MACEDONIA –
The Aid Worker’s Story
Starts: 01:00:00:00
00:20
This was the weekend I planned to be in Prague. It’s funny what life deals you but miraculously I finally made it to Skopje. It’s a cool spring evening and I’m collecting my thoughts between the sounds of nightingales and NATO planes. Strange evening companions. It feels surreal being here so close and so far away. It feels terribly calm and I feel like I’m operating in a parallel universe to my normal life whatever that is. It seems calm enough yet horrific atrocities are supposedly occurring twenty kilometres away.
00:58
When I came here I was heading the Assessment Mission to have a look at the scenario here with a group of people but very quickly it became apparent that there would be a need for us to get involved. And so I moved from being Head of the Assessment Mission to Head of CARE’S operation here because I was the most, the person who was here at the time that could take over that role. I guess that was about exactly five weeks ago from today and then the whole things happened in the last five weeks. Everything that’s gone on, it’s been an enormous, biggest five weeks of my life I think.
01:34
Tonight I had the feeling of having a panic attack. It was horrible. I’ve calmed down now but I felt as though the weight of the world was on my shoulders and it was more responsibility that I could bear at that moment. Things are very difficult in the camp. We need about ten more pairs of hands.
01:50
Mark Brooking, CARE Volunteer/Engineer:
Two days ago I got a call from CARE Australia and they asked me if I could go to Macedonia in two days time. On Wednesday they said I might be going. Thursday they told me I was definitely going, if I could go on Saturday. It’s the first time I’ve had a chance to actually do something like this. I mean you watch it on TV and, before ten days ago I’d never even thought about it.
Sydney Airport, April 24
02:39
MB:
A couple of guys from CARE Australia gave us briefing. I suppose I became nervous for about five minutes when they were telling us the situation over there and the situation with the two CARE workers that are hostage at the moment.
Frankfurt Airport, April 25
03:04
Peter Stevenson, CARE Volunteer/Accountant
The problem is that our flight coming in has been late and we’ve missed our connecting from Frankfurt to Vienna.
Day one, Skopje, Macedonia
03:32
JH:
They’ll get here and I think instantaneously there’s a shock factor and that’s the aim of trying to give people a good talk when they come and explain this is the situation, this is what’s going on, this is who I am, this is who everybody else is, and this is how you’ll fit into the grand picture.
03:50
JH: (Addressing CARE Volunteers)
Welcome all of you to this fantastic and exciting mission. I know some of you have worked for CARE before and some haven’t. This mission is an emergency mission and for what that means, it means that we’re in a state of constant transition. So anything I tell you may change tomorrow and the thing I ask the most of everybody and I say this up front is that everyone try to learn to be as flexible and adaptable as possible. I know most people are. It’s important that you be understanding about things if you’re told things one day and then the next day it changes that you’re willing to go with the flow. You’ve come to probably one of the most fascinating and….
04:29
JH:
Two or three weeks ago when we first were asked by the United Nations to take on a camp and we didn’t really have enough staff here. There were days that I woke up feeling quite sick, thinking this is an enormous task that’s been required of us and of me and you know I’d stop and think well I don’t know how I ended up here. I’m 26 I’m a girl from Melbourne and I just came over here to try something out new for a year. Moved out of my other job and suddenly I find myself in this scenario.
5:00
JH:
You’re only about twenty kilometres from the border to Kosovo here. The border is.. if you keep going on this road and you’ll be there in about ten minutes. Less than ten minutes. So see the camp over there. I don’t think we’ll be getting any more people in this camp.. although we say that every day and every day we get more people. But there really isn’t anywhere else for them to go now. So theoretically you won’t be getting any more but you just can’t be sure.
That’s the kind of bus that goes to the border empty and it comes full of refugees.
Here’s our French friends and these are the CARE and accommodation tents just here too .. There’s the CARE car and there’s all the CARE workers in their little green…
(chatter amongst driver and words of welcome from other CARE workers.)
Stenkovec Refugee Camp
06:38
CARE Volunteer talking to other volunteer workers.
