Honey For Healing Wounds

 

New Albanian vocabulary: me dhunue (to rape)

 

 

Ana and Dardan’s excited message about their baby was a welcome relief to an inbox which was filling up with email about victims of domestic violence and trafficking. I had started doing some consultancy for an organisation that worked with women’s shelters and I was learning that not all homes were so happily honeyed. One of the shelters I was working with had a beekeeping project running, and so on a day in early summer I caught the bus to a meeting place in the town of Gjakova where Sakibe, the director of the Safe House women’s shelter, would wait to accompany me to the unmarked building some miles away.

Once in her car, I was soon lost on a convoluted route through Gjakova’s suburbs. I wasn’t sure whether Sakibe was doing this on purpose, but I knew that the shelter’s location was kept secret; there was certainly no way I could find my way back here. It was an ironic echo of the scarf placed over the bride’s face that I’d seen in photo- graphs on my Women for Women visit.

We were driving through a gracious residential area – wide streets and houses each set in a little piece of garden. It was very different from Pristina’s chaos of concrete and disregard for planning regulations, but Sakibe was negotiating the grid pattern of streets with frequent switches left and right, like some chess master. Finally she pointed out the building up ahead that was our destination. As we approached the shelter, we saw a man standing in the garden. She stiffened and suggested quickly that I should go in alone while she found out why he was there.

So I saw myself into her office and sat reading the posters on its walls.

 

The rules about anger:

Don’t hurt other people

Don’t hurt yourself

Don’t destroy the things you have

Talk about it

 

The women who live in this house know all about anger, I guessed.

Sakibe had told me that there are about fourteen of them there at any one time. ‘They come for a minimum of six, a maximum of eighteen months, and while they’re here they have free medical services, psycho-social support, computer classes, English classes. They do all kinds of work, including beekeeping, to raise money for the shelter.’ Most importantly, as the organisation’s name assures them, they have a Safe House. In Albanian the word for house and the word for home are not differentiated and the atmosphere in the shelter could probably even be called homely. Rugs on the floors, non-institutional furniture, the smell of coffee, the sound of children’s voices. I had only been to one women’s shelter before, where I worked briefly as a volunteer in the UK in the 1990s. The shelter in Gjakova compared favourably from what I saw of it. It was clean and purposeful and upbeat.

As is Sakibe. She came back from her discussion with the lurking male.

‘He was only wanting a job.’

It is this desire for work, for an income, that led so many of the women under Sakibe’s care to where they are now. Research done for the project I was working on found that eighty per cent of victims of trafficking in Kosovo were lured by their traffickers with false promises of work. It is easy to see this as a consequence of dangerous naivety, but the research also showed that in almost half the cases, the trafficker was well known to the victim. So although we may comfort ourselves with ensuring that our daughters wouldn’t get into cars with strange men, in some cases prevention of human trafficking would be better served by warnings against getting into cars with uncles, brothers-in-law, your friend’s boyfriend… or indeed your best friend herself; many traffickers are women.

It seemed unbelievable that such things could be done within the family, when I had seen such repeated and powerful evidence of the priority put on the family unit in Kosovo. But I knew that in traditional Kosovan families, the head of the family has absolute power – for good and for bad. I remembered the Kanun’s description of woman as a ‘sack to be well used’; I could see that if something unspeakable was done to one member of a family by another, all the mechanisms that ensure safety and solidarity against strangers would become collusion.

Having once been an established transit point for trafficked women, Kosovo had recently become a source country. Women and girls from Kosovan villages are trafficked internally and to the brothels of Western countries. The reports I had seen in my work had made harrowing reading: ‘my father’s friends came to our house and offered me a job in a fast food restaurant but the agreement was that they would take me and follow me back home every day. The very first day the owner tied me up, closed my eyes and raped me. The next day he forced me to sleep with people...This continued regularly and he eventually sold me to five people who raped me and later on six brothers abused me sexually.’

For those who remain in Kosovo, their customers include shameful numbers of men from Kosovo’s international community – all those UN bachelors or NATO squaddies, NGO employees far from their wives. One report interviewed men in Kosovo who have used the services of prostitutes, to identify the level of understanding they had about the possible histories of the women whose sexual services they were paying for. One strategy for tackling human trafficking works on the premise that if appropriately informed, clients of sex workers can be a powerful means for rescuing or at least alerting the police to the presence of victims of trafficking in brothels. Despite what it said on the wall of Sakibe’s office, I felt anger rising in me, and a distinct desire to punch someone as I read some of the testimony from these men.

