Macedonia is a man’s world By Charles Schenk

Written spring 1999 from Kumanovo, Macedonia

One day last summer a young English teacher and I were taken out to lunch several kilometers outside of town by a fellow teacher. I had just moved here and he, like many people, wanted to get to know the American. We ate and talked, about America, mostly. Our host drank wine mixed with mineral water as we whiled away a hot afternoon.

After a while it occurred to me that this guy had consumed an entire bottle of wine and was about to begin a second.

“You know, our host is really quite inebriated,” I told my young friend in English, a language he didn't understand. “How are we going to get back to town?”

What had made me realize this was that he had just broken a glass. After which he quickly explained that he had broken it in honor of me, of my coming to Kumanovo. An old Macedonian custom, he said.

Translating this into English, my friend practically snorted. “I take it there's no such custom,” I said.

“Of course not.”

That was when I noticed the kelner, or waiter, removing the empty wine bottle and setting down another. And that was when I asked my friend how we would get home.

She shrugged. “He's going to drive us,” she said. “It's frightening, but there's nothing you can do about it. Men here drink. They drink a lot. They get very drunk. And they all think that they drive just fine when they're drunk. My mother and I have sat in the back of the car many times when my father was drunk ...”

“I'll tell you what,” I said, after we had puzzled this out a bit longer. “You take my telefonska karta and go outside and phone for a taxi. When it gets here we’ll say we're late for a very important appointment and ...”

“Oh no!” she said anxiously. “We cannot do that. That would be a deep affront to his manhood.”

It was about then that our host started yelling and waving his arms. He had moved to another table, where he now seemed to be drinking somebody else’s wine. When I asked my friend what our host was hollering about, she drew herself up and said, “I would prefer not to translate taboo words.”

Eventually I relented, and he drove us back to town and all three of us got home safely; I had to, as I saw it, because I was looking ahead to working with this man the next two years.

I would like to report that such boorishness is quite rare among Macedonian men, and that my friend and her mother are especially timid examples of Macedonian womanhood; but, from what I’ve observed, neither statement would be true.

I was giving English lessons to a girl who had just graduated from secondary school who wanted to get into a college that would prepare her for a career in tourism. She had to pass a difficult English test. We sat in her dnevna soba, or living room, one afternoon. Her father sat at the opposite end of the room, near the kitchen. In the middle of the lesson, indeed, in the middle of a sentence, the girl’s father said something to her in Macedonian.

Immediately she got up and walked across the room, past him, into the kitchen, where she retrieved a pack of cigarettes, opened them, returned and handed them to him. Politely, and without a word of complaint.

Understand that the father had been sitting about a meter from the cigarettes, the girl maybe five. And of course it was her English lesson, and her future.

Most women here are aware that their lives are not as free as those of women in Western societies. Looking up the word for “slave” in my English-Macedonian dictionary, I found the phrase rob na dom, meaning “slave to a house.” It's apt. The typical Macedonian housewife cooks and cleans and keeps her house immaculate. She uses a washing machine designed and built by communists, I won’t go into details, but yes, it's as awful as it sounds. And she irons practically everything, even socks and underwear. In addition, she works at least part-time outside the home.

Her day is extraordinarily long, and much of it is spent cleaning up messes made by her husband, who in the current Macedonian economy is often unemployed. When guests come to her home, she largely confines herself to serving food and drink, and emptying ashtrays. The guests talk with the husband and children. When they leave, it’s her job alone to clean up.

One young woman I know told me this story about her birth: While her mother was in the hospital, her father filled three ashtrays with his cigarette butts. When one was full he let it sit where it was and got another. When the new mother came home, her first job was to empty and clean out those ashtrays. I can’t vouch for the story, of course, but I believe it.

And yet, surprisingly, even young women don't much object to this arrangement. Another teen-aged girl explained to me that it’s perfectly all right with her if her future husband behaves in the typical manner for Macedonian men, and she will be happy to do all the chores her mother does; she just wants him to have a job. That men don’t have jobs right now isn’t their fault, she explained.

When young women list the good points of their boyfriends, they never fail to point out (if it’s true) that they don't beat them.

Macedonia is a man’s world.

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Transition to free economy by Charles Schenk

Written summer 1998 from Skopje, Macedonia

It was just a short ride to the bus station in Skopje, but as so often happens here in Macedonia, the conversation turned to work, and money. “I have 27 years,” the taxi driver told me bitterly, stating his age in the style of his native language. “I cannot have a wife. I cannot have a child. I work seven days a week, sometimes 15 hours a day, and only I exist.”

