Global Women’s Narrative’s Project is an Oxford Initiative for Human Rights and Ethics. I became involved in this project in 2020 when I was introduced to one of my current mentors, Lyn Boyd-Judson who runs the initiative. Below you will find my first interview which is still in the editing stage.
Janet Reineck’s Interview:
Grace: I wanted to introduce Janet Reineck who will be speaking about her time in Kosovo from 1980 to the early 1990s. Janet earned a Master’s degree in Dance Ethnology from UCLA and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She lived in Kosovo (former Yugoslavia) for eight years, first conducting research, then as the director of rural development projects for Oxfam, International Rescue Committee, and George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Returning to Santa Barbara in 1997, Janet became a professional fundraiser, directing development efforts for local charities. She will be talking about her research and aid work, her interpretation of women's issues, and her experience as an American woman in this region.
Janet: Thank you Grace! This is a wonderful opportunity to talk about this particular part of the world and women’s lives. It all started for me in the 1970s, I was traveling through the Balkans, I was fascinated by the area. I was drawn to Eastern Europe and this is when it was a very tight society, in the ’70s. So I would travel there in the summers. I was going to UCLA and then it came for me to choose the thesis subject for my master’s in dance ethnology. Which is sort of a combination of anthropology and expressive behavior at UCLA. So based on travels throughout the Balkans for a number of years I met Albanians at one of the festivals in Croatia and they led me to their village and that was actually in the summer of 1980. So at that point, I traveled down by myself and found this community and I immediately fell in love with the culture, I somehow felt it very deeply. I loved the way they lived, the way they spoke, I loved the language Albanian and I loved being in that situation where you are never alone. I was thrust into a community of young women. At that time I was in my late 20s and I was immediately absorbed by the women. I stayed for a while in that village and realized that was where I wanted to do my dissertation research. That was 1980, so that was a very interesting time because Josip Broz Tito who was president and who had governed Yugoslavia since World War II, had been a hero, a partisan hero, a communist in the Second World War. He had led the country and he was a minority himself, he was Croatian and he was leading this country that had been dominated by Serbia. So he was thought of as the champion of the minorities and this is a very crucial part of this story because the Albanian village people that I was staying with, thought of him as a real hero. They loved him so much because they thought of him as a champion of the minorities. So when I happened to be there, this first time, my first contact with Albanians, he had just died and his funerals were on television. These village women who did not speak Serbian, they were watching these broadcasts in Serbian and Cyrillic written on TV and they were crying and sobbing. This really gave me an inside to the flavor of the country and how things were rolling at the time. So 1980 was a critical year. Then I went back to America and I got a Fulbright scholarship so I could go back to Kosovo and study. So now we are in 1981. And right when I was about to leave for Kosovo for the first time, Marshal law was declared because there was an uprising. It started with the students at the university at Brishna in Kosovo and it grew and grew until some factories joined in and workers and then Marshal law was declared and the tanks came in. I could not get into Kosovo so I still went to Yugoslavia, I had my Fulbright, I was ready to study but I could not get near Kosovo, which is a province. It is a province the shape of a diamond and the size of Los Angeles county actually. It takes about three hours to drive from one side to the other, that is the size of it to give you an idea. So this is a very small part of Yugoslavia right above Macedonia. So bordered by Albania and Macedonia and Romania and Serbia. It is an ethnographic island of mostly Albanians with a minority Serbian population. So I could not go to Kosovo but I went to Yugoslavia and I stayed in Beyograv, Serbia. I lived with an old Montenegrin widow, I practiced my Serbian which I started learning at UCLA, and then I was learning Albanian at the time. So I spent some time doing that and then it took me 6 months to be allowed into Kosovo. No foreigners were allowed in Kosovo at the time because they were under Marshal law, but finally about 6 months down the line I was allowed into Kosovo. Like I said I was the only foreigner. I had been warned by my mentors at UCLA, ‘I don’t know about Kosovo’, ‘nobody has ever worked there before’, ‘your a woman alone going into a Muslim area and nobody knows Albanian’. So basically I had been told this was not a good idea, but like I said I had really fallen in love with the culture, I was drawn to it and I knew it was the place I had to go. So I finally got there but for several years it was very difficult going into the countryside, I could stay in the city where I lived, and I lived in a neighborhood of villagers and they all had arranged marriages when they were 14/15 year olds. They became my family, they were my mother, my sisters. I lived there all and all for four years, first to do my masters research, early 1980s, then I went back in the late 80s to do my PhD research for Berkely in anthropology, and I still lived in that neighborhood. That was sort of my base where I really got to know women's lives, my baseline was the people I was living with, and they were as most people in Kosovo were. So that was sort of my base, I could not get into the far-flung mountain areas, really remote areas, where I really wanted to go because of the politically tense situation. There was such a fear from the Serbian point of view of Albania swallowing up Kosovo or there being some sort of unification of Albania which was right on the border of Kosovo. So even the literature I wanted to read was off-limits. The political situation was so intense and so tight. Here I was an American young woman who never had to mind my p’s and q’s so to speak, I never had to be so politically correct that if you say the wrong thing you are thrown in jail, I would have been thrown out of the country. So I had to learn very quickly what can be said and what can not be said. The colors of Albania are red and black, and I remember I had a hat that was red with a black ribbon and they said you can not wear that hat. I had a suitcase that was black with red trim and they said get rid of it, hide it. I mean it was so intense. Also, there were great shortages at that time as well, it was hard to get bread, it was hard to get milk at that time. It was an intense place politically to have my first work going on. There were many things going on, on the one hand, there was the political stranglehold on this place, and then at the same time I was deeply immersed in these women's lives and learning about them.
Grace: Okay so let's go more into the earlier years and break down the interview into your earlier years in Kosovo in the ’80s and then when you returned to Kosovo as an aid worker in the 90’s. I know you just talked about it a lot but if you want to introduce this earlier part of your life more and break down your purpose in Kosovo, your general experience there at this time, how you were received as an American woman, and how you perceived the treatment of Kosovo women.
Janet: Well I learned very quickly that I was very lucky to be a woman doing research in Kosovo, and I can not imagine how a man would ever do that in a Muslim setting anywhere in the world. In a segregated setting like this. Because I was in some ways treated like a man because I wore pants and I drove a car and I took care of myself. No one was taking care of me, nobody was telling me what to do in that sense, I was an honorary man. I would sit on the floor, on the pads, you know in a traditional Muslim setting you are sitting on the floor and I would sit cross-legged and talk with the men and talk about “male subjects” let’s say which is history and politics. I had to pretty much stay away from politics in the beginning. I had to be very careful about what I said. But I could enter the men's world. But of course, as a young woman, I was deep in the women’s world. And I was a “young woman” at the time and so I just blended in and was treated as one of the women there. So that was a huge advantage at the beginning and I quickly got hold of that.
Grace: Do you think you were able to have these conversations with men more because you were an American woman or because you were a scholar there with a research purpose there?
Janet: Both, it is a good question. Albanians have traditionally loved America and Americans. When they were starving when Rancovich, the head of the secret police started to have it out for the Albanians in the late 1940s and collectivism was imposed and many people lost everything they had, the food that came to them was from the American Redcross. I mean they have a long love affair with America so that was helpful. To be American was very helpful, to be a woman, and to be a scholar, that is, and to be studying their culture, not many people in Kosovo were even doing that. There are two famous women, Edith Durham, an English woman who had studied the country of Albania and had written a book called “High Albania'' which dove very deep into the culture. Then there was a woman in the 1950s and 60s, Berid Bakar, who was a Norweign woman who had done the same kind of study I had done. But besides that, that was it. So people were very pleased that I was studying their culture, they love their culture. I mean as many traditional people think, they think they have got it, they have the coolest culture there is. So they were very happy that I loved it too. I am a person with very few boundaries, I am very relaxed with people so I became their daughter and I became part of the family. I just felt very close to everybody. I was filming, I was recording interviews on tape recording, and filming on a super 8 camera at the time. I could film the most intimate parts of society, I mean people dying their hair with henna, people praying, women who were having arranged marriages, meeting their husband for the very first time on the night of their wedding. I have all of this on film. These practices have now disappeared. And I was welcomed to do it for those reasons you said. Being an American, being a woman, and being somebody studying their culture.
Grace: Yes and can you talk a little about being an anthropologist and this idea of not just being a witness to the culture but you actually partaking in it and actually wanting to be there and wanting to do the dances, and sitting with the girls up until night time, having these conversations and actually digging in.
Janet: I mean, that’s it, as Margaret Mead said, ‘you have got to be in a state of mind where everything is interesting to you, you are curious about everything going on around you all the time’. So I was in that suspended space as an anthropologist, on the other hand, I was sort of going native at the same time. As most people do when they go to live in a place for a long time. On the one hand it was that idea, that identity, as an anthropologist and becoming a part of their lives but the idea as an anthropologist is that you do not influence the culture where you are working, you just come to understand how the people perceive their lives. The emic point of view so to speak, their world view, what makes these people tick and how they see it, that is what I was really studying. It was not until the 90s that I could flip all of that. My job at that point was to completely have an influence on the culture and luckily when I went back in the 90s as an aid worker, I had already lived about 5 years in Kosovo before I tried to start doing humanitarian aid there. So that was a huge advantage. Because in the beginning, I was just absorbing and understanding. Dance was an important part of all of this, you know I grew up dancing and my degree was in dance ethnology. Using dance as a way to understand how people, especially people in traditional societies, use it to express their world view, influences and expresses. So that is what I was ostensibly writing about at the beginning, and weddings. Because all of the dancing happens at weddings. I was talking to people about marriage. What is a young woman's life about, what is an arranged marriage, what is the concept of this, what does marriage mean to these people? Because it is the core of everyone's lives. Dance happens to be the way a wedding happens. It can go on for two weeks and I danced with them all of the time. Women in those cultures, you don’t need a party, you don’t need a band, you don’t need a tape recorder. If you have got a large tambourine, I should go get mine, it is called a diara, if someone can play it and sing, then you have got a party. Women danced all the time, and I loved to dance with them, and I could hold my own and I would take things I had learned in one area, one village, or at one house in my neighborhood, I would then do that move somewhere else. And you know women were dancing with women, that was the thing, women loved to dance without any men around. As is with many Muslim cultures, because then they can be much more expressive. So that was the way they liked it and that was the way we did it most of the time.
Grace: Great, so getting into more of your understanding of the marriages there can you introduce us to your experience with arranged marriages while you were there?
Janet: Well I can start with Farida who was the mother in my household. Now we are in the town but she had lived up in a village and had had an arranged marriage and had come to the town, which most people had. There were some original city dwellers that had a very different life than there were the villagers. So as with many places, there is a huge dichotomy between urban people and village people. In the beginning, I was living in a house with urban people but the whole neighborhood behind this big fancy house I was living in, because they had room for me, all of the houses behind were village people and they had made really humble dwellings. So a lot of the time was spent spending time with Farida in the house I ended up living in which was a village house. There I learned all about their arranged marriages and basically the concept, and of course, almost everything I am going to say applies to you know take your pick of middle eastern culture. So I could be talking about Tunisia or Egypt or Morocco and it is basically the same idea in most ways. But the idea is, as a little girl, by the age of 8, 9, 10, you start working on your chaise, your trousseau, all of the objects you will take as a bride to the home of your husband, your groom. So you spend years, in the old days, but this is time delimited, I am talking about Kosovo in the 1980s. Which was about the way Kosovo had been for many many decades if not centuries in some ways. Chaise, what we would call your hope chest, what you would put in your hope chest were these delicate things, what we would call tatting, super small things made out of thread. And then some knitted things, some woven things depending on what village or what part of Kosovo you lived in. It was things like knitting 20 pairs of socks and they would go to all of the men in the grooms family. You spent much of your teenage years making these things. So in the olden days, women did not go to high school they barely went to grammar school. Up till the 1960s and 70s, Albanian women were not seen in highschools whatsoever. I mean making things like handicrafts, that is how you demonstrated your worth and how well you could clean. Especially young girls, they were cleaning. And the interesting thing there is cleaning is very important to women’s identity. It is the way you express the value of yourself and your home. One of the young girls I lived with in the beginning said here’s the deal here Janet about our stoves, they would have these little stoves, and maybe they had it for 20 or 30 years but it looks like they bought it yesterday. Why is that? And why do they spend so much time cleaning, because it is your reputation and your name at stake? And Sadet, one of my sisters said, Janet here’s the deal, your guests, you may have everything clean most of the time, but that one day, everything in your house isn’t perfect and that is the one day the visitors come, your screwed. And that is a value shared in so many cultures. But it is much more extreme than it is in our culture. I mean everything, even though it was very simple and you were sitting on the ground, maybe it was a wood stove and a low table, a sofra, but that sofra was spick and span. And every morning, on the subject of cleaning, and women’s roles, every morning, 5 or 6 o’clock you, depends is it is in the village or the city, would hear this whoosh-whoosh of sweeping which was the women and especially the bride of the house. That means a woman who would come into your home, she was marrying one of the brothers so she was a bride. She would be sweeping all of the asphalt around your house or the dirt or whatever. I always felt it was a way for a household to be like, “We are up! Our brides are up!”. And if there were no brides, the boys were too young, then it was the mother out there sweeping in the morning. So we can now get into the subject of brides. Nuset is the word for brides and it has a whole world of meanings, I don’t even know where to begin. But we started with these teenage girls so let’s go there again. Here you are, in the 1980s, girls were going to high school so you are still working on your handwork in the afternoons. I mean you are really developing this large hope chest of handicrafts, and this is a very important part of life. As you get older at 12, 13, 14 you are becoming very aware of the way you act when others are around you in the neighborhood, people, men, women, anyone. You start being judged and you start being looked at by the time you are 13 to 16, you are really being scrutinized by everyone around you as a potential wife for a boy in their family. So even when it is not arranged marriages, even when that had pretty much disappeared in the cities in the 1980s but arranged marriages were still the name of the game. So I was living in a world where both of these things were going on. In the cities, women and men had started “dating”. But whoever you met you were still considering who they would be a good match for in your life. Everyone was constantly doing that, you were always being judged. The way you danced, the way you presented yourself. You were always scoping people out and you were being scoped out. Here is the crux of it all, and anyone who has lived in the Middle East or India, many cultures, I mean in the old days this was the norm in the world. The crux of it is that marriage is an economic agreement between two extended families. It is not a romantic thing between two individuals. So of course, traditional Albanian society is based upon the collective group, there is not a sense of individualism, that we have growing up in America. So you wake up in the morning, in a culture like this, which is probably similar to a majority of cultures in the world, you don’t wake up thinking, let’s see what’s good for Janet, how do I feel today, what am I going to do, and how am I going to achieve my goals, that is not in your mindset. Your mind is, alright I have to clean the room, what do I have to do for the family, I have to clean the babies up, get the food going. Your life is the people around you, that is the essence of everything, that is what life is. Especially in a Muslim, traditional society, it is all about the women. There are men, there are cousins, there are neighbors, but your life, your emotional life is all about women, you are always with women. When I was first in that village in the summer of 1980 and I told you I was with women all the time, and I mean all the time. I mean if I went to the outhouse I had 5 women with me. I was never alone, no one is ever alone, so the concept of depression, although it exists in some ways more in modern times, especially for brides because they go nuts with their mother in law but we will talk about that later. The concept of depression was very strange. When I was first there for those first years and I was homesick, especially in the beginning, kind of bluesy, kind of bummed out. They didn’t know what to make of it, they didn’t have a word in their vocabulary. I mean people got sick but when they got sick, but they just kept working. I mean you would complain a lot about it, but you would not do anything about it. So here we are talking about women, talking about becoming a bride, so your life as a young woman, you’re thinking you have got to have the right marriage. You have got to have the right marriage because your life is going to be spent mostly with your mother in law. This was when people mostly lived with extended families, so all of the women went to live in the house of their husband, with all of the other co-brides, wives of the brothers. That is an extended family. So most people live in nuclear families, all of the young brides want to go into a nuclear family, that is just their husband and their own kids. But in traditional life, in most of the 1980s everybody is living in these extended families. The men are off doing their own things, working, and with other men in the neighborhood. But you are with women, and especially you are under the thumb of your mother in law. So if you had a very nice, gentle mother in law, that was really great. If you had a bitchy mother, that was very difficult. I knew woman intimately that had very horrible mother-in-laws, and they would pit brides against each other. So this is a very different culture we are talking about, with the 1990s everything changed, after the war many things changed and things are what they would call “modern” now. But the relics of it all are left. For example, there is a young woman that I just met who is from Bulgaria and married an Albanian and is studying the same things now I researched back then. So she is using my research and my dissertation and looking at what has remained and what has changed. Looking at what has been retained and what has been thrown away. And that is an extremely interesting thing to research for societies all over the world, especially for societies that were very recently traditional and modernized in a heartbeat. They have gone from the way they lived for a thousand years and boom to something else. So when I was living in the 1980s I was living with a village family but in the city. They were sort of modernizing at this point. So the brothers, my brothers, they found their own brides, they were not arranged marriages. But I remember driving with him down the main street and he would be looking for a bride. And he found a wife, and they are still married and live in Zurich and are very happy. This is very interesting because these young people, they don’t want to be identified with an Albanian past. These traditions I am talking to you about now, they don’t want to hear about them. So what is so interesting is I would go out to the villages, and by the time in the late 80s when I was working on my dissertation and I could really go out to the villages by myself and live out there. I would take videos of people talking about arranged marriages and weddings with the bride and groom meeting that night. I am talking about 1988. So I would come back with these videos and the young women in my house would say no way that is happening in Kosovo. But I had experienced these things. In remote villages, which are not really that remote. It is a very interesting study of how women’s lives changed from where the marriage is an economic arrangement between the other family where you both derive honor and perhaps wealth from this relationship. And then it is moving to a relationship with a person you love. But to conclude, I will say that of the arranged marriages I found, I found them to be very happy. Because they had a completely different concept of what a marriage is. Because it is not about who I am madly in love with, who I am infatuated with, that didn’t enter into it. The thoughts were, is this a family I can enter into, is this a family I can work with, it incorporates the whole family idea.
Grace: Great, now maybe you could touch on the way that people view these arranged marriages and these marriages that are not based on love and how people, mostly in the western world believe this oppresses women, but in your experience, it was a lot happier of a life.
Janet: I mean I will tell you what Grace, it is a mixed bag, just like marriages in this culture. I mean if somebody was doing a study on marriages in American culture in the 2020s, how do you generalize? I mean some are great, some are kind of “eh”, and half end in divorce. I mean it is a mixed bag and I would say it is the same in arranged marriages. Prior to the 1990s most arranged marriages I saw worked very well and much better than marriages in the western world. I mean thinking of it, I can not think of an arranged marriage that did not work out. I mean my best friend in Kosovo, a village girl, who was up from up in the mountains, was put into an arranged marriage with someone who was not her equal. She was a nursing student and smart as a tack, but her husband was very meh and kind of a loser. But she has made a great marriage of it! She has had all these kids and her kids have had kids and she has just nailed it. Because she said, “this is my destiny”. This is something interesting for you Grace, the word for husband is Fati, which also means fate or destiny. So in other words he is not just my husband he is my destiny. So you don’t think of arguing, you don’t think well I could have that one or that one. And there is another concept that is vital to all of this Pajtim, and that means acquiescence. You must acquiesce, you must give in, you must agree. You have to agree with your destiny. And that is said to men too, not just women. And I would say that of my friend, right away, she gave in and said okay this is my destiny and I am going to make the very best of it. So my general sense of it was that most of these arranged marriages were good. The people that I lived with, their marriages were fantastic marriages, and they had arranged marriages at 14 years old.
