When the news came, they said, ‘The miners are locking themselves in.’ We were close because the technical service building is close to the mine entrance. We were young and we felt that something was ending, some uncertainty because State Security was around, we knew their faces. They would always follow our every move. And we told a colleague, we discussed it more and more, the miners’ situation, the political issues. And then we told a colleague, ‘Can we go there and join them?’ He said, ‘Do you want to join?’
When we went there with our colleague and he said, there were duty shifts, they started to appoint the duty shifts. We had the red ribbons {touches her arm}, they put the red ribbons on their hands and they were responsible for how things run, who came in, who left. […] And then we went in, we visited them, the situation, it seemed like a whole different world somehow, like we were isolated, no news, no nothing, I mean no good news. The delegations would come one after the other, with Kolgeci and Stipe Šuvar, Morina, and all of them in order, […] the ones outside would say, ‘You’re going to stay there with them,’ the ones in the mine would say, ‘Don’t let them come down because they’re pressuring us.’
[…] We continued to support them, when the workers came out [of the mine] we helped them, we helped them with cleaning, medication, stuff like that. Because there they were… and we had the Ambulance in Stantërg and the physicians from there came, the medical workers of the ambulance and they joined us in the mine. We had a team formed. The number of people leaving increased, people left the mine tired, overwhelmed, and the technical service where we were became a medical station, there were two stations.
Vjollca Meha was born in 1963 in Mitrovica. In 1988, she graduated from the Geology Department at the Mining and Metallurgy Faculty in Mitrovica. For a year, she worked as a teacher at the Technical High School in Mitrovica. Beginning 1989, Mrs. Meha got a job as a geologist at the Trepça mine, but was forced to leave it in 1990. In 1993, she worked as a Geography and Math teacher in the Elena Gjika High School in Tuneli i Parë. Mrs. Meha returned to her workplace in Trepça in the year 2000, where she continues to work to this day.