With each bus you unload it get them all into a tent. We tell them don’t be frightened. Don’t worry about people in uniform. Only on two occasions have we got buses in the day. The rest of the time they come at night. Don’t ask me why. There seems to be great delight in releasing people from the border at nine, ten, eleven o’clock at night so you get the buses here at one, two, three o’clock in the morning. We unload them one at a time. Get some water into them, get the driver to open up the door, get some water, bit of bread, if you’ve got a bit of bread, something to eat and then close the door again.
Don’t let them off because once you let them off you lose complete control over it because usually the bus comes here everybody runs from anywhere in the camp to find out where did they come from is there anybody on there that they know.
(Chatter amongst refugees arriving by bus).
MB:
07:42
Peter, again there’s seventeen more people coming off the next bus so there’s going to be a gap.
07:52
It’s amazing. But it’s so much more easier to do it, the first one we’re doing is in the daylight because it’ll make it easier for us when the buses come in the night but I’d hate to be doing this in the middle of the night.
MB:
08:19
I don’t think you can imagine what’s it like to actually get here and see what it’s like and see what the people are like and then we had a quick briefing and the buses were turning up so in a way it was good we got dropped in the deep end. Feel really pleased that we managed to do it. Gone and find out what we’re going to do tonight now.
JH:
08:38
I’d say that attitude level usually lasts for about two to three days because it’s still quite exciting it’s all very new. They’re a bit uncertain about what they’re supposed to do but they learn to fit in. Then I think as tiredness starts to hit after the first two, three four days perhaps, then people tend to go into a bit more of a lull again. And they know now what it is, they know what this job is and they’re trying to figure out whether they can cope with it, and whether they’ll last.
09:08
(Reading letter) It looks like the holocaust on TV and it’s hard to take in all of this. The enormity of the situation and what this could mean for humanity. Tonight I’ve taken on another camp at the request of the UN and called for immediate staff reinforcements. It’ll stretch our capacity a lot now but someone has to do the job and few if any other NGO’s have put up their hands.
70kms south of Skopje at Cegrane – a new camp is being set up by German NATO Troops.
JH:
09:47
It’s about 80 to 90 percent Albanian Community down there. They were very welcoming of us. Where Stenkovec is in an area which is largely it’s right near the border but it’s mostly Serbian and ethnic Macedonian farmers in there. And not very comfortable that the camps expanding.
Day three - Stenkovec Refugee Camp
MB:
10:17
Well the situation at the moment is that we’ve got this new camp that we’re trying to set up so they’ve asked me to go down there this afternoon with Marge and go sit in on some meetings. They’ve started putting some tents up so they expect refugees to be dumped on them very, very shortly. They don’t want to get stuck in the same situation as what happened here. But the situation here is what we’ve been working on the last two days, is they’ve had say five buses a day coming in here which is probably two, three hundred people but today we’ve been told we have to take two thousand more people. If they dump two thousand on us today there’s no way we can put them under shelter.
JH:
10:54
I think the way things are going they’re going to move people to the new camp very soon. But we need to kind of get a handle on that one too.
MB:
10:59
How soon is soon…end of the week, tomorrow?
JH
11:02
I think by Friday they said. Go and find Marge now.
MB
Where will she be?
CARE VOLUNTEER11:07
Can I just ask you about these two thousand refugees?
JH:
This afternoon I think. That’s why I’m only taking two people out of here. I was going to take four but I’m gonna to take two now.. …
MB:
Well hopefully we’ll be back in time and they won’t have arrived.
JH:
No hopefully. You better go. Have a look for Marge up and down the corridor if you don’t see her then just go, I think.
CARE volunteer:11:28
Two thousand.
MB: You’ll cope you’ll cope.
CARE volunteer: 11:32
A thousand each.
CARE volunteer:
She’ll be right.
CARE volunteer:
Yeah no worries
Peter Stevenson:
12:00
In my previous experience I haven’t been immersed in the urgency as I’m seeing today. There’ve been times when it’s been quite chaotic in the past but with the enormity of the situation is something, which is quite new to me.
Amidst the chaos movie star Richard Gere arrives for a fleeting visit.