‘I am concerned about trafficking because it is widespread and there are many victims. On the other hand, I think these kinds of services should exist because we have fun. I am somewhat concerned about my close relatives, particularly if they get involved and become victims.’

You vicious, smug bastard.

Sakibe told me that once women have escaped the company of men like this and have settled in the shelter, as far as possible attempts are made to find work for them. Beekeeping is an obvious choice – the area is known for its beekeeping and this municipality has the second highest number of hives in all Kosovo. Ten of them belong to Safe House.

Sakibe got out a small plastic pot to show me. It contained the night cream made at the shelter from hive products, including propolis. Propolis is the dark brown, faintly unpleasant-looking sticky material that bees use as a multi-purpose disinfective coating in the hive. It is gathered from the shiny protective substance that covers buds and the shoots of young plants. Adem had pointed out to me how it was used for plugging gaps when they appeared in the honeycomb. Equally, if any intruder – for example, a mouse or beetle – appears in the hive, when the bees have stung it to death they will cover the corpse in propolis to disinfect it and prevent unhygienic putrefaction.

‘We mix the propolis and wax together with Vaseline and almond oil,’ said Sakibe, and allowed me to stick a finger into the rich, sweet- smelling night cream. Of course I bought some, liking the idea of slathering myself like a queen bee every evening before bed.

Then Sakibe got out another pot that she explained was a cream with a different balance of ingredients, used for spots and blemishes. I hadn’t encountered the word for ‘spot’ in Albanian before, and Sakibe and I had an uncomfortable moment while she tried to mime a skin complaint, before finally abandoning tact in the interests of linguistic accuracy, and pointing to my chin. I bought some of this cream for ‘puçerra’ too, with the curious image in my head of anointing the little pustule every night like some exotic flower waiting to bloom. Or, of course, like a little dead beetle perched on my face, kept from doing any more damage...

The money from the sale of the creams goes for some of the extras that make the shelter so attractive – Sakibe told me that those rugs on the floor, as well as the office computer and the women’s television, were all paid for out of the funds raised by the bees’ hard work. I had heard about the healing properties of honey; about the forest fires in Australia where koala bears suffering terrible burns had been treated with manuka honey applied direct to the skin. The more I heard here, the more I thought of this building as a hive of healing activity.

But Sakibe wasn’t done. ‘As well as the honey and skincare products, the women also produce handicrafts.’ I made noises of polite interest and Sakibe called in some young women to show me their work. The girls’ faces were lifeless and it seemed they could hardly bring themselves to answer my questions; they certainly didn’t look me in the eye. I had the strong impression that these were women who had not had a good deal from strangers in the past. And I felt instinctively that our common experience of beekeeping was not enough to bridge the gap between their experience and mine. No amount of chummy questions about glucose syrup was going to make the connection that had been managed with Shqipja and Lendita. I didn’t try. But I did like to think about these fragile women at their work with the hives, wearing the veils that would enable them to look out at a small world of little dangers, and feel invincible, inviolable in the face of them. If anything was going to offer a sense of possibility for women to take control of their lives, then the microcosm of the hive where the queen rules over a healthy community in which everyone has a role, might just do it. From their faces, I could see it was a tall order.

However, none of their bitterness or suspicion had been communicated in the exquisite work they showed me. I got the same sense I’d had before when Kosovan women had shown me their needlework. It seems that these genteel handcrafts, all lace mats and embroidered towels and frilly aprons, are a kind of dream world, the careful stitching of an escape route. I have sat under corrugated iron roofs, or in homes that smell of farm animals, and now at the shelter with women who have been so terribly betrayed and hurt, and yet on all these occasions, it seems that all the spare energy these women have had has gone into magicking these puffs of fine living or fine dining out of the hard grind of real life.

