Totally Legal: A Honey Cake For Women’s Day
New Albanian vocabulary: tetë marsi (8 March), besheret (scarecrow)
None of my fears about independence were realised – there were no inter-ethnic incidents and no casualties of the celebration. The posters that had appeared over town, urging people to ‘celebrate with dignity for a propitious beginning’ had clearly had some effect. So had the temperature – the extreme cold had dissuaded people from staying out in the numbers that might have caused trouble.
The feel-good wave of the independence celebrations continued for weeks. Every time you met someone for the first time after the Declaration, you wished one another ‘happy independence’. I had the same conversation with my gardener, taxi driver, the head teacher of a school I was working with, all of them saying, ‘it’s up to us now to make a success of Kosovo. No excuses.’ Everything seemed possible.
Weeks later I was still saying ‘urime pavarësia’ to people when I realised that it was time to change my greeting – there was a new festival to congratulate people on.
I had never celebrated Women’s Day before coming to Kosovo. This was partly something to do with a frustration with this kind of affirmative action, and the unoriginal quibble that if any days are to be celebrated as ’Women’s Day’s then there should be at least 178 of them in a year. It also had something to do with my experience of being a woman – brought up in a liberal family where I was given cars and footballs to play with as well as my dolls, was taken to science fairs and given the implicit and explicit message that there was nothing I couldn’t achieve. Later, I’m not sure I even really noticed I was a girl, at my all-girls boarding school. And then I studied English literature at university, and went on to train as a teacher, and in doing so, while I was doing exactly what I wanted, my success in the field was unlikely to threaten any male hierarchies.
When I came to Kosovo and experienced my first Women’s Day on8 March, I was unprepared for the congratulations that came my way. Other women wished me a ‘happy Women’s Day’; at the school where I taught part-time, the (female) headteacher bought pot plants for all the women staff; one organisation I was working for left a piece of jewellery for me as a small gift on my desk in their office, and the courtous old (male) communist professor with whom I had a meeting later that day as part of the project I was working on with an international charity presented me with his hand and his felicitations. As I grumbled to Saskia,’ what are they congratulating me on? Having breasts?’
Saskia has lived in a number of socialist countries and has a different take on the day, as did the million or so women in the country where I was living. For most women in Kosovo, 8 March is the only day when they get presents. Despite the brave displays in some of Pristina’s florists in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, they didn’t seem to have done much business the previous month. For the majority Muslim population, there’s no hardcore celebration of Christmas either. The gifts at the Muslim celebration of Bajram (Eid) are given almost exclusively by adults to children. There is a tradition of ‘Father Winter’ (in his red and white coat with a sack of toys on his back, not a man I would be sure of being able to pick out in an identity parade with other old men who do the rounds in the UK at this time of year) but his responsibility is for presents brought for children – handed over at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
But on 8 March all my Kosovan girlfriends seemed to get a present– mainly flowers – from husbands or boyfriends. And everyone was talking about doing something special for their mum. Lots of my friends got an unofficial afternoon off and went out for a meal together. Shpresa had told me that if they were lucky, their (male) boss would take them out to lunch.
In the days leading up to 8 March, the streets had budded with plastic. Artificial lilies and roses in the most unlikely colours were sold at improvised stalls. I saw children struggling home from school with over-sized drawings of implausible bouquets.
It was a lovely blooming, chiming well with the season. In our first year in Kosovo, I had been infected with the sense of imminent flowering, and during these days I had bought three small potted crocuses. Placed at even intervals along a windowsill they were my own personal celebration of spring.
I returned home on 8 March that year to find that autumn had come rather early to my pots. Where the three had sat at the beginning of the day, now only the middle one was left. I could only assume that the others had been stolen – I imagined some boy shinnying over our fence with the image of his mother clear before him.