Andrew “Henry”Gardner, CARE Volunteer/Philosophy student:
12:23
There’s twelve more buses coming.
12:35
Well I think they think a lot of sleeping bags are going to clog up the tents but it’s not quite clear, and it’s not quite understood that there’s actually twelve more buses coming so they’ll be used up within an hour or two, at least before the evenings out but we need to be actually stationed here for when the people come in. We’ve just unloaded about 900 of them about an hour ago, so I’m not looking forward to this one bit.
AG:
13:01
Richard Gere should have stayed to help me unload them.
Gary Taylor, CARE Volunteer/Retired Army Officer
13:21
I think the emotion is at the moment. And then you’ve just to say well I can’t, shed a tear all day I’ve got to get that out of the way, so I can get on and help. And I think we’re all handling that. Yesterday it was very emotional. There were a lot of women yesterday that were just literally not on this planet. They were so stressed out that it was really sad.
AG:
13:48
We were expecting twenty buses and it just seems twenty-one’s turned up and it was an incredibly hectic squeeze just to make room for the two thousand people we were expecting. So at the very last minute we’re going to have to squeeze a hundred odd extra people into the tents. And the tents were squashed at eighty and I think we were packing in one hundred and ten just then. God be willing that the 21 buses are it and hopefully it may be over in an hour, an hour and a half. Fingers crossed.
Ten minutes later, six more buses arrive.
GT:
15:05
No. Stay there and bring the buses back.. No there’s no room left in that tent mate. We’ll take them to another tent and then we’ll bring them back.
JH:
15:18
The situation’s rapidly deteriorating and it sounds pretty shocking in Albania. Huge numbers of refugees… how and where to put them nobody seems to know. There’s some news tonight that the Russian Prime Minister may have had successful talks with Milosovic. I feel strange today like this whole experience is beginning to grow in on me. Like I’m in a vacuum. I’m trying to figure out what this operation is in the uncertain situations.
Day four - Cegrane Refugee camp
MB:
15:49
Since I left you yesterday I’ve arrived at this new camp at about two o’clock yesterday afternoon and there was nobody here. We were trying to set it up and we expected refugees in on Friday. We came down here to have a meeting and that’s all we thought we were going to do. They told us that yesterday afternoon to expect anywhere between a thousand and five thousand people last night. And all afternoon the rumours kept going back and forth and back and forth and we never knew. So three of us prepared to stay here all night and we worked with all the organisations here to try and get it ready. It wasn’t ready but 27 buses turned up at eleven o’clock last night. And we finished putting them into tents at about 7.30 this morning.
I haven’t slept yet.
Margaret McCarthy, CARE Volunteer/Nurse:
16:46
I’ve been on my feet now for thirty hours and not making much sense but it’s really what emergency work is all about and you’ve got to get in there and you do your best and I mean it was great. I mean it’s the same in any emergency situation. I mean think everybody gets in there and we couldn’t have done it without the German NATO Forces. I mean they were fantastic.
MB:
17:10
Last night I was riding on one of these giant NATO forklifts and I was really thinking I cannot believe I’m here doing this. Because two weeks ago I’d never even thought of doing aid work. And I was truly believing that I’d never done something so satisfying in my life. I think I’m going to be here for a while doing this.
17:29
A couple of weeks ago I was watching television in Balmain Sydney and now I’m giving German NATO Forces their instructions and helping five thousand refugees.
MMcC:
17:58
Having a lot of people that come from fairly tragic circumstances but have come to something that is safe and secure. They know that people here are helping them. They’re not going to be pushed out of here in any great hurry.
MB:
18:07
I’ve just come from a meeting. We’ve just been told to expect four and a half to five thousand refugees later this afternoon. There is absolutely no way we can take that many. The Government’s just sending them to us. We’re trying to delay it. We don’t have the tents for them. The camps just going to be overrun before we have any proper infrastructure. So that’s the very latest situation.