I took a careful look at him then. He was a handsome young man, trim, with pleasant features and the beautiful light-blue eyes that are common here. I suspect that, with a little money in his pockets, he would have young women lined up for the chance to be his wife.

“How much money are you paid?” I asked. It’s a rude question in America, but here people talk about money without hesitation, how much they make, how much Americans make, how much things cost here compared with America.

“Three hundred marks,” he replied. All significant sums are expressed in Deutschmarks, though the standard unit of currency is the denar. But a denar is worth less than 2 cents American, so it takes thousands of them to make purchases of any size. And the young man did not mean that he earns 300 marks per week; salaries are always expressed in monthly amounts. So let me show you what this means: One Deutschmark is worth about 55 cents, so 300 of them are worth about $165 American. That makes for an annual salary of about $1,980.

All over Macedonia, the lives of young people are on hold. Some have jobs at which they work long hours for ridiculously small salaries, while most have no jobs at all. They live with parents even into their 30s. It’s common to find four generations in a household.

In late June, when I had just moved to Kumanovo, one day a young woman who speaks some English offered to walk with me to the post office, which I had not been able to find on my own. As we walked, she asked me about my living arrangements and I told her I have the second floor of a kukja, or house.

“You have privacy?” she asked, and looked at me with greedy envy. Since then I’ve come to know this young woman better. She and her sister and her sister’s husband and their three children live with her parents and grandparents in four rooms about three kilometers outside Kumanovo. Maja works in a photo shop from 2:30 to 9 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. on Sundays. Every other Sunday she has a day off. Her pay is 100 Deutschmarks per month, and though much of it goes for the bus rides, it’s better than staying in the apartment all day.

People here talk about “the transition” to a free economy, since Macedonia was formerly part of Yugoslavia and spent about 50 years under socialism, but increasingly it’s the mentioned with rueful disdain.

Many of the country’s young people just want to get out, and the English lessons I give as a member of the Peace Corps are often to people with visas to Canada, Australia and New Zealand, or to people who have only the hope of obtaining such visas. The big prize is a visa to America, of course, but those, I’m told, are the most difficult ones to get.

I’m often asked to edit plaintive letters to authorities in these countries.

Many just drift. Their lives are often aimless and without hope. Many of those who have no jobs spend their evenings in the cafes and sleep late, often until noon. Drugs are a problem. I sometimes see syringes in the trash piles when I go out for my morning coffee and pastry.

We were approaching the bus station when I told the taxi driver about a friend of mine, also 27 years old, who has a diploma to teach the Macedonian language but has never gotten work in that profession. So she works as a kelnerka, or waitress, in a small café. Her hours are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. to closing, which is at least midnight and often comes at 1 or 2 a.m. If she makes a mistake on an order and doesn't collect enough money from her customer, her pay is shorted. And there is no tradition of tipping in Macedonia.

“Two hundred marks,” the young driver said. “I know.”

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The young wait By Charles Schenk

Written spring 1999 from Kumanovo, Macedonia

Last Sunday morning I sat with a young woman, helping her to prepare a resume, in English, to fax to a company in Greece that had advertised a job. Though trained to be a lawyer, she needs to log two years of volunteer service in the local courthouse before she can work as a lawyer. But she needs money. The job she sought was delivering ice cream and other dairy products.

She will be 26 next month. She has never had a job that paid. We worked together an hour and a half until we finally had something that could be typed up and faxed the next day. And then I saw her hand shake and she reached for a cigarette.

“Shto ti e?” I asked her. “What's the matter?”

“I'm wondering, what’s the use?” she said, and looked at me, and I saw that she had tears rolling down her cheeks.

The day was warm and the French door to the terrace was open. Outside I heard another NATO helicopter overhead. I knew what she meant.

Responsible young people in this country try to build futures for themselves. They wait year after year to marry. They wait to have children. They wait for jobs that, when they get them, pay almost nothing. And all the time their tiny, landlocked country is bordered by four neighbors none of which likes it very much.

The greatest immediate threat lies to the north, of course, in Serbia. Decisions being made now by people in places like Belgrade, Paris and Washington, and some of them are deeply selfish people, could mean that war will come to this city just 12 kilometers south of the Serbian border. I will be long gone by then, of course; it’s my students who will remain behind.

