Childhood
Mimoza Paçuku: Can you please tell me how you experienced your childhood?
Drita Vukshinaj: Yes. My name is Drita Luri Vukshinaj. I was born in Prizren on October 3, 1954. Prizren is a historical city, my childhood was in Prizren, say, I was my mother’s second child. We were two brothers and I. I was an active child and one day, when I was six, I fell from a tree and got a foot injury, from which I still suffer.
It was a big injury then, because there was no adequate medical treatment for it in Kosovo. A doctor came from Skopje once a month. My mother was working at that time, my mother took me to the doctor, and Kosovo doctors first said that they had to amputate my leg because the bone was badly injured, but a doctor from Skopje said that I should go to Skopje, and stay there. My mother sent me there for a checkup, but the mentality of many people, including my father, was that he wouldn’t allow my mother to stay with me at the hospital, so he made me return to Prizren.
I started to go to school. My mother took good care of me, but I was a child who did not stay away from friends, and perhaps because of that my friends also accepted me, because I didn’t stay away, I was always among them. My mother died, I was ten and a half years old when our grandmother took care of us, my mother’s mother, because my father was from the Tetovo area[1] and he had no relatives here, so we lived under the care of our grandmother. These are some moments of my childhood that I’ll never forget, my foot injury became worse every day.
In Prizren, a woman whose daughter had a disability as well, and who had recovered in Belgrade, stopped me in the street. She stopped me and said: “Why don’t you go to Belgrade for treatment?” And I said, “I don’t know how. My mother has died, and I just don’t know how.” She showed me how to collect all the papers needed. (Sighs) I was in seventh grade then. During the summer holidays, after I finished seventh grade, I managed to gather all the documents and papers, without saying anything to my father or any of my family members. I was very close to my brothers, they always took me to the city[2] with their friends, they would never leave me alone, even though I had a disability. Once I gathered all the paperwork, I said to my father, “Let’s go together to the hospital in Bajnicë.[3]” He said, (raises her voice) “But you already were in Skopje’s hospital.” “No I said I want to go there.” He heeded me and so we went.
I could speak a little Serbian because my uncle lived in Croatia, and every year we went to visit him. His wife was Bosnian, so that is why I could speak Serbian. We went to Belgrade, it was during the summer, and the medical examinations and checkups were done on the fifth floor of the building, where the windows were open and there was an open space directly by the windows and the doctor said to my father, “We need this, that she stays in the hospital for a while and has an operation” and my father said, (changes her tone) “No, I don’t want my daughter to have an operation, and I don’t want anything to happen to her just because of leg surgery.” At that moment (smiles), I jumped into the empty space near the windows, the windows were open, and I said to my father in Albanian, “Sign the document, or I will jump out the window!” And I said to the doctor in Serbian, “If my father doesn’t sign this document, the time will come either to cut off my leg or to save it with one or two surgeries.” The doctor was shocked, he begged my father, I repeated to dad, “Make a move, and I will jump out the window and fall down!” (Smiles) Then my father had no choice but to sign, and I stayed in the hospital.
I finished eighth grade in the Serbian language, I had no problem because I could speak the language. I had four surgeries there without going home because I was afraid that my father wouldn’t sign the papers for further surgeries. I had to undertake another one, but I went home for a little break, I had a cast and I wasn’t afraid any longer that my father would not sign the papers. I had to have some screws taken out of my leg. When I came back to Prizren after a year and a half, almost two years, I found Prizren to be, I don’t know, I felt as if I was born again. When I went to the lagje[4] where I was born, Koridhë, I looked for the friends with whom I grew up. I stayed in Prizren for two months, and then went back to the hospital, where I stayed for a short time, and then went back home for good…
When I came back, I removed my cast, but some consequences of the injury remained, however, they were small compared to the ones I had and I overcame those with the help of my brothers and friends. I was always with friends, I was always with friends in the city, my big brother was the one who gave me the courage. In Prizren there was only one discoteque this was before the 70’s and my brother took me every night to the club, where he always told me, “You need to be with us, don’t worry about your leg, it won’t bother you in anything that you do. You can do any work, any movement.” I was a very active child also at home, because I did all the work by myself regardless whether it was a man’s or a woman’s job. If the electricity didn’t work, or some light bulb broke, I tried to fix it, I chopped wood, I did all of these things at home. My grandmother was very old and very sad because two of her daughters had died very young, my mother and my aunt. My brother tried to help her take care of us and did the best he could to support us both financially and emotionally, but it was I who was my brothers’ sister, mother, who took care of everything and all the house work. My grandmother didn’t eat bread from the store, so we had to bake it at home.