JH:
18:37
People can talk to you about figures and they can tell you that there’s ten thousand people waiting, five thousand people waiting but it’s hard for an ordinary person to visualise what ten thousand people looks like queued at the border. Or how do you fit ten thousand people into buses. And it’s not until you stand there in the middle of the camp on a day when refugees are arriving and you watch bus load after bus load after bus loads, each bus carrying somewhere between 60 to 100 people on it packed to the hilt that you can actually get a sense of just the enormity of the numbers of people coming through.
19:17
I’m concerned about the welfare of the staff tonight particularly the field staff and new arrivals most of all. Everyone’s looking pretty hagged and sunburnt and I think everyone needs some time off. At my request eight new staff are arriving in three days, which is a relief.
MB:
19:45
What happened to my head? It looks a lot worse than it is to start with. I got on a bus today. I jumped on a bus with an interpreter to get some refugees off and hit my head on top of the door jam and I did it in front of a film crew, so I think it’s gone out to the world and it started to bleed and that was the most embarrassing thing because I kept doing my job and the refugees started looking at me with worried looks on their face and they went “aw poor poor man, ” so I could see the headline saying something like: ‘Refugee comforts aid worker in refugee camp’.
Day five - Stenkovec Refugee camp
AG:
20:40
There’s just so much to be done especially with summer coming on and sanitation’s going to become a big problem. The people from Kosovo themselves helping, the French Emergency services French engineers. This is the closest you get to a real sense a real deep sense of humanity. The whole spread the best and worst. It’s just really raw and in your face.
21:02
The French troops have been absolutely magnificent to them. They’ve been so orderly and have an awe-inspiring attitude they leapt to it and have gone in efficiently done the job but still with obvious compassion.
French Army Soldier:
21:13
French staff organise with the refugees.. big challenge of the soccer. It’s Sunday bigger challenge on the top in this camp.
AG:
21:34
Hat off to them if I was wearing one.
JH:
21:41
The thing that amazes me as a young woman standing here in 1999 to look around and think where are all these people going to go. How will this ever get solved? What will ever happen to Kosovo? What will happen to these people?
Day six - Cegrane refugee camp
22:05
MMc This morning we’ve opened up the mother and child centre. (Hold on we’ve got a problem). Everybody wants something straight away. They think there won’t be enough. But there’s plenty of everything. It’s just a matter of being able to hand it out in an orderly sort of fashion.
JH:
22:34
It is certainly a life that is very much on the edge and the unpredictability of every day for us here and the changing tide of the needs and the emergency are something that keeps your blood pumping in your veins. It’s something that keeps your heart ticking. Getting you up everyday.
MMcC: 22:59
I’m yelling at everybody. I’m losing my voice.
JH: 23:02
But you have to ask yourself how long you can do that and remain a normal human being.
AG: 23:07
Funnily enough I’m probably slightly less than a misanthrope when I came in initially and I hope.. I’ve thought about this and the reason this is here and these people are going through such terrible circumstances is because of the actions of others but I’ve thought about it and it’s actually the actions quite a few others not that many people of have cause this much misery but you then have this many people who are just getting on with it and actually conducting themselves with, I think dignity is the word that comes to mind. I’m less of a misanthrope and hot dang I wasn’t expecting that.
Day seven - Stenkovec refugee camp - May 2
The soccer atch between the French Troops and the Refugees is about to get underway. The whole camp turns out.
The refugees win 4-3.
JH: 25:35
It’s moments like today when you see a soccer match between the French soldiers in our camp against Albanian refugees and you watch the excitement and joy on their faces it makes you realise there is hope for you there is a reason to go on. There is a reason we are here helping these people. Most of the time you just go on and do what you’ve got to do and you’re driven by whatever it is that drives us to do this sort of work. But here are moments that you stop and you think ‘why am I doing this?’
26:10 It’s part of humanity. Exercise from a land that many are likely never to return to Kosovo. I got emotional tonight to try to explain the situation to family and friends on email and not knowing how to say what I’m going through and what I’ve seen. It’s difficult to look beyond what’s happening each day and I’m simultaneously driven by a desire to help these people as fast as possible.
Three new volunteers left Australia last weekend.
CARE says many more are needed.