Both the ethnic Macedonians and the ethnic Albanians living in Kumanovo have reasons to worry. The young Albanians worry about refugees from Kosovo. One young woman I know told me her family has three sets of relatives in Kosovo. The men will stay there, she said, but the women and children from any or all of these families might arrive on her family's doorstep any day.

“Only my father and I have jobs,” she said, “and we have only two rooms. I don't know where we would put them, or how we could feed them.”

“But you have to accept them, I assume,” I said.

“Oh, yes.”

Virtually every ethnic Albanian in Kumanovo has relatives in Kosovo, I’m told , and nearly every Macedonian here has relatives in Serbia. NATO’s choppers overhead mean protection for Macedonia, but NATO planes could soon be dropping bombs on their cousins, their uncles and aunts, their brothers and sisters.

It’s easy enough to define the causes of the present crisis over Kosovo. One is religious bigotry,  and you find it both among the Christians and the Muslims. Another is fear born of ignorance, because, though they inhabit the same countries, and have for centuries, these Christians and these Muslims do not know each other, not even the simplest things about each other, because they live out their lives in strict segregation. Yet another is the philosophy of predestination, especially widespread among the Orthodox Christians, that provides a convenient excuse for doing nothing to avert clear danger. And finally, there are some here who want war, because they imagine gaining something from it.

“Every 20 years or so we have a war in the Balkans,” one girl, who is 18, told me. “It's purifying.”

I felt a chill.

Well, perhaps war will be averted. Perhaps signatures will be put on documents, however reluctantly, that promise peace. Perhaps those documents’ promises will then be honored. Perhaps no bombs will fall, for now. But for Macedonia’s young people, still the question remains: How do you build a future in this? What life is there when NATO choppers must always hover overhead?

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A Macedonian epiphany by Charles Schenk

Written spring 1999 from Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria

A Macedonian epiphany: I needed to know which gate to go to at the bus station in Skopje to catch my bus back to Stip. This was last summer, when I was in training there to be a Peace Corps volunteer. Now, there’s a fellow at a turnstile at the Skopje bus station whose only job is to tear the ends off bus tickets and hand them back to the customers. His job is like a lot of jobs in Macedonia: completely useless, as far as one can tell. So as I passed through the gate I decided to give him some real work to do and asked him, “Gospodine, koj avtobus e za Stip?” that is, “Sir, which bus is for Stip?”

He looked at my Pennsylvania Dutch face for a moment and asked, “Sprechen ze Deutsch?” (I wish I had a buck for every time I’ve been asked that question in the year I’ve been here in the Balkans.)

“Ne, Gospodine, jas sum Amerikanets. Zboruvam angliski jazik.” “No, Sir, I am an American. I speak English.”

He studied me for a moment and waved his big arm toward the buses and said, “Funft.”

All the way back to Stip I wondered about this, and smiled about it, and when I got there I asked two of my Macedonian teachers if my Macedonian had been so execrable he just didn't understand me. They assured me it wasn’t. It wouldn’t win any prizes, they said, but it was passable.

I thought about this story yesterday, when I was reading The New York Times on the Internet here in Blagoevgrad. A story on the front page said that NATO troops stationed in Kumanovo, Macedonia, where I’ve lived these past nine months as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English at the local gymnasia, believe those three soldiers taken captive were ambushed on the Macedonian side of the border by ethnic Serbs and then spirited across and handed over to Yugoslav troops.

If you want to understand the Balkans, you must know one simple fact: ethnicity is everything here. Ethnic Serbs living in Macedonia speak Serbo-Croatian as their first language and identify with Serbia, not Macedonia. An ethnic Serb’s family may have lived in Macedonia for generations. It doesn’t matter. He’s a Serb. Ethnic Albanians living in Macedonia learn Albanian in the home and only begin to learn Macedonian at age 6 or 7, when they start school. Ditto for ethnic Turks living in villages in the eastern part of the country. Ditto for all the many ethnic groups in that tiny country of two million.

I now believe I know what went through the mind of the ticket-stub puller. His entire life’s experience told him that, if you are of a certain ethnic group, you speak the language. “Sure, he’s American,” the guy probably thought, “but he’s first of all a German. He must speak German.” He may have been wondering why I would deny it.

Political boundaries just aren't all that important here. They are simply projections of the power of the ethnic group that happens to be on top at the moment.

Other Americans in our group of volunteers, Americans of mixed ethnic background, would often be asked, “Sure you’re an American – but what are you really?”

These Americans would tell the Macedonians things like this: “Well, let’s see. I'm a quarter Irish and a quarter Scandinavian and ...”

