Poignant accounts

Each refugee we met had a moving—and important —story. Ellie Kutlovci, one of two Kosovar physicians with whom I worked, described how she left Kosovo. The Serb police took all her family’s cash at gunpoint and gave them five minutes to leave their home. She chose not to bring her medical license. She knew what had been reported in the news media since the crisis began: Physicians are being singled out for killing.

On our way to a refugee camp one morning, we stopped by the Kosovar embassy in Tirana to pick up the notarized equivalent of a medical license for Ellie—a small but significant victory.

On my fifth day in Albania, Kola Krasniai, the other Kosovar physician on the team, invited me to accompany him on a home visit. We saw a 76-year-old man, too ill to walk to the clinic, who Kola thought has tuberculosis. The man lay on a gray cot in the basement of an unfinished beach hotel. He kept his medicine in plastic bags, hung on hooks from the wall. A woman cooked scrambled eggs over an electric burner while we visited with the man. Her children were quiet, clean, and curious about their visitors. I wondered if the children were thin because they had already caught the man’s illness.

To get tuberculosis drugs in Albania is nearly impossible. This man would have to travel to one of three tuberculosis sanitariums in the country and remain there for the duration of his treatment. We left inhalers and antibiotics for him.

The next day, in another setting, we saw a healthy 3-month-old baby who needed immunizations. She was just 1 month old when she and her mother were forced to flee from their home by Serb soldiers. The mother has had no word of the father since.

We also saw a couple, both 96 years old, in the heavy traditional dress of rural Kosovo, who had run out of the medicines they brought with them when they fled. Now they live with their daughter, an attorney, and her children, in a small white house belonging to distant cousins who insisted they move in during the crisis. We listened and looked and dispensed new medications.

Nursing in Albania

The day before we left, two other nurses and I took a day off from the camps for an extraordinary visit to the Albanian nursing school. Traditionally, nursing education in Albania works like this: You finish high school, then you call yourself a nurse. On an earlier visit to the Tirana hospital, we learned that Albanian nurses pass medications and keep records. Unlike U.S. nurses, Albanian nurses don’t assess, not even vital signs. Families provide bathing, linens, meals, and comfort.

The Albanian nursing school will soon graduate its first class.

The nurses we met at the nursing school, however, have been able to work in other European countries and have great plans to build a new nursing profession in Albania based on their experiences. They have created a four-year curriculum and put together skills labs. Their first class will graduate this summer. The Albanian nurses were eager for advice on how we “trained” physicians to respect our competence. We left inspired, hoping for a relationship in the future. Leaving Tirana to return home, we were tired, hot, sad, and filled with complex thoughts and emotions. It was a privilege to have worked with Ellie and Kola. They are fierce and intelligent, traumatized but eager to offer healing and respect to their people. They pinch the children’s cheeks and joke with the adults. Many of these Kosovars will not see home again as they knew it. But they will experience respect here, and their grandchildren will witness it.