I was grateful for his restraint in only taking two – and in going about his petty theft so symmetrically. And that night as I lay in bed, I wondered about my unknown sister somewhere in Pristina, proudly displaying the gifts from her cheeky, daring little darling son; or the new bride feeling spoiled by her indulgent husband – the one with the thighs strong enough to clear railings in one bound – and little guessing at his dangerous thieving heart.
A year on, and I had slightly more sympathy for Kosovo’s women and their brave little day of plastic floristry. I had now worked for Unicef on a project that had involved collating a frightening set of statistics. This is a hard place to have X chromosomes. If you are female in Kosovo, you are more likely to live in extreme poverty (28 per cent of females as opposed to 15 per cent of males; the World Bank notes that income poverty disproportionately affects female-headed households). As a cause and an effect of this poverty, you are more likely to be illiterate (nine per cent of women as opposed to three per cent of men).
As a woman or as a girl you are less likely to have access to the kind of information that enables you to make choices about your life and your health. A recent study found that 35 per cent of girls/women were not aware of sexually transmitted infections while for men/boys this figure is lower, though still worrying (26 per cent).
In the light of all this, it is unsurprising that you are less likely to be employed: Unicef had recorded that in the 15-24 age group unemployment was 74 per cent for women and 56 per cent for men. For those of us used to Western economic indicators, I’ll repeat that statistic. Unemployment – not employment – levels stood at 74 per cent for women and 56 per cent for men. Participation in civil society is lower too; something like 12 per cent of females as opposed to 26 per cent of males are reported to be involved in political parties, fora, political organisations, youth centres, youth clubs or NGOs.
For me, there is one further statistic that I find most stunning, and most telling about the prevailing sense that it is somehow less important to care for the female members of the Kosovan population than its males: only 55 per cent of girls are fully immunised as opposed to 72 per cent of boys. I don’t know how those kinds of decisions are made– a conscious choice that TB wouldn’t matter so much because she’s just a girl? An insistence on only the best for sons (and heirs) which ensures that every recommended procedure is followed to the letter while the girls’ health care might just slip your mind?
It is a further piece of evidence to suggest that girls are not really wanted in Kosovo. You can see this, too, from the patterns of families’ production of babies. Many have two, three or even in one case I met, twelve older daughters before the longed-for son arrives. I’ve never come across the opposite pattern. Superstition offers plenty of ways to end a line of girls – you can call your daughter by her mother’s name, which will ensure that her next sibling is a boy, you can call her Shkurta (‘short’) as an imprecation that the line of girls may be thus. You can also give her such a foul name that the fates won’t allow you to have another daughter. Anyone who officially names their daughter ‘Scarecrow’ or ’Ugly’ doesn’t deserve to have any children at all.
By my second year in Kosovo I had had experience of some of this, and had heard the stories from friends – Kosovan women, or foreigners like my friend Mary, working to bring healthcare to rural areas so that women can have check-ups or even contraception without having to ask their husband’s permission first to leave their village. And so this year in a way I was pleased to see Kosovo’s women clutching their pot plants on 8 March, and in a way I was all the more frustrated. In the context of women’s education denied, limited access to health- care, limited participation in political life, and disproportionately high unemployment, I was frustrated with a mentality among both men and women which thinks it is flattering to have one day a year when you are given a plastic rose and let off the washing up.
But it never hurts to be reminded to appreciate your friends – male or female. And in Kosovo I had learned new kinds of female friendship, and the cooking, conspiracy and creativity it could bring with it. So I could hear the smile in my voice when I discovered it was Saskia calling on the morning of 8 March. She was less upbeat.
‘I’m not having a good day – I’ve just got back from holiday. I left the kids there with Wolfgang so I could get on with some work in Pristina. But now I’m back I’ve found our flat in chaos with the land- lord in the middle of decorating.’