I finished eighth grade in the hospital in Belgrade, and when I returned to Prizren, I had to take three more tests, and then they gave me the eighth grade diploma. Then my father and my brothers implored me everybody in my generation went to high school in Prizren dad implored me me in Prizren there was no typist he said to me, “It would be good for you to study typing because there is a demand for typists in Prizren and you can get a desk job.” But I wanted to go to a technical school, and study mechanics. I heeded my father, and he registered me in Pristina, I began school there, I had an apartment there, but I still thought about technical school.
Every Saturday I met in the street a classmate who was enrolled in the technical school and had just begun taking classes so I asked him what the lessons were like and I looked at his books. After a month, I took my documents from Pristina (smiles) and applied to the technical school[5] and the director of the school told me, “Will you be able to catch up, because you are one month late?” I confidently said, “I will catch up on everything without any problem.” So I registered, and began to go to school there. Dad did not know about it, and one day he asked me, “Aren’t you going to school in Pristina?” I said, “No, because I am going to physical therapy as the doctor told me to do, and Pristina is too far away. I cannot travel. Here it is near, and I am on sick leave.” It took a while but after a month I told him, “Just go get my clothes, the clothes that have remained in the apartment, and bring them here, because I registered in the technical school of Prizren, which I have always dreamed of.” (Smiles) My father was speechless, but he went and took my clothes. I passed that first year and had all Bs because I loved that subject, and I was the only girl in class (smiles) because very few girls studied the subject I had chosen.
About my childhood, I must emphasize something else besides my stay at the hospital, it was 1965, the time when we experienced a great misfortune in our family, our mother died. My mother didn’t die of any illness, she was working, we were three children, and at the time she heard from some women in Prizren that to have an abortion she had to drink an infusion from a flower, zekum çiçek. It was May 1st. She sent us my brothers, my father, my grandmother, and me to our aunt’s house. She said, “You go visit your aunt because I have to clean the house, and I will join you later.” We stayed there, waited, but she never came. When we went back, these were moments that I’ll never forget… we found her lying in the bedroom (cries), and even today I see that flower near the window, whose water she had drunk… and my father quickly went with an ambulance to the hospital. But that drug was so poisonous that it had destroyed all her internal organs. The doctors couldn’t get any response from her, because she couldn’t talk anymore, her tongue had thickened. I remember as it were today the doctors talking to her and not capable of hearing her words as to what she had done. A blood drive began in Prizren, the military, the workers of the factory where she was employed, and the schools donated blood, but it didn’t have any effect, because she died in the evening of May 12th. She was buried on May 13th, at the age of thirty. We remained in the mercy and care of our grandmother. I can never forget those years, because she was so young when she died. Whenever I heard children in the neighborhood crying “mother, mother,” I always felt this deep feeling of sadness inside me, because I didn’t have a mother anymore, I had no one to call mother. But we had our grandmother whom we leaned on and who supported us.
My father was also very close to us, he was so close to us that he did not get married because he always said “No,” our maternal grandmother lived two houses past ours, dad bought a house near grandmother and we shared the yard and practically lived in the same house. He said, “I cannot marry while your grandmother is alive, I don’t want to cause more pain, marriage would be an embarrassment, and she will be upset.” So my father didn’t marry again, he stayed with us, and he reared us. We had an average standard of living because we were given mother’s pension, dad was also receiving a disability pension because while he served in the army a horse hit him, and he had two or three broken bones, his military pension was good. My father was strong, and he worked during the summer, so we had an average standard of life. He wanted us to get an education, so my brothers and I, the three of us, went to technical high school (smiles). My little brother and I both studied as mechanics, but my older brother studied architecture. So…we were a small family, we didn’t have many relatives, our only relatives were our friends and neighbors.
There are also some other moments that I spent in the hospital. Since I was there for a long time, I started eighth grade there because luckily I spoke the language. There were all grade levels, and teachers were present. There was a department where all classes were taught, it was a hospital where some patients had to stay for years, especially the patients who would do certain complicated operations to the spinal cord, they had to stay there for three or four years. The hospital offered the patients the opportunity to learn so that they wouldn’t be illiterate. At first I had a little trouble understanding certain terms used in Serbian, but I quickly learned and adapted so I didn’t have any problem. Others had problems, there were some young girls from Gjilan and Vushtrri who didn’t speak Serbian and were mistreated by the nurses. And destiny…our rooms were separated by glass windows, and I saw the nurses mistreat Albanian girls, but they separated us and did not allow us to stay in one room. At one point I ran and confronted the nurse or the doctor, or whoever was there, I confronted them. “Why?” (changes her tone) “Because she soiled the bed sheets, or whatever.” I told them, “Well it happens. Sick people will soil their sheets,” I supported them in these cases, and I was able to defend the others. When they graded us, they discriminated against us a lot compared to the others because there were people from all over, Serbia, Yugoslavia. They always looked at us suspiciously, the instructors too, because we now spoke their language and that worried them. (Smiles) I finished my eighth grade there.