And the frustrated Macedonians would stop them and say, “All right, but then, what do you feel like?”

On Thursday, March 25 -- the night after the bombing started and one day before we in the Peace Corps began our evacuation from Macedonia -- I talked on the phone with a former student of mine who is half-Serbian, half-Macedonian. She said, “You know, everyone in Serbia loves Milosevic.”

I asked, “How do you know that, Natasha?”

“My mother and I were watching the Serbian TV station,” she said, completely without guile.

I paused for a moment and then said, as gently as I could, “Well, you know, Natasha, if I controlled Serbian media, they'd say that everybody loves Charlie.”

This is not a stupid woman. She is, in fact, very bright and very talented and one of the many people I worry about while I am holed up here in Blagoevgrad, about 15 kilometers from the Macedonian border. But it was clear that this was the first time she had thought about this simple fact.

“Well, yes,” she said after a moment. “I guess you're right.”

In the Balkans, when ethnicity and common sense collide, it is often common sense that takes the bruising.

I don’t know whether NATO’s actions in Serbia are right or wrong. Serbs themselves are not bad people -- any more than Germans are -- though now they are doing bad things to the ethnic Albanians who populate Kosovo. Given the wrong kind of political leadership, however -- the kind that Milosevic has given the Serbs; the kind Hitler gave the Germans -- you can count on it that the ethnic Albanians would commit the same horrors against the Serbs. I only know that there are some wonderful people in Kumanovo, the town that I called home for the past nine months, and they are ethnic Serbs and ethnic Albanians and ethnic Macedonians -- and I worry about them all day long and pray for them at night.

 

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E-mail from the Balkans By Charles Schenk

Written spring 1999 from Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria

Bisera, all 17 years of her, with her red hair and her easy laugh, first dropped into one of my English classes at Gymnasia Goce Delcev in Kumanovo, Macedonia, one afternoon in late July last year. When I tripped over her name (it’s pronounced BEE-say-rah), she suggested I call her Pearl, because that’s what it means in Macedonian.

That day I had brought to class three photographs I had taken since coming to Macedonia as a Peace Corps volunteer. Make up a story, I told the kids. When they handed in their work, I simply couldn’t believe Bisera’s: with a few minor corrections it could have passed as the work of a native English speaker -- a very literate one.

From that day until the day late last month, when Peace Corps/Macedonia evacuated to Bulgaria, I involved Bisera in everything I could. I wasn’t the first teacher at the gymnasia to spot her; virtually everyone predicts a great future for her. Lately, at her request, I’d been trying to figure out a way to get her to America for college. But few people have much money in Macedonia and the price of an American college education seemed out of reach.

This week she e-mailed me from Kumanovo, to tell me how an ethnic Macedonian girl, living 12 kilometers from the Serbian border, sees the war:

* * *

Hi, C:

Thanks for e-mailing me. I was very worried about you. However, in the past few days I realized that things are going inversely and only someone who is not here (like you) should be worried about me. Suddenly, after 10 years of war going on in my neighborhood, I found Kumanovo in the center of attention. ... Lucky you; you managed to get out of here before the real problems started. Don’t even think that I’m blaming you for leaving us here. You were the one who had choice.

Let's start with the nightmare:

Every single night I hear the sound of the planes right over my head.

Every single time I damn them for all the death they brought here, hidden under their wings.

You can't even imagine how it is to be alive, when only death, war and misery are surrounding you. ... This is the time when I conceived the real meaning of words like, “American citizen” or “American passport.” It’s like being a God on this piece of land. It’s like having a ticket to Heaven, at the moment when the doors of Hell are open and waiting for you.

Now, when I have seen all the news on TV, I’m sure that the rich countries are not even aware of the fact that besides Albanians, there are other people living here, like Macedonians or Serbs. ... Americans probably think we belong to a lower grade of the human race.

 My dear friend, I’m very disappointed. I thought there’s a great career waiting for me somewhere, but now I realize that I’m stuck up under this sky ... for all my life. ...

 While the air strikes are in progress, I see how insignificant I am, how powerless my thoughts are. I feel how short my hands are which can’t even rise above my head to catch and stop those deadly toys hurrying through the sky. I believe the words that [our mutual friend] Snezana once said: “Our destiny is determined by the time we're born.” That's a typical Balkanic way of thinking, but it works if you are in Macedonia.

