I’ve been a little low the past two days, and I know it’s directly related to the 24/7 kind of schedule I’m keeping with Liliana.  I’m fully aware that I need to remember how good I have it, and that I chose this hands-on motherhood path for a reason.  So my thoughts have been on a trip I took to Kosovo in the fall of 2003–how it changed my perspective on wealth, family, and happiness.  I wrote this article upon my return, but it never got published.  I didn’t feel too badly, because the change effected in me was well worth it.  I thought I’d share.

It’s called “Ramize’s Hairband.”

Sometimes, in an effort to help another person, you realize, in a brief moment of reflection, that that person has affected more of a change in you.

And so it is, on a recent trip to Kosovo, I meet my catalyst for change.  She is a serious-faced, thirteen-year-old girl who lives in the squalor of a Roma refugee camp, twenty minutes outside the noisy din of Prishtina, the capital city.  As I’m leaving the camp one day, she scrawls her name in the van’s window dust and points to herself.  R-A-M-I-Z-E, she spells.  She doesn’t want me to forget her.

The next day we return to the camp so the doctors and nurses in my group can do physical exams and distribute medications to those who need them.

I sneak off to find Ramize.

It’s been four and a half years since war ravaged Kosovo.  Sad to say, I remember it as intermittent and irritating blips across my television screen–can’t those people just stop fighting?  I’ve since learned that when the Serbs invaded Kosovo and physically ousted the Albanians from their homes, shooting and raping many of them, the Albanian families fled across the borders to Albania and Macedonia.  After months in refugee camps, the Albanians returned to find their homes burned or looted, everything gone.  These people in the Roma refugee camps, called gypsies by the Albanians, have yet to find homes back in Prishtina.  The low-slung, warehouse-like buildings they live in are thin-walled, and some are open-windowed, so they absorb the sweltering summer sun and the frigid winter winds.  The men try to find jobs in town, but they encounter discrimination and condemnation from the same Albanians who were the victims of the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing.  At first glance, Roma families live on air, it seems.

I am here with a group of eighteen people from my church in Rochester, Minnesota.  We have come to offer humanitarian aid in whatever way we can—teaching computer and journalism skills, repairing homes or churches, and distributing clothing and medications in this Roma refugee camp.

The instant I step outside our makeshift “clinic,” I am like Mrs. Mallard in Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings.  I count five boys and girls with their grimy hands in mine, pulling on my coat and tripping over each other in their eagerness to attract my attention.  I’m an American, something they equate with President Bill Clinton who sent bomber planes to Kosovo to save them from the Serbs.  They jabber at me, oblivious I cannot understand.

Then Ramize appears from around the corner, barks at the younger kids, and links her arm in mine.   She smiles and pushes a packet of sunflower seeds into my coat pocket.

“Ra-miz-e,” she says to me.  She exaggerates her pronunciation and points to herself.  She cocks her head and waits.

“Elissa,” I say.  And then repeat it louder and slower, as if that will help her understand.  “E-liss-a.”

“Come,” she says and drags my arm in the direction of where she lives.  The only thing I’m afraid of is the scattered huddles of smoking, leering men.  I could be reading their smiles incorrectly, but when Ramize scolds them in a disgusted voice, swiping one forefinger across another in a shame-on-you way, I’m sure of my assessment.

The children are yelling–not at me but just for the sake of filling the sky space with their voices.  My eager entourage and I skirt the many puddles and squish noisily through the mud.  We pass two cars, hoods up, doors gone, tires missing, forgotten in a forlorn landscape.  Dirt-flecked chickens scatter from our path, and dogs with matted fur stare at us with vacant eyes.  A father leans out an open window, balancing a chubby toddler on the windowsill.  He smiles a gold-toothed grin and waves the baby’s hand as we pass.  I wonder how his baby will stay warm when the snowstorms rage and the winter wind sweeps through the wide-mouthed window.

Minutes later, we come to one of the last buildings on the horizon.  By outward appearances, it could be some American family’s garage with an attached clothesline, freshly laundered shirts, pants, and undergarments snapping in the wind, except there are sheep grazing in the distance.  Ramize shoos the other children away.  At the entrance, I wipe my Doc Martens on a loosely knit rug–in reality a discarded afghan.

When I step inside, I think I will be in her house, but no, it’s just an entryway, lit by one bare light bulb hanging from a solitary cord.  To my left a neatly stacked woodpile, and farther on, a stall, much like a horse stall, in which a half-full bucket of yellow liquid sits behind a homemade curtain.  The smell in the air reeks of urine and sweat and something sour I cannot place.

Ramize pulls me to the first door in the hallway and pokes her head inside the door.  After a few rapid verbal exchanges, she swings the door open and beckons to me.  This is her home.  I recoil at first because I see her little brother, maybe three or four years old, taking a bath in the middle of the floor.  He sits, shivering and hunched over, in a narrow, shallow metal basin.  His naked body is shiny with water, and his hair is slicked down over his head.  Ramize’s mother pours warm water over him, gently wiping him down.  I search for some place to go, other than this room, other than this very private ritual, but there’s nowhere else to go.  This one room is Ramize’s home.  I avert my eyes, and Ