Pam Dawes at the People’s History Museum, Manchester.
I talked to Pam Dawes after she contacted the Oral History Kosovo website. As a member of MaK (Manchester Aid to Kosovo) she wanted to tell us about their oral history project, Voices of Kosovo in Manchester (www.vokim.org), a collection of interviews with individuals who arrived in her town as refugees from the Kosovo war. MaK was born in Urmston, a suburb of Manchester, and more precisely in a pub, The Britannia. It was the first week of the 1999 NATO war, and hundreds of thousands of Albanians were being expelled from their homes by Serbian security forces. Some pub patrons thought they could skip a drink and instead brought aid to the refugee camps. The rest followed.
The humanitarian story Pam told me, so extraordinary in its simplicity, is presented here, woven from her words.