It is very hard to describe my feelings; there is just a tremor in my throat. I’m not able to talk, because the only thing that could come out from me would be a scream, a horrible mixture of rage, sorrow and pain swallowed in this stupid war.

And, I just wanted to be someone who can help this people, someone who can bring prosperity and happiness to them, few things they have never had.

You've done a great job, buddy. You almost forced me to feel like having all the world in my hands; but my only task now is to struggle and keep running away from this whirlpool threatening my life.

Therefore, I’m closing up in my space, where no plane engines nor bomb detonations can be heard. I waste my time reading poems, writing letters, doing jobs that have nothing to do with the war.

I’m very quiet, I observe the situation when I’m outside, so I noticed several changes. First of all, the whole community is expecting something to come, although nobody knows what. People are talking and acting calmly and they are going to bed earlier. Then, the NATO guys. They go downtown prepared for fight; they wear their uniforms, guns and helmets even in restaurants and shops. People don’t like them. My fellow citizens used to think that it’s all these guys’ fault and that they were the ones who brought the war to Kumanovo.

During the day, while I’m in school, I can see the planes carrying bombs for our neighbors, and from the look in the eyes of my schoolmates, I see that all of them are trying not to let their feelings and tears go out. The Albanians who are studying at the gymnasia are pretty aggressive recently. There are KLA graffiti everywhere; they ... talk loudly that USA supports them, and that, sooner or later, we are going to be the minority, so they can choose what to do with us. That is what I’m afraid of. I have no illusions now, Charlie boy. All I can pray is to stay alive and be with my family.

I don’t expect anything from anyone, not even from my great friend across the ocean, who will not remember me after a couple of months. I have almost lost my hope.

So, stay in peace in your wealthy country, Charles, and try to remember your friends you once had from time to time. And if there are some grammatical errors, don't try to correct them. I suppose I won't be needing my knowledge of English for a long time. ...

Yours, Bisera

 

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It’s not over  By Charles Schenk

Written June 1999 from Pennsylvania

The faculty room in Gymnasia Goce Delcev was segregated. In this way, the room was like the school, and in this way the school was like the city of Kumanovo, Macedonia, where it is located. In this way, Kumanovo was like the Balkans.

There were two long tables in the faculty room. The one along the wall was where the Orthodox Christians congregated between classes. The other, identical table, beside the window, was where the ethnic Albanians met.

Because there was no table for crazy Unitarians from America who had joined this program called the Peace Corps, I shuttled back and forth between the two.

One afternoon -- this was about a month before the bombing began that would force the Peace Corps to evacuate from Macedonia -- I sat alone at the Orthodox table, reading a magazine and waiting for a young English teacher to arrive. I was to co-teach the next couple classes with her.

Several ethnic Albanians sat talking at the Muslim table behind me.

In walked a woman, not a faculty member, apparently a mother or grandmother. She was one of those large middle-aged women who seem not to walk so much as roll along, like vast ships at sea. She looked at me and asked a question.

“Izvinete, Gospogjo,” I replied, “kazhite pak.” (That is, “Excuse me, Madam, repeat what you said.”)

She did. But there were two key words I didn’t know, so I said: “Izvinete. Jas sum Amerikanets. Ne zboruvam Makedonski jazik dobro. Ne ve razbiram.” (“Excuse me. I am an American. I don’t speak Macedonian well. I don’t understand you.”)

She looked at me a moment, somewhat imploringly. I had the impression that her question, whatever it was, was important to her. Then I thought of something and said, “Ama, tie zboruvaat Makedonski dobro” – that is, “But they speak Macedonian well” – and I motioned over my shoulder to the Albanian teachers sitting at the table near the window.

She responded with a look that Queen of England might make in the company of a commoner who had just passed gas. Then she turned hard to port side, and rolled out the door.

This is how relations are between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans.

I’ll tell you another story, if I may. I mean, while I’m telling tales out of school.

The Macedonian for “Good day” is “Dobar den,” while the Albanian is “Mir ditte.” So whenever a Christian teacher at the school acknowledged my presence, I said “Dobar den,” and when an ethnic Albanian nodded or said “Hello,” I responded with “Mir ditte.” One day I was passing the ethnic Albanians’ table when a teacher nodded to me and I replied, “Mir ditte.”

Again, a horrified look, and then real anger came to his face. My impulse was to get away. I had no idea what I had done. It wasn’t until the next day that one of the English teachers explained to me that the man was a Slav, not an Albanian.

“Well, how was I supposed to know?” I asked her.