There was an interesting moment in the hospital when I had my surgery, they didn’t put me in a cast, but they lifted my leg with a metal bar which had a 90 degree angle {moves her hands in a 90 degree angle}, I stayed for two days in the emergency room, and when they brought me here, I had this surgical drain on my leg. The drain did not hurt, but I was a child who was accustomed to not stay in one place for two days (smiles), I stayed in the emergency room for two days and said, “My leg hurts right there,” and the doctor said, “You don’t have any pain there.” And I said, “It hurts! And you have to remove it.” He said, “But it is there to keep your wound clean.” I cried, “It hurts here, it doesn’t hurt anywhere else,” then they did not have a choice, they removed the drain because I could not look at it.
There was a girl from Gjilan, [Lule]. Her room was very far and I wanted to see her (smiles), but I couldn’t from my room. I could not communicate with her until I learned how to understand sign language with letters written like this {demonstrates letters in sign language} so we talked that way, we talked with a window between us. Then the doctor came, removed the drain (smiles), and left. Nearby there was a girl who used a wheelchair, but it was little, so I looked around. I looked at that wheelchair, and what else to do? I sat on the wheelchair, but didn’t know how to hold my leg. The leg was 90 degrees above the other leg {shows with her hands} and so I went with the wheelchair along the hallway to her. When the doctor came out into the hallway, he said (raises her voice), “Luli,” he grabbed his head “What did you do? You just had a difficult surgery!” I just listened to him talk and went to the girl from Gjilan. When she saw me {shrugs} she was very happy and said, “Thank God you had your surgery and managed to get up so quickly.” I said, “I got up but I gave myself permission because the doctor would not let me, and I wanted to see you so I came here.” (Smiles) And I have not forgotten that moment and how much I risked.The surgery was very difficult, but I took the risk and went to see her.
I have to say that the hospital was very good. It didn’t help only me, but all of Kosovo. They performed surgeries for which we did not need to pay, the doctors were extraordinary specialists and very good. I hope God’s will is that now and in the future we’ll have such doctors in Kosovo so that our children don’t have to go abroad to have very expensive surgeries.
Another childhood moment that I will never forget is before I went to the hospital, it was ‘68, when the Albanian flag was raised at Shadervan[6] in Prizren, my brother Simon was the one who raised the flag in Prizren, and the police intervened. There were many people at Shadervan, and they [the police] wanted to take the flag away. My brother was so smart and so fast, he took the flag and ran as fast as he could. They ran after him, but they couldn’t catch him, I knew that his favorite place for walking was across Marash[7] so from the morning on I wandered around there, walked, when my brother who was hiding behind a big stone in Marash, whistled. I turned back and approached him, and he said, “I am in the cave of the castle[8] near the 42 stairs, I am staying there, do not tell anybody about this, I have the flag, you must bring me some bread.” I didn’t tell my father, dad was looking for him everywhere, the police found out who took the flag and came often to our home, searching, but I didn’t talk. I prepared food for him every day and send it to him, at the same time every day, to the cave near the castle. He remained hidden in the castle for over one month just because he didn’t want to give them the flag. (Smiles) After a month, he came out and gave the flag to the people who had raised it in Shadervan, because they had been arrested that day by the police, but were released after two weeks, but the flag never reached the hands of the Serbian police.
I have to say something about the castle as well. It was near our neighborhood, where I was born. All the children…the children went to the castle every day, and even though I was sort of disabled, I always went with them, and ran as they did. We didn’t go on the regular road, but on the road from Marash, a very narrow and small alley, but I climbed up that road as well. I would look at them and say, “I can do it, too,” (smiles) and I walked till the top. Sometimes we saw snakes on top of the castle and we took them in our hands by their head and we were afraid of letting them go, ”What do we do now!?” Below in Marash there was a house with chickens, and what did we do? We went near a chicken with the snake and the snake bit the chicken and the chicken died and we ran away from there. (Smiles) We took the snakes to our neighborhood and threw them in the direction of children, and they got very scared, and we laughed because they thought that those snakes were poisonous, but they weren’t at all. Those are some childhood memories that I will never forget.
