Kosovo where he can work, or go back to Nepal or somewhere where he can live with his nine-year-old son as he attends school.
“You want to see his future,” said Khadka, with a conflicted look on his face. “Maybe Kosovo is better than Nepal for future—who knows?”
Khadka also has a one-year-old daughter. His children both live in Nepal with his parents and his wife.
He only gets to see them every year or two, because he has to keep working to raise money to support them. Siripreedanukul is more used to being away from her daughters, 18 and 21. They both live with her parents in Thailand. Siripreedanukul is divorced from her husband, but he lives in Thailand and gets to spend more time with the children.
“Last year she lived here and now she’s back in Thailand studying for her bachelor’s degree in English education,” said Siripreedanukul about her daughter in college. “Here for education is expensive for us. It was hard before, but now we have social network—Facebook, Skype—we talk every day.”
The rhythm of life is constant travel and work for Siripreedanukul, Khadka and their colleagues. They work in Kosovo to bring money back to their families. Their kids move back and forth for school. Every year, they renew their identification documents to maintain their jobs. They spend time with the Kosovars they work with, but also know the small group of others from their own countries.
So Kosovo is not fully home to these immigrants. Though they spend almost all their time in Kosovo, they maintain citizenship in their home countries. According to the 2011 census data, immigrants with citizenship made up 7.4 percent of the population; but 97 percent of these immigrants were Kosovars returning home after the war.
While Khadka spends every day working and can’t find much time to enjoy the company of others,
Siripreedanukul has found a group of friends, and Prishtina reminds her of home.
“Prishtina is a small province, but it’s the same for me in Thailand,” she said. “I don’t live in the big city, I don’t live in the capital. I live in the part that’s relaxed. Prishtina has very nice people; when we start to talk, they are very nice, and I have a lot of friends. I’ve been here nine years—it’s like my second home.”
(Holly Wilkerson is a reporting intern at KosovaLive this summer in collaboration with Miami University in the United States.)