Ends: 01:26:55:00
The Aid Worker’s Story
Starts: 01:00:00:00
00:20
This was the weekend I planned to be in Prague. It’s funny what life deals you but miraculously I finally made it to Skopje. It’s a cool spring evening and I’m collecting my thoughts between the sounds of nightingales and NATO planes. Strange evening companions. It feels surreal being here so close and so far away. It feels terribly calm and I feel like I’m operating in a parallel universe to my normal life whatever that is. It seems calm enough yet horrific atrocities are supposedly occurring twenty kilometres away.
00:58
When I came here I was heading the Assessment Mission to have a look at the scenario here with a group of people but very quickly it became apparent that there would be a need for us to get involved. And so I moved from being Head of the Assessment Mission to Head of CARE’S operation here because I was the most, the person who was here at the time that could take over that role. I guess that was about exactly five weeks ago from today and then the whole things happened in the last five weeks. Everything that’s gone on, it’s been an enormous, biggest five weeks of my life I think.
01:34
Tonight I had the feeling of having a panic attack. It was horrible. I’ve calmed down now but I felt as though the weight of the world was on my shoulders and it was more responsibility that I could bear at that moment. Things are very difficult in the camp. We need about ten more pairs of hands.
01:50
Mark Brooking, CARE Volunteer/Engineer:
Two days ago I got a call from CARE Australia and they asked me if I could go to Macedonia in two days time. On Wednesday they said I might be going. Thursday they told me I was definitely going, if I could go on Saturday. It’s the first time I’ve had a chance to actually do something like this. I mean you watch it on TV and, before ten days ago I’d never even thought about it.
Sydney Airport, April 24
02:39
MB:
A couple of guys from CARE Australia gave us briefing. I suppose I became nervous for about five minutes when they were telling us the situation over there and the situation with the two CARE workers that are hostage at the moment.
Frankfurt Airport, April 25
03:04
Peter Stevenson, CARE Volunteer/Accountant
The problem is that our flight coming in has been late and we’ve missed our connecting from Frankfurt to Vienna.
Day one, Skopje, Macedonia
03:32
JH:
They’ll get here and I think instantaneously there’s a shock factor and that’s the aim of trying to give people a good talk when they come and explain this is the situation, this is what’s going on, this is who I am, this is who everybody else is, and this is how you’ll fit into the grand picture.
03:50
JH: (Addressing CARE Volunteers)
Welcome all of you to this fantastic and exciting mission. I know some of you have worked for CARE before and some haven’t. This mission is an emergency mission and for what that means, it means that we’re in a state of constant transition. So anything I tell you may change tomorrow and the thing I ask the most of everybody and I say this up front is that everyone try to learn to be as flexible and adaptable as possible. I know most people are. It’s important that you be understanding about things if you’re told things one day and then the next day it changes that you’re willing to go with the flow. You’ve come to probably one of the most fascinating and….
04:29
JH:
Two or three weeks ago when we first were asked by the United Nations to take on a camp and we didn’t really have enough staff here. There were days that I woke up feeling quite sick, thinking this is an enormous task that’s been required of us and of me and you know I’d stop and think well I don’t know how I ended up here. I’m 26 I’m a girl from Melbourne and I just came over here to try something out new for a year. Moved out of my other job and suddenly I find myself in this scenario.
5:00
JH:
You’re only about twenty kilometres from the border to Kosovo here. The border is.. if you keep going on this road and you’ll be there in about ten minutes. Less than ten minutes. So see the camp over there. I don’t think we’ll be getting any more people in this camp.. although we say that every day and every day we get more people. But there really isn’t anywhere else for them to go now. So theoretically you won’t be getting any more but you just can’t be sure.
That’s the kind of bus that goes to the border empty and it comes full of refugees.
Here’s our French friends and these are the CARE and accommodation tents just here too .. There’s the CARE car and there’s all the CARE workers in their little green…
(chatter amongst driver and words of welcome from other CARE workers.)
Stenkovec Refugee Camp
06:38
CARE Volunteer talking to other volunteer workers.