Grace: When you first came into contact with this process of arranged marriages were you hesitant in the beginning? Did it take you time to understand the context of these things? Did you have push back in the beginning? Or were you open to it?
Janet: I did not because the people I lived with were so happy. It was a fabulous marriage, a fabulous family. What was very striking and where my push back was, was when there were multiple wives. So multiple wives was an accepted tradition, there weren’t a lot of them. There is one more subject I would like to touch on in this realm which is sworn virgins. This is another whole part of women’s identities in Kosovo. These are women that take on the life of a man. There were a couple of different reasons for doing this and it is a very traditional practice in many cultures. Sometimes this would happen because there are no brothers, no sons, so she would be designated this role. Or it was women that just didn't want to be a woman and they decided to live as a man. I knew a couple of these people. And one of them in particular, Mira was a shepherd up in the mountains with the men. I interviewed her a lot and wanted to know how you can just say I am not going to do this traditional life of a woman. Because this role of a woman is such a strict role, this is strictly how she looks and acts, we will give her respect as a woman if she fits into this tight little box. How do you all of a sudden say, not me, I’m not doing that. It is amazing that the tighter a society's rules, the more exceptions there are. So many, many people had affairs and all Albanians are very good secret keepers. Because there is so much side stuff going on, people had to be really good secret keepers. Talking to these sworn virgins, I was trying to get to the bottom of how this happened. When I asked Mira she said, “oh I just like sheep, I just wanted to be a shepherd”. But I was really trying to get at her and see how she perceived herself and her position in life. So I said, “Okay so what is good in life and what is bad?”. And all she said in response was “summers are good and winters are bad”.
Grace: It’s interesting how in so many societies we have this polarization between men and women and how this causes a third party to emerge. But this third party becomes a hodgepodge group of everyone that does not fit into those two rigid groups such as transgender, gays, lesbians, and transsexuals and in this situation that third group became “sworn virgins”
Janet: Yes so in this society that is how they conceived it and to differentiate it.
Grace: Yes so while we are talking about this relationship between men and women can you talk a little bit about being an American woman in Kosovo and not being able to spend time alone with men there.
Janet: Yes, I learned very quickly that women can not be alone, if you are alone the understanding is you are free game, you can be assaulted by a man. In traditional society, there wasn’t even real a word for rape or a concept of it. Because if a woman allowed for herself to be alone, she was saying that she was open to anything. That’s not necessarily why women were always together but you certainly never went anywhere alone. I had circumstances where I would be talking to a colleague in the ethnographic institute and I was alone in an office with a professor and that did not end up being a good thing. I mean mostly from the perception of other people, it was just not something you did, unless it was a brother or someone in the immediate family. But generally, that was the rule. And I became very modest, I mean I grew up in California so I didn’t have these barriers, but when I left Kosovo I sure did. When I would walk down the street I would look down, I didn’t look around, I kept my eyes where I was going. I started talking up less space with my movements, I became very conservative there. I was conservative in the ways I spoke and dressed. All of this was because I did not want to be an outsider, I wanted to be accepted by the women so I was very careful.
Grace: Okay, so as a kind of closing to this period of your life, I know we were talking about it a bit but can you speak to the ways in which it was a lot easier for women to gain respect in this society compared to the west where it takes so many things for women to obtain happiness and respect.
Janet: My feeling after all those years, in general, was that women were generally happy, as long as they had a decent mother in law, who was a fair good person. Generally, these women were much happier than women in the west. This was because it was much easier to fulfill society’s prescriptions/mandates for a woman. You had to be a virgin at marriage, you had to have a very modest reputation, you didn’t go out, you didn’t talk to too many boys, you were circumspect, you were modest and moral. If you had that identity from the time you were a teenager on, then that set it up. Then once you were married it was helpful if you had a son or a couple of sons, and there was a reason for this, in a patrilineal society where women would go and live with their husbands family you need sons in the house because your daughters will one day move away to live with their husbands so when that happens you need sons in the house to take care of you. This is a system that exists all over the world. So if you had kids, and you had sons, had a calm demeanor, and cleaned a lot, if you did all of those basic things you were given a tremendous amount of respect. You were considered this wonderful being called a woman and women were given the utmost respect. Even if we are all sitting and the men are all talking and they are the ones engaging, and maybe the women are bringing the tea or the coffee and they are not engaging and just standing in the corner very poised. I did not see it as a demeaning thing, the women respect each other and society respects them. Where in western culture you have to have a great marriage, great kids, a great career, and be fit and beautiful and fantastic, nobody can do it! I mean you can barely pull it off. That prescription we have for what a woman is supposed to be is impossible, almost impossible to achieve. Where the things that these women needed to achieve to gain respect in their society was very attainable. So I found that was a fundamental principle. And something else undergirding it is this basic respect for all people within a culture like Albanian. For example, if a visitor arrives everyone stands up and shakes their hand. It is not just this idea of respect for women but this idea of respect for all people. It comes down to the sense of individualism is not a thing, it is about the group.
Grace: Okay let’s move into the latter years of your life. I will give you a couple of minutes to introduce this period of your life and talk a bit about why you returned to Kosovo as a mother, how you were perceived, how it was to be working in your career as an aid worker in Kosovo, and how society interpreted you and you interpreted this society.
Janet: So I left Kosovo in 1988 and I went back to Berkely and defended my thesis topic and was now a PhD and was working and had my son. So I was a single mother and had my son in 1990. While I am back in America, Eastern Europe is falling apart and freedom is coming, Yugoslavia is falling, there is the war in Bosnia in the early ’90s, and Yugoslavia is no longer a country, there are now separate entities. By this time Kosovo was living like an apartheid where a minority Serbian population was ruling the province called Kosovo. It was extremely tense, they knew it wasn’t going to last because it was a small minority ruling the large majority Albanian population. It became what they called a “shadow society” where the Albanians were trying to resist the way things were working in a peaceful way. So they created a parallel health system, a parallel education system, they basically boycotted Serbian rule and institutions which was very complicated for society, because we are talking about approximately 1 million people within Kosovo. People were being arrested all the time, professors, doctors, etc, it was a very tense situation. So this is now 1994, and I got a call from Oxfam, in Oxford, England, the charity, and they asked if I would like to go to Kosovo and potentially lead an aid project, an assessment. And I said you bet, I didn’t think I would get into Kosovo for a long time, but I told them I have this 4-year-old son. So I somehow went to the Yugoslavian embassy in D.C. and managed to get a tourist visa. I claimed I was just a tourist that loved to dance and me and my son just loved Yugoslavia. So we somehow got a visa, I am not sure how. My job at that point was to lead this assessment for Oxfam during this incredibly tense time as I said. Serbs and Albanians were not speaking basically since 1990 and this is in a society where neighbors are Serbs and Albanians. I was not only leading this assignment but I was also working under the ministry of health which assigned me to work on sanitation in grammar schools in eastern Kosovo. So I gathered a team of an engineer and an assistant and we had a tremendous team of Albanians. Our job was to go out and dig a new well if the well was contaminated and outhouses with septic pits. We were helping people understand what leach fields were because many of these outhouses were just leaking into village streams. So that was our “mandate” and it was very difficult because we were working in Serbian/Albanian schools where the two supervisors were not speaking to each other which is very difficult when you are working on wells and septic tanks and eventually we were working on the buildings themselves. So then I finished that assignment with Oxfam and got hired by International Rescue Committee under that same assignment except to expand it and spread it a bit more. We were working in about 30 villages in this very ethnically mixed area and it was dicey the whole time but the people really did want to make a change. Then it got beyond sanitation, I started teaching English on the side, just as a way to get into the schools with the kids and the families, and then we started a health education project where we would go and gather women in a certain village and get them out of their houses which they never did and get them to the village school which many of them had never been to and get them together and talk about very basic things like breastfeeding and second-hand smoke and blood pressure and things like that. We then developed small groups called “Acivistas” or activists. We would always find a couple of young women like you Grace, sometimes they were married women, that kind of got the idea that there is something else to do. There was something they could do to improve women’s lives. In each of these villages, we would find about two activist women and together they all created a group called “La Genda” or The Legend, so that was the society and we would meet all the time. Then it became about getting girls to go to high school because in the 1990s girls stopped going to high school, ostensibly because the Serbs were out there and it was dangerous but really there were a lot of reasons, that’s a whole subject within itself. But really we were trying to talk people into sending their daughters to school. So I was hiking from house to house and talking to the uncle if the father was away, essentially talking to the whole family about what it would take to get this girl to school. I would say “You know, you want to be part of Europe, part of the modern world but you are leaving your women in Arabia”. This was in the old fashioned sense, but these people wanted to modernize, but they needed to provide their girls with education and give them freedom to be equal partners in society. So that was our work which went on for 3 years, 7 days a week, very intensely. It was amazing work because the people wanted it, they were hungry for it, it was basically civil society work, they were agitating for civil society. This was especially interesting for me as I spoke fluent Serbian and Albanian and I really knew what time it was. When these guys would tell me something I could say, really, are you kidding me? Guys would say, well my daughter can’t go to school because of the Serbs, and I would say no you don’t want her to go to school because you don’t want her to be an “educated” girl and if she doesn’t find a job how is she going to be in a “traditional” marriage. So I could really say let’s get real here because people knew me at that point, I had paid my dues, I had done a good job at documenting who they were as a society. So in 1997, I went to the visa office to get my usual permission to stay and they stamped a big “denied” on it. So this was the beginning of all foreigners being expelled from the province, by that time there were a lot of NGO’s there and they could see the war was coming and they didn’t want us there to witness it.
Grace: Great, could you rewind a little and talk a little about not only this idea of you coming back with a PhD and a son and this kind of confidence and your ability to talk to men on a peer to peer level but also be a woman and speaking to women’s needs.
Janet: I mean it worked really well. My team was a mix of men and women and people respected what we were doing. I spoke like a man, they would say, in the way I was talking about these things and I had been there for so long and we were really able to get these things done and get people excited and working hard. When I went back in the early 2000s after the war, we had an amazing reunion with the people. Because get this, after I left and the war came in 1999 mainly because of what Madelyn Albright said, she said that we were late in Bosnia and it was a massacre, a holocaust, this is not going to happen in Kosovo. So she talked Clinton and Tony Blair into it, that’s why NATO was there and the war happened in 1999. NATO bombed the hell out of Kosovo and the Serbs gave up basically and they achieved the independence they were seeking. So after the war, every NGO was there and the military was insane, they built a multi-billion dollar military base that Cheney had a lot to do with, he had an interest in it financially which is a whole other story. So they were achieving these things in snap, building a well? Building a school? All done in an instant. I mean you get a bunch of GIs in there, your building these things in a day that took us months, to talk to the people and collecting a Deutschmark from each family. I mean the U.S. military was on it, when I visited I would talk to these young GI’s, they didn’t even really know where they were. But all of this is to say that when I went back to visit I had such a beautiful reunion with the people I worked with because we had made something happen in an apartheid regime and they had really had a hand in all of these projects so they were really cherished. Also, I am still in touch with all of these people I worked with on Facebook and it is a very special connection from a very important time where there were not only all of these transitions politically there was also what we are talking about here Grace which is women’s lives have changed so much. I mean half of the country has left and gone to the west, every family has somebody living in the west, sending back a bunch of money if possible, building these big houses. If it is possible to work all of the women are working. Many of these customs I am talking about people in Kosovo now think of as ancient history. Arranged marriages? Ancient history. But the mothers remember.
Grace: Yes but as you mentioned some of these cultural norms still linger in society in the sense of people saying “oh he would be great for her”, etc. And as you stated you were there at this time that was such a cultural and political shift, it is probably easy to imagine these concepts as ancient history.
Janet: Yes all of that is very true, and if I had time I would love to write about this, I mean we are talking about human transformation, a basic cultural transformation which is the most extraordinary thing to behold. Especially in a short period of time not over many many decades or hundreds of years, this is within a decade. And the women just like you Grace, these activists, that escaped this war and hiked over the mountains with babies strapped to their chest, to Macedonia or Albania and hiked through the night and found refugee camps. So once things settled down and they were able to return, they were able to lead. So now there is this thing called “The Network of Women” or “The Kosovo Women’s Network” which was started by a friend of mine and we were really best friends in the ’80s. She started creating a group of activists in another part of Kosovo and she was able, with many other amazing women, was able to create an amazing network of women’s groups. So now the women are much more organized and active than before, and looking at every aspect of women’s lives and taking those distant relics and seeing how they can dismantle them. As in all of the developing world, these women are so sharp and know exactly what they want and know how to get things done. So the transition we have seen from the 1980s to now is tremendous and I feel very grateful that it transformed my life. Especially living in difficult conditions, so now I wake up in the morning and think, I’ve got clean water and I’ve got a bed? Because in those early war years it was very difficult and we were losing so many people we knew, it changed my entire reality. So now I think of having a life as the opportunity to make an extraordinary impact on the world and that is all there is to do. That is all there is, you have this day, how are you going to use it to alleviate suffering? It gave me that, it gave me a totally different approach to life.
Grace: And it is amazing to see how you started this journey as a curious young woman and wanting to experience a different culture and immerse yourself and learn and grow but it became this life long journey of realizing how the world has impacted you and how you want to impact the world and you had this really lucky experience of being in that time and place and it seems like exactly where you were supposed to be, it allowed you to blossom in this amazing way. So I wanted to ask this question, what were your goals during this period of your life, and did you feel you achieved these goals and how did they feed into what you are doing now?
Janet: Oh well everything I did in Kosovo feeds into what I am doing now. I mean my goal at the beginning was very clear, in the 1980s, it was to understand how these people, men, and women, how these peoples conceive of their lives, how do they think and feel about their lives, what is their life like, and how do they perceive it, what is the deepest meaning of what is going on. Then I was looking at what are the differences between urban and rural and all of these permutations of this little tiny place called Kosovo but there were so many different perceptions of life. So that was the 1980’s, in the 1990’s we were just trying to build some outhouses we were trying to give women a chance to get back to school and to think of themselves as people who could make something happen in life. So all of this led me to the ability to found World Dance for Humanity. So obviously there is the dance component and that comes from me and my life doing daces from all over the world but the other main component is you have just this one little short life you better damn do something with it, you better make something happen, and you can make something happen. So my idea with founding World Dance for Humanity was that I was going to teach these dance classes and what everyone pays for the classes, people can pay what they can, people can come for free, but every dime from this project is going to go to a really great aid project. We started in Nepal, we worked in Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Liberia, Uganda, and then we really settled in Rwanda. So every dime from my daily dance classes goes to this aid work. So this all is based on my experience in Kosovo. And even knowing how to do the current aid work in Rwanda is based on doing this deep village work down in the mud with village people in Kosovo. Not coming from above and saying “Okay! Let’s have beehives!”, it is coming from the people from the inside out. That was my education and I am deeply indebted to these people that took me in as family. And I am in love with the culture. And everyone in my PhD program was like that, everyone was deeply drawn to a certain area or culture as if they had lived there in a past life. And I feel that anyone that does work like this is able to dedicate their lives to these different cultures and people.