I don’t know what I would have done in a similar situation in the UK, but I was aware of having new understandings of hospitality in this warm country that had extended us such a welcome. When we had chosen our house here I had specified that it must be one of the minority with a separate kitchen. I had been thinking of Foreign Office-style ’entertaining’ I had imagined I would now need to do – some image of afternoon teas and politically astute table plans. Instead, Kosovo had taught me the real meaning of hospitality. I remembered with shame my grumpiness in London when friends based overseas had called to ask whether they could stay the night – tomorrow – while they were in town. Now I was learning what it was like in practice when, ‘a home belongs to God and the guest.’ It seemed the most meaningful way to mark Women’s Day – of course I invited Saskia to supper and to stay the night with us.
Orange and walnut strudel
For dinner I wanted to cook something from my Albanian recipe book to show off, or at least include, some of my honey. The following recipe for ‘strudel’ (though it ended up doughy, not like anything that I would call a strudel) looked appropriate. I went through checking the vocabulary and was sure I understood everything, with the exception of one word in the title and the ingredients list – ‘afion’. Since I needed 500g of the stuff in the original recipe (the version below is modified in the light of my experience) and it was the title of the dessert, I guessed afion might be important. But it wasn’t in either of my dictionaries. I sent Gazi an urgent text message asking for a translation, but I got no response.
Thankfully, reading on through the recipe I saw a suggestion for replacing the afion with ground walnuts so I made this version. The next day I finally received the reply from my teacher. He’d never heard of afion either but his much bigger dictionary defined it as ‘opium poppy’. His message continued ‘Are you making something illegal? If so, share a piece with me.’ This is the walnut version, completely legal.
Ingredients
10g yeast
165 ml milk*
85g sugar
450g plain flour
1 egg plus 1 egg yolk
35g melted butter
35ml rum
the juice and rind of an orange
a pinch of salt
165g ground walnuts (or poppy seeds)
vanilla to taste
1 tbsp honey
Mix yeast with a little lukewarm milk and a pinch of sugar and flour. Leave in a warm place until the mixture starts to ferment.
Sift the flour and make a well in the centre.
Add the egg yolk, 35g of sugar, the butter, the rum, 80ml of milk, the orange juice and rind, and the salt.
Mix, adding the fermented yeast.
Place the resulting dough in a warm place for 25 minutes.
Meanwhile, warm the ground walnuts in 70ml milk.
Whisk the white of the egg until it is firm
When the walnut mixture is cool, fold in the egg white and the yolk, the vanilla, and honey.
When the dough has had 25 minutes to prove, roll it to a thickness of1cm on baking paper.
Spread the walnut mixture over the dough, leaving a 2cm margin at each edge.
Roll the dough like a Swiss roll and turn out on a greased baking sheet.
Leave for 10 minutes and then put in a 200 degree oven for 25 minutes.
Serves 6
*Milk had been a problem for me in Kosovo, because I am so picky about the taste of UHT. With the electricity and thus refrigeration difficulties in Kosovo, it is rare to be able to buy anything else in the shops – and when I did buy some in unattractive bladder packs (small tough plastic bags where the milk lurches around in your hand as you pick it up, with an unsettling breast-like feel) it was curdled by the time I got it home. Then Shpresa, the farmer’s daughter, said that it should be possible to get milk delivered to my door by a farmer. I mentioned it to Gazi who said that his cousin owned a café and used fresh milk there and that he would ask him to give my details to the farmer who supplied him.
And thus it was that I received a phone call one day when an unidentified male voice asked in Albanian: ‘Is that Miss Elizabeth? Are you interested in milk?’ Had the mafia come calling? This was clearly a coded question, and I didn’t know the answer. While I cast about for a possible password, the caller identified himself as Shemi, a farmer who was offering to bring a two-litre bottle of his farm-fresh milk every week to my door for a euro.
The milk was delicious and in its floral notes I swore I could still taste the pasture Shemi’s cows had munched on. The milk came in re-used fizzy drink bottles, and there was also one occasion when there was an unmistakable tang of Fanta, but once I’d pointed this out to Shemi the bottles seemed to come better washed.