Every Wednesday in Fushë Kosovë, four women sit in a room adorned with the crayon drawings and school work of their children, making beads from recycled paper. In another brightly decorated room, five more women scrape and smooth cream-colored bars of flower-shaped soap.
These nine women are a part of a series of microfinance projects run by The Ideas Partnership (TIP), a non-governmental organization stationed in Pristina, which works to reduce poverty and send minority children to school.
Adlije Hajrizi, 40, is married and the mother of seven. Her tired face, under short blonde hair, looks down at the round beads she meticulously rolls from long, colorful stands of paper, while she chats and laughs with the woman sitting next to her.
Ardian, 23, is Hajrizi’s oldest son. He does hard, physical labor and earns very little money, mainly due to the lack of work available in the area. He is divorced, with no kids and did not finish high school. Hajirizi said she hopes her 6-year-old daughter, Nerxhivan, will have a better life than her brother, through better education.
Nerxhivan stands next to her mother and watches with wide eyes and a coy smile as the mother sorts the strands of paper, partnering certain colors together, and rolling them into a little ball.
“I want her to finish high school and then go to a vocational school to learn a skill like nursing,” Hajrizi explained through translator and project coordinator for TIP, Arta Ponosheci. “Then she can make good money and help the family and help herself.”
The women like Hajrizi, working in the TIP projects are ethnic Ashkali, a minority group in Kosovo, who have lived their entire lives in the small district, Neighborhood 29, within Fushë Kosovë. It is a tight knit community where the people marry young and have many children.
Neighborhood 29 is only five miles from the busy streets of Pristina, but it is miles behind in terms of development. The houses in the community are mere shells of their former beings. The decaying walls are held up by hodge-podge spackling and the traditional, orange clay shingles cling to what is left of the roofs. The children kick a blue soccer ball on a dirt and cobblestone alleyway between these houses. The backdrop is a coal power plant, just beyond the train tracks, which emanates a gloomy, gray cloud of smoke over the neighborhood.
There are few job opportunities in Neighborhood 29. The men search through trash bins for pieces of scrap metal to sell for mere cents. The women beg in the streets with their children, holding their hands out to strangers, receiving a couple of twenty cent coins.
With TIP, the women make €25 per month, which has helped in eliminating their need for begging. The jewelry they make is sold at fairs, often held on Mother Teresa Boulevard in Pristina, and at the online stores, Balkan Spring, Two to One, and Smard Online for €2 to €4 each. The soaps they make are sold in bags hand sewn by ethnic Egyptian women in Peja, using donated clothes and sheets. This soap and bag combo brand is called, “Sa Pune,” and is sold for €2.50 at fairs and in a shop called Bio Natural, in Pristina and Gjakova.
Ponosheci said the main goal of TIP when it started three years ago was to get the ethnic Ashkali children of Neighborhood 29 back in school and keep them learning every day.
“There is no cost to attend school, other than notebooks, pencils, and other basic school supplies,” she said. “The main problem is that the children are kept out of school to help their mothers beg for money in the street. If we access the mothers, and give them a basic income, then we can ensure that the children are able to attend school. For the mothers to stay in the program and continue getting paid, they must keep their children in school.”
Soap maker Haxhere Hasani, 38, is married and has four children. She said the project has not only helped send her kids to school to get a full education, but it has helped her to improve herself, through education.
She lifted her head, covered in an orange and green hijab, and a smile showing crooked teeth crossed her face. “I have learned how to write my name and my children’s names,” she explained enthusiastically through the translator. “I can read the names now, too, when I see them.”
According to Ponosheci, TIP holds literary and parenting classes each week for the women. In these classes, the women are learning how to write and read alongside their children, allowing them to read with each other at home. She said they also learn games and activities to play and interact with their children on a daily basis, keeping them active, both physically and mentally.
The program also helps the women connect and bond with each other, something that is difficult when they are mainly expected to stay at home with the children and little adult interaction, Ponosheci said.
Hasani and the other soap makers sit at a table, talking excitedly and laughing with one another, as they smooth the small soaps they made together from scratch the previous Wednesday.