Grace: Yes and what is so amazing about your work is that at the most basic sense you are an anthropologist and then the aid work becomes more of a tool or just the humanitarian side of you, where it’s not from a logistical standpoint of “I need to fix the world” it is rather rooted in the idea that you want to make these human connections first and then it becomes a question of how can I help.
Janet: Well once you’ve lived somewhere else and realized what other people go through, you know, what it takes to wash clothes when you don’t have a water source. I mean anything, what it takes to make food when there is hardly any of it there. I mean when you have lived in a situation like that I do not know how you don’t figure out a way to be anything but helpful in a solid and deep way. I mean I don’t see another way to live. People talk about how to be happy and I do not even understand the question, I mean it is so obvious that happiness comes from purpose and meaning and taking this little life you have and making something happen. I mean I am ecstatic every day because we have a way to make something happen and we are doing it.
Grace: That is amazing. I wanted to back up a little and hear some more about your time in America while the war in Kosovo was happening and this sensation of being so close to Kosovo and its people. And then your interaction with Bill Clinton.
Janet: Ha! I am trying to put myself back to that time. When 9/11 happened in 2001, the Albanians were some of the first people to stand up and say “we will all go to war for America, anywhere you need us we are there”. They thought of America as saving them from oblivion and it was basically Bill Clinton, even though as I said, Madeline Albright was the one who made sure NATO was going to Kosovo. But Bill Clinton got the credit, and he is a saintly figure in Kosovo, they think of him second only to God. I mean many people, I mean they really do revere America because we rescued them when they were being slaughtered. I mean even when America or technically NATO was bombing Kosovo they stood on their roofs with their arms up in praise because they believed they were being saved. That relationship between America and Kosovo was very emotional. So when I can back from that little trip to visit Kosovo that I told you about, once I was back I happened to go to the drug store to get my photos from the trip and as I was walking out somebody said to me, “Hey you know Bill Clinton is down at the restaurant in Summerland” and I said, you’re kidding. He had been helping a local congresswoman getting reelected and I said “I’ve got to talk to him, I was just in Kosovo!”. I mean we are talking about American flags all over, in the most remote villages in the mountains, it was really this sense of belonging. So I went to the restaurant and there were these secret service agents outside and I said, well it’s still just a restaurant right, I can just go inside, so I did. I happened to know the congresswoman he was meeting with and I said “I’ve got to talk to Bill” and he was in the bathroom and she said “Okay”. So once he got back I started talking with Bill and I took out my photos and said “Here is the American flag flying in these village towns!” It was extraordinary to speak with him because he is so passionate about people and the world. He knew well that he was revered in Kosovo, he had been several times, and it was great to share that moment with him.
Grace: Amazing, so just as a closing if you could touch on some of the main takeaways from this period in your life.
Janet: Well if we are talking personally, it is the smells, cut peppers, and summertime, cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions, and sitting around in the villages, the tea, and the women, laying down on the couches, relaxing, being way up in the mountains, in the valleys of the mountains. I have many memories of driving around in my car, and no women had cars at this time in the ’80s. I had this pumpkin-colored old weird car that had gone through many Fulbright scholars and ended up with me. Being alone in this car and stuck up in the mountains during thunderstorms. What is really cool is last year we were able to buy this plot of land for unwed mothers in Rwanda and we named the plot of land “Opoya” after this region in Kosovo which I hold so near and dear to my heart. And this ability to tie these two places together that I am in love with so much, it fills my spirit and fills my heart. These people who are so warm and so giving, we had such a deep connection, that is the greatest human gift is being accepted with no boundaries between us, just complete humanity together, that is what it is all about. I mean it is a gift to go anywhere in the world and to soak up that culture in your heart is quite extraordinary. And you have been able to have these experiences and make these connections Grace, living in a few different places already.
Grace: Yes and that is something interesting about going far and wide and making these connections in your own community or country, it feels like nothing I’ve ever felt before, it feels like you are supposed to be there and making those connections.
Janet: Yes, and that in itself is an interesting subject, why do I feel more in a community there than here, well because I wasn’t living in my natal community that I grew up in. So when you travel around and live in different places from 18 on, like I did, community means something different and you make extremely deep connections. And that is what we do with World Dance for Humanity, listening to musics from all over the world and dancing with people from all over the world to weave our hearts and souls and break down these ideas of “well this is what I like and don’t like and this is my little box”. It is trying to break down those barriers and pop those bubbles of me-ness, let it all go entirely, and embrace the world. It is those moments that give me joy and it is those small connections that give me joy. We have been doing songs from Lebanon to let our hearts feel what is happening in Beirut, and we try to let all of these barriers down and just see and feel each other’s humanity.
Grace: Yes it is seeing each other fully and making connections with a deep sense of compassion and respect. I think that was great, thanks, Janet.
Janet: Thank you so much, Grace, thanks for being interest and listening, and giving me the space to share these stories.