Last night I met a friend of mine, whom I hadn’t seen since the 1990s, because she lives in Sweden, we spent three or four hours talking and reminiscing about the past and the days we spent growing up together. I don’t forget those moments, but there are also moments with my elementary school classmates. I was an exemplary student and a very friendly child with everybody, boys and girls, and so I was…close to all of them. I was also very close to my teacher Isane Alo, who was very dear to me. I was in fourth grade when my mother died and my teacher’s mother had died one year before that, so she always wore black clothes and a black headscarf. Three or four days after my mother died I went to school wearing a black headscarf and my teacher stopped me and said, “You don’t have to put a headscarf on.” And I asked, “Why? You have been wearing one for such a long time after your mother died, and you keep wearing it and I will wear it because my mother died and I will not take it off.” For a long time she tried to convince me to take the black headscarf off because I was a child, and one day I accepted her wish and went to school without the headscarf and she hugged me and kissed me (smiles) and said that it was very good that I decided to remove it, because she said, “You have done well, because you are a child and your mother would be sad if she could see you with the headscarf,” so I removed the headscarf, thanks to my teacher.
The school wasn’t too far from us. However, I was always worried because I was a child with a disability, I was lively, but the condition of my leg only got worse, this sick leg that worried me but fortunately they didn’t amputate it…When we ran as kids, sometimes I couldn’t run as fast as the others could, and I would be upset and I would scream at them and ask them not to run so fast because I couldn’t catch up with them, but it was a very understanding group and they ran at the speed that I could (smiles), they did not outrun me. Also during gym classes, when we were in the gym and we had exercises to do, I did all of them maybe because I had great will, I don’t know, I did not want to be separated from the others, only running bothered me a little. I’ve achieved everything I wanted to with the help and support of my family, especially my big brother, because my little brother would sometimes tell me, “Don’t go to town, stay home, you go out every night,” but my big brother did not leave me behind (smiles) and took me with him every time. We grew up, say… {coughs} without a mother, but we were very polite and well mannered, and all the people in the neighborhood envied us. We were among the best students, the people in our street, it was a cul de sac, praised us and told us that we were the best students in school, perhaps because we had a student from every house who was either in a class with me, or with one of my brothers, so everyone knew that the three of us were excellent students.
I began to cook when my mother died and my old grandmother was old, so I cooked and prepared…“But how do I cook?” I wandered around the neighborhood, I knew when they were preparing the meal, I stood by them and watched. What they prepared today, I did it tomorrow. In almost every neighborhood there were maybe thirtytwo or thirtythree families that I visited to see what they had prepared and how they had prepared it, how they made that food, and ran home to make it. I never said that there was something I did not know how to cook, (smiles) that I couldn’t do handiwork, because I was always interested to watch what others did and then do it myself. There was no jealousy, no, I am not a jealous person, I didn’t have that feeling, why somebody did it and I did not, when someone did something, why I was not able to it too. (Smiles) Although a child, I was that way, and I always cooked and did handiwork. Women back then did a lot of handiwork, and I too began to do that as a young girl, to knit sweaters…everything, and what the women in the neighborhood did, we did too.
I will not forget that when winter arrived we poured water on the street for it to freeze and the next day we went out with our sleds. Before I poured the water the women in the neighborhood begged us, “When you want to pour water call us, and leave us the sleds outside so we can ride on them, (laughs) because during the day everybody passes by and can see us.” We called them and it was nice to see older women, mothers with kids, get on the sleds and slide down nearly 50 meters or more. It was happiness for us too, because the winters back then were very harsh. The snow froze the street, and it was pure happiness to sled in that small cobblestone street we had there, the snow covered the street and we went sledding. I can mention friends with school with whom I am still in touch today: Bukuria, Neharja, Sadeti, Selvetja, today we meet and I talk with many of them about the school days of the past, but there were also some of them who didn’t go to high school nor have any higher education and I meet with them too and talk with them. I have been very close to my friends. (Smiles)
[1]The Tetovo’s area is in northwestern Macedonia, and is primarily inhabited by Albanians.
[2]City, in this context, can be understood as the center of Prizren, which is a broader geographic region.
[3]Bajnice was the name of the hospital in Belgrade.
[4]Lagje in this context means just neighborhood, but more specifically, in the traditional tribal organization of northern rural Albanians, it refers to a group of families sharing a common ancestor. From now on, it will be translated as neighborhood.
[5]The technical school was located in Prizren.
[6]The fresh water drinking fountain in the main square of Prizren. Shadervan (Sadirvan in Arabic) means precisely fountain, built to provide water for more than one person at once, usually for ritual ablutions, and is a typical element of Ottoman architecture.
[7]Marash is a park upriver from the center, at the foot of a hill above the city. The small area consists of several traditional residential buildings, the 1833 Mosque of Maksut Pasha, a mausoleum of the Saadi order, and the eighteenth century mill [now café Mullini]. Near the river, a sizeable 400yearold plane tree, the only one of its kind in the Balkans, is located beside a natural spring.
[8]The castle consists of the ruins of a medieval fortress built by the Byzantines, expanded by the Serbian Njemanjić dynasty and finally by the Ottomans.