“Before this job, the women spent most of their time in their homes with the children, while their husbands went out,” she said. “Here, they can talk and share problems; often finding out they have the same problems. They can relate with each other.”
Vjollca Berisha, 31, married with four children, sorts through the pile of soap on the table before her, with her bleached blonde hair worn up in a clip. She said the health class and the nurse who gives advice about pregnancy, children, and common illnesses have both been very helpful.
The nurse assistant, Bajramshah Shala, is a short, smiling woman who wandered about the center, chatting with the woman. She has not completed an official nursing program and is guided by a trained gynecologist, Ilmije Gula, who comes in to the TIP center in Fushë Kosovë every Thursday. Shala is at the center every day, available for the women to come in and ask questions.
“I am mostly asked questions about pregnancy, how to deal with it during and after,” she explained through the translator. “I also get questions about their children when they are sick. They come and ask about which medicine the children should take, and if they have money they can buy the medicine right here in the center.”
The women of Neighborhood 29 grew up underprivileged and undereducated, focused on becoming wives and mothers at early ages. Most of what they know about pregnancy and raising children is passed down information from their undereducated mothers and other women in the community, and observance of their maternal methods.
Bajramshah Ahmeti, 34, is married and expecting her seventh baby in September. She is a small woman, covered in a floral, black dress and a gray hijab. Although she has had six children, she said she has learned a lot about pregnancy from the program’s weekly health classes, and from nurse Shala and Dr. Gula.
“The health class and nurse have taught me about ways to keep the baby healthy before and after birth. I have had six other children and they are healthy, but there is more to learn about being pregnant and having children that my mother did not teach me,” she explained through the translator.
Along with the provided literacy and health classes, volunteers of all ages, from different parts of the world, work with the women each week on making the jewelry and soaps and teaching them simple skills like listening and cooperation.
Toni Whyte, 65, is a volunteer from Australia with a background in art and education. She has worked at similar women’s projects in Africa, India, Nepal, and New Guinea. She is working with the women of TIP in a 7-week program this summer.
“I teach color and design and help in coming up with new ideas for bead designs,” she said. “The women are not so highly skilled in crafts, so it takes some time to teach them basic designs, but we are working on expanding. We started with simple white paper beads and have expanded into more colors. They have a brilliant sense of color.”
According to Whyte, the project has not only helped the women make a basic income from the crafts to support their families, but it has also boosted their work ethic and performance.
“They begin to develop work habits and learn the discipline of going into work every day,” she said. “An idea that is very different for them in their community.”
Ponosheci said if the women do not come into work, they will not be paid, which motivates them to come in every Wednesday to do their share in making the jewelry and soaps.
Berisha, polishing a bar of flower-shaped soap with an old, pink t-shirt, said she wants to continue coming into work and making steady money each month to help fix her house, buy food, and provide things like clothes and books for her children, but above all, she wants her four children to finish school and find jobs, a difficult task in Neighborhood 29.
“I don’t want them to all live in my little house,” she said with a laugh at the notion of her children staying in the neighborhood. “Do I want them to move away? No, I want them to be close to me. But I also want them to lead their own lives.”
Jess Verdon, 21, is a volunteer for the project from England. She said it is difficult to change culture norms, but the best chance at change is through the children.
“There isn’t a lot that can be done to transform the older women’s level of education,” she said. “But the children are the future and with education and a working role model, they can be the change the community needs. They go to school and boast about their mother’s work to their friends. By seeing their mothers go to work every week, the children are motivated to want to do more with their lives.”
Throughout the session, 6-year-old Nerxhivan has watched her mother work. Hajrizi shows her daughter how she gathers the different colored strands of paper and shapes them into a bead. Nerxhivan laughs when her mother tickles her nose with the stands, revealing she has the same smile as Hajrizi, and continues watching her work, as if it were her own job to observe.
(Kathleen Clyburn is a reporting intern at KosovaLive this summer in collaboration with Miami University in the United States.)