Women start stitching well before they’re married, producing crochet, embroidery, woven work, and the ‘oia’ I’d seen at the Ethnological Museum that I still can’t describe with an English word. In Kosovo girls seem to pick up these skills like children in bookish homes pick up reading. By adolescence they are preparing the little woven coasters, the sets of three mats (always in sets of three) that go on shelves and tables, the mats that go on television sets, the tablecloths and traycloths that are used when serving guests with drinks and sweet- meats. And so, at the end of a day spent sweating with heavy kitchen- work or on the smallholding, the young women of Kosovo sit preparing beautification for their homes of the future, for the potential grooms they can impress with the nimbleness of their fine fingers, for the husbands they will have who will love or flatter them. And one by one these fine lamina of aspirations are piled up to fill large cases kept on top of wardrobes (a bottom drawer would be too small for a Kosovar’s trousseau).They sit there like a dream narrative.

I suppose that there is no better place for fantasies to be spun than in this Safe House. And the women who Sakibe had called in showed me theirs for sale. To be honest, I don’t really like little lace mats around my home. And I didn’t have space for any more – as a result of the generosity of the women I had met during my time in Kosovo, I had been given more than I could ever possibly display or appreciate. But I wanted to tread lightly around the work they’d dreamed up, so I asked to buy one small flowered traycloth.

The other work they did at the shelter was something I’d not seen for sale before, though I had seen the finished product when I had been invited to the wedding of Elmaze’s brother. On that hot day in rural Kosovo I had turned up to the family’s smallholding to find incongruous tableaux of gorgeous finery against the backdrop of haystacks and chickens. I’d seen a honey ritual, too – the bride invited into her new home, with the groom’s family, dipping her fingers into a saucer of honey with which she then anointed the lintel to show the sweetness she was bringing to the house.

The bride, and the wives of the groom’s brothers were all dressed in trousers of extravagant swathes of fine white tulle. Over their fine white blouses cuffed in lacy oia they wore elaborate waistcoats embroidered in intricate patterns of silver thread. Later I had some frank conversations with Elmaze where I heard the extraordinary prices of these wedding outfits – even more, of course, when the silver or gold thread is made from real metal.

The women at Safe House had started production of these waist- coats and they showed me not only the intricate finished product, but also a half-finished model in which you could still see the cardboard base cut into the required shapes. It seemed appropriate that it was in this women’s shelter that I was offered an insight into the mechanics of marriage, of what goes on beneath the glitzy embroidery.

Sakibe told me that the shelter gave one of these waistcoats to Nicole Kidman when she visited Gjakova in her role of Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Fund for Women last year. I had pointed out to me the photograph sellotaped on the wall which showed Sakibe with her arm round Ms Kidman. I remembered reading about her visit, a low-key trip in which she focused on Gjakova as the city hardest hit in Kosovo by atrocities during the war. So many men were rounded up in the streets and killed, or targeted in other ways by Serb forces, that there is now a large number of Gjakovar families who have a female head of household. A great strike for feminism, at an immeasurable cost.

 

Traditional dancing troupe wearing embroidered jelek waistcoats

 

I clearly couldn’t rival a Hollywood star, but Sakibe was keen to thank me, too, for my visit. To increase the market for their honey, the shelter had been distributing recipes for dishes with honey as an ingredient. Sakibe gave me a photocopy of a recipe for kurore (‘crown’) to take away with me. I told her that I would include it in my book, and that I would do what I could to spread the message about the shelter’s needs. And then I left her to get on with her work, her beekeeping, her nurturing of damaged women, her production of soothing ointment.

 

Kurore

 

Ingredients

3 eggs sunflower oil

2 tablespoons of brandy

the grated rind of 1 lemon approx 300g plain flour

50g dried fruit

100g ground almonds

500g honey

 

Beat the eggs with 2 tablespoons of oil, the brandy and the grated lemon rind. Add as much flour as is necessary to produce a soft mass. Divide this repeatedly into half and half again until you have 32 pieces.

Flour your hands and roll the pieces of dough between your palms to make them into small balls. Fry them lightly in oil and drain on kitchen paper.

Cut the dried fruit into small pieces and mix in a saucepan with the almonds and honey. (A tip for transferring honey easily from the jar is to coat your spoon in oil first.) Warm on the hob until the mixture binds together.

Add the fried balls to the honey mixture, turning so that the balls are covered in honey. Leave for approximately 10 minutes and then trans- fer to a well-greased round baking tray, placing the balls round the edge and leaving a space in the middle. Leave to cool before serving.

 

Makes 32 pieces.