With each bus you unload it get them all into a tent. We tell them don’t be frightened. Don’t worry about people in uniform. Only on two occasions have we got buses in the day. The rest of the time they come at night. Don’t ask me why. There seems to be great delight in releasing people from the border at nine, ten, eleven o’clock at night so you get the buses here at one, two, three o’clock in the morning. We unload them one at a time. Get some water into them, get the driver to open up the door, get some water, bit of bread, if you’ve got a bit of bread, something to eat and then close the door again.
Don’t let them off because once you let them off you lose complete control over it because usually the bus comes here everybody runs from anywhere in the camp to find out where did they come from is there anybody on there that they know.
(Chatter amongst refugees arriving by bus).
MB:
07:42
Peter, again there’s seventeen more people coming off the next bus so there’s going to be a gap.
07:52
It’s amazing. But it’s so much more easier to do it, the first one we’re doing is in the daylight because it’ll make it easier for us when the buses come in the night but I’d hate to be doing this in the middle of the night.
MB:
08:19
I don’t think you can imagine what’s it like to actually get here and see what it’s like and see what the people are like and then we had a quick briefing and the buses were turning up so in a way it was good we got dropped in the deep end. Feel really pleased that we managed to do it. Gone and find out what we’re going to do tonight now.
JH:
08:38
I’d say that attitude level usually lasts for about two to three days because it’s still quite exciting it’s all very new. They’re a bit uncertain about what they’re supposed to do but they learn to fit in. Then I think as tiredness starts to hit after the first two, three four days perhaps, then people tend to go into a bit more of a lull again. And they know now what it is, they know what this job is and they’re trying to figure out whether they can cope with it, and whether they’ll last.
09:08
(Reading letter) It looks like the holocaust on TV and it’s hard to take in all of this. The enormity of the situation and what this could mean for humanity. Tonight I’ve taken on another camp at the request of the UN and called for immediate staff reinforcements. It’ll stretch our capacity a lot now but someone has to do the job and few if any other NGO’s have put up their hands.
70kms south of Skopje at Cegrane – a new camp is being set up by German NATO Troops.
JH:
09:47
It’s about 80 to 90 percent Albanian Community down there. They were very welcoming of us. Where Stenkovec is in an area which is largely it’s right near the border but it’s mostly Serbian and ethnic Macedonian farmers in there. And not very comfortable that the camps expanding.
Day three - Stenkovec Refugee Camp
MB:
10:17
Well the situation at the moment is that we’ve got this new camp that we’re trying to set up so they’ve asked me to go down there this afternoon with Marge and go sit in on some meetings. They’ve started putting some tents up so they expect refugees to be dumped on them very, very shortly. They don’t want to get stuck in the same situation as what happened here. But the situation here is what we’ve been working on the last two days, is they’ve had say five buses a day coming in here which is probably two, three hundred people but today we’ve been told we have to take two thousand more people. If they dump two thousand on us today there’s no way we can put them under shelter.
JH:
10:54
I think the way things are going they’re going to move people to the new camp very soon. But we need to kind of get a handle on that one too.
MB:
10:59
How soon is soon…end of the week, tomorrow?
JH
11:02
I think by Friday they said. Go and find Marge now.
MB
Where will she be?
CARE VOLUNTEER11:07
Can I just ask you about these two thousand refugees?
JH:
This afternoon I think. That’s why I’m only taking two people out of here. I was going to take four but I’m gonna to take two now.. …
MB:
Well hopefully we’ll be back in time and they won’t have arrived.
JH:
No hopefully. You better go. Have a look for Marge up and down the corridor if you don’t see her then just go, I think.
CARE volunteer:11:28
Two thousand.
MB: You’ll cope you’ll cope.
CARE volunteer: 11:32
A thousand each.
CARE volunteer:
She’ll be right.
CARE volunteer:
Yeah no worries
Peter Stevenson:
12:00
In my previous experience I haven’t been immersed in the urgency as I’m seeing today. There’ve been times when it’s been quite chaotic in the past but with the enormity of the situation is something, which is quite new to me.
Amidst the chaos movie star Richard Gere arrives for a fleeting visit.
