NAGAVC - In the classroom of the village school, a young boy with a thatch of mousy hair stood up to recite a poem he had clearly committed to memory.
His classmates were not enthralled but they were quiet as he hurried through his words, their 7-year-old faces bright and content. There were exercise books on the desks in front of them, and though they were wearing their coats, a wood-burning stove in the corner of the room took the edge off the morning chill. With a few changes, the classroom could have been anywhere.
But in the school in Nagavc, an old farming community tucked away in the hills near Prizren in south-west Kosovo, there is much that lies in the detail.
Should you stop to admire the pupils' drawings, pinned to the wall in the school entrance, you would notice among the pencil sketches of houses and flowers, a tank with a short, jutting gun barrel and a soldier wearing an unmistakably pudding-basin helmet.
Standing in the school yard and looking at the outside of the building, you would see beneath the fresh coat of clean white paint the places where half-a-dozen bullet holes have been filled in. And should you have been able to understand the little boy with a poem forever ingrained on his mind, you would have heard him remember his grandfather - loved and now gone, killed by the Serbs.
This is Kosovo 12 months on, a country and its people facing the anniversary of a Nato bombing campaign. The politicians who ordered the bombardment said it would help the Kosovar Albanian population, such as those people in Nagavc.
In many respects it is an artificial anniversary. The thousands who suffered in the dark days of last spring, when years of tension and oppression in Kosovo finally exploded on an unprecedented scale, will each remember and mark their own private tragedies - the day family members were massacred by paramilitaries who casually discarded the bodies, the day homes were destroyed, the day they were forced into exile from a place they had lived for countless generations.
But in one respect today's anniversary is crucial. For it marks the moment when, as Nato bombers began dropping their laser-guided ordinance on targets near Belgrade, the Western powers proclaimed that the Kosovar Albanians were no longer struggling alone.
It marks the moment when, after months of threat and diplomatic intervention, the West showed it was prepared to use its military hardware. It marks the moment we said we would help.
In Nagavc, which was largely destroyed by Serb MiG bombers and whose population was killed or else driven out in retaliation for the Nato strikes, one might initially think that this promise has been honoured. Next to the unmetalled track that twists up the valley into the village, there is a large white sign that informs all who pass of the assistance that has been showered on Nagavc by the German Government. The sign is close to the village's silver mosque - destroyed by a Serb shell, unrepaired and now taken over by pigeons - in the graveyard of which KFor soldiers cleared a landmine left by paramilitaries.
In the school, too, there are signs. There are new windows and desks, provided by a German children's charity which has stuck its logo in a prominent position on one of the panes. The same organisation provided materials to paint the outside of the school and to fill in the bullet holes.
"We are grateful for the all the help we have received. I would like to thank that charity," said Gani Elshani, aged 39, the head teacher, who for three weeks last September held lessons in the packed-mud schoolyard as the classrooms were being redecorated.
Elshani is polite, grateful for the assistance he has received, but it is obvious that he and his fellow teacher, Safet Gashi, are struggling to provide education. "We don't have enough books. There are no toilets, the schoolyard needs repairing," said the head teacher. "We were promised sporting equipment but we have none."
In these circumstances they struggle to help children traumatised by their experiences. Experts from Macedonia briefly visited and told the teachers that it was better for the children - who witnessed more horror in a few days last year than most people experience in a lifetime - to express their fears than to bottle them up. They told them it was good for the children to recite their poems and to make their drawings. Then the experts left.
Away from the school, things are worse. When the Independent first visited Nagavc last summer, three weeks after Nato and the Russians had entered Kosovo, the village was literally a bomb site. Seven bombs dropped on a run along the centre of the village had wrecked the majority of the houses.
Villagers returning after three months' exile in refugee camps in northern Albania found virtually nothing. Their homes were ruined, the year's crops had all but been wiped out and they were living off food handouts from the same charities that provided them with tents in which to sleep. All they really had was the euphoria of being home.
This week, returning to Nagavc, it is clear that very little real progress has been made restoring the infrastructure of the village. The houses that were damaged have received only the most basic of repairs and entire families are squeezed into one or two rooms.
"We are trying to get back to normal but it is hard," said Shpresa Krasniqi, a teacher in a local school. "One problem is that we have so little room. There are seven of us in one room and when you want to be on your own you cannot."
Everyone is the same. Xhevdet Krasniqi, who is one of many in the village to share this family name, said his family of seven were forced to spend what felt like the entire winter in one room.
At times the temperature fell to minus 30 and the room in which he and his family huddled together was the only one where the inside of the windows were not solid with ice. Even now the electricity supply is scant - two hours on, six hours off.
The lack of work is a returning theme. People are desperate to rebuild, but they say they cannot afford the basic materials they require. Instead they make do as they can: a piece of timber holds up a stairway, a torn piece of a thin blanket stretches overs a window frame.
In the fields it is no better. Like much of Kosovo, Nagavc depends on agriculture for its survival. But the farmers who traditionally took their harvests of tomatoes, grapes and potatoes into the market at Prizren fear this year they will have little to sell.
It is wrong to assume the people of Nagavc do nothing but complain. The villagers are proud and generous with the little they have, their homes are spotlessly clean. Even the graffiti sprayed on to one of the walls translates as "Long live Nato."
But the villagers realise they face a struggle. Although they now have peace and are no longer persecuted by the Serbs, in practical terms it is hard to see how their lives are better. The euphoria so apparent last summer has gone.
- INDEPENDENT
Wounds linger under fresh coat of paint
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