Andrew “Henry”Gardner, CARE Volunteer/Philosophy student:
12:23
There’s twelve more buses coming.
12:35
Well I think they think a lot of sleeping bags are going to clog up the tents but it’s not quite clear, and it’s not quite understood that there’s actually twelve more buses coming so they’ll be used up within an hour or two, at least before the evenings out but we need to be actually stationed here for when the people come in. We’ve just unloaded about 900 of them about an hour ago, so I’m not looking forward to this one bit.
AG:
13:01
Richard Gere should have stayed to help me unload them.
Gary Taylor, CARE Volunteer/Retired Army Officer
13:21
I think the emotion is at the moment. And then you’ve just to say well I can’t, shed a tear all day I’ve got to get that out of the way, so I can get on and help. And I think we’re all handling that. Yesterday it was very emotional. There were a lot of women yesterday that were just literally not on this planet. They were so stressed out that it was really sad.
AG:
13:48
We were expecting twenty buses and it just seems twenty-one’s turned up and it was an incredibly hectic squeeze just to make room for the two thousand people we were expecting. So at the very last minute we’re going to have to squeeze a hundred odd extra people into the tents. And the tents were squashed at eighty and I think we were packing in one hundred and ten just then. God be willing that the 21 buses are it and hopefully it may be over in an hour, an hour and a half. Fingers crossed.
Ten minutes later, six more buses arrive.
GT:
15:05
No. Stay there and bring the buses back.. No there’s no room left in that tent mate. We’ll take them to another tent and then we’ll bring them back.
JH:
15:18
The situation’s rapidly deteriorating and it sounds pretty shocking in Albania. Huge numbers of refugees… how and where to put them nobody seems to know. There’s some news tonight that the Russian Prime Minister may have had successful talks with Milosovic. I feel strange today like this whole experience is beginning to grow in on me. Like I’m in a vacuum. I’m trying to figure out what this operation is in the uncertain situations.
Day four - Cegrane Refugee camp
MB:
15:49
Since I left you yesterday I’ve arrived at this new camp at about two o’clock yesterday afternoon and there was nobody here. We were trying to set it up and we expected refugees in on Friday. We came down here to have a meeting and that’s all we thought we were going to do. They told us that yesterday afternoon to expect anywhere between a thousand and five thousand people last night. And all afternoon the rumours kept going back and forth and back and forth and we never knew. So three of us prepared to stay here all night and we worked with all the organisations here to try and get it ready. It wasn’t ready but 27 buses turned up at eleven o’clock last night. And we finished putting them into tents at about 7.30 this morning.
I haven’t slept yet.
Margaret McCarthy, CARE Volunteer/Nurse:
16:46
I’ve been on my feet now for thirty hours and not making much sense but it’s really what emergency work is all about and you’ve got to get in there and you do your best and I mean it was great. I mean it’s the same in any emergency situation. I mean think everybody gets in there and we couldn’t have done it without the German NATO Forces. I mean they were fantastic.
MB:
17:10
Last night I was riding on one of these giant NATO forklifts and I was really thinking I cannot believe I’m here doing this. Because two weeks ago I’d never even thought of doing aid work. And I was truly believing that I’d never done something so satisfying in my life. I think I’m going to be here for a while doing this.
17:29
A couple of weeks ago I was watching television in Balmain Sydney and now I’m giving German NATO Forces their instructions and helping five thousand refugees.
MMcC:
17:58
Having a lot of people that come from fairly tragic circumstances but have come to something that is safe and secure. They know that people here are helping them. They’re not going to be pushed out of here in any great hurry.
MB:
18:07
I’ve just come from a meeting. We’ve just been told to expect four and a half to five thousand refugees later this afternoon. There is absolutely no way we can take that many. The Government’s just sending them to us. We’re trying to delay it. We don’t have the tents for them. The camps just going to be overrun before we have any proper infrastructure. So that’s the very latest situation.
JH:
18:37
People can talk to you about figures and they can tell you that there’s ten thousand people waiting, five thousand people waiting but it’s hard for an ordinary person to visualise what ten thousand people looks like queued at the border. Or how do you fit ten thousand people into buses. And it’s not until you stand there in the middle of the camp on a day when refugees are arriving and you watch bus load after bus load after bus loads, each bus carrying somewhere between 60 to 100 people on it packed to the hilt that you can actually get a sense of just the enormity of the numbers of people coming through.
19:17
I’m concerned about the welfare of the staff tonight particularly the field staff and new arrivals most of all. Everyone’s looking pretty hagged and sunburnt and I think everyone needs some time off. At my request eight new staff are arriving in three days, which is a relief.
MB:
19:45
What happened to my head? It looks a lot worse than it is to start with. I got on a bus today. I jumped on a bus with an interpreter to get some refugees off and hit my head on top of the door jam and I did it in front of a film crew, so I think it’s gone out to the world and it started to bleed and that was the most embarrassing thing because I kept doing my job and the refugees started looking at me with worried looks on their face and they went “aw poor poor man, ” so I could see the headline saying something like: ‘Refugee comforts aid worker in refugee camp’.
Day five - Stenkovec Refugee camp
AG:
20:40
There’s just so much to be done especially with summer coming on and sanitation’s going to become a big problem. The people from Kosovo themselves helping, the French Emergency services French engineers. This is the closest you get to a real sense a real deep sense of humanity. The whole spread the best and worst. It’s just really raw and in your face.
21:02
The French troops have been absolutely magnificent to them. They’ve been so orderly and have an awe-inspiring attitude they leapt to it and have gone in efficiently done the job but still with obvious compassion.
French Army Soldier:
21:13
French staff organise with the refugees.. big challenge of the soccer. It’s Sunday bigger challenge on the top in this camp.
AG:
21:34
Hat off to them if I was wearing one.
JH:
21:41
The thing that amazes me as a young woman standing here in 1999 to look around and think where are all these people going to go. How will this ever get solved? What will ever happen to Kosovo? What will happen to these people?
Day six - Cegrane refugee camp
22:05
MMc This morning we’ve opened up the mother and child centre. (Hold on we’ve got a problem). Everybody wants something straight away. They think there won’t be enough. But there’s plenty of everything. It’s just a matter of being able to hand it out in an orderly sort of fashion.
JH:
22:34
It is certainly a life that is very much on the edge and the unpredictability of every day for us here and the changing tide of the needs and the emergency are something that keeps your blood pumping in your veins. It’s something that keeps your heart ticking. Getting you up everyday.
MMcC: 22:59
I’m yelling at everybody. I’m losing my voice.
JH: 23:02
But you have to ask yourself how long you can do that and remain a normal human being.
AG: 23:07
Funnily enough I’m probably slightly less than a misanthrope when I came in initially and I hope.. I’ve thought about this and the reason this is here and these people are going through such terrible circumstances is because of the actions of others but I’ve thought about it and it’s actually the actions quite a few others not that many people of have cause this much misery but you then have this many people who are just getting on with it and actually conducting themselves with, I think dignity is the word that comes to mind. I’m less of a misanthrope and hot dang I wasn’t expecting that.
Day seven - Stenkovec refugee camp - May 2
The soccer atch between the French Troops and the Refugees is about to get underway. The whole camp turns out.
The refugees win 4-3.
JH: 25:35
It’s moments like today when you see a soccer match between the French soldiers in our camp against Albanian refugees and you watch the excitement and joy on their faces it makes you realise there is hope for you there is a reason to go on. There is a reason we are here helping these people. Most of the time you just go on and do what you’ve got to do and you’re driven by whatever it is that drives us to do this sort of work. But here are moments that you stop and you think ‘why am I doing this?’
26:10 It’s part of humanity. Exercise from a land that many are likely never to return to Kosovo. I got emotional tonight to try to explain the situation to family and friends on email and not knowing how to say what I’m going through and what I’ve seen. It’s difficult to look beyond what’s happening each day and I’m simultaneously driven by a desire to help these people as fast as possible.
Three new volunteers left Australia last weekend.
CARE says many more are needed.
Ends: 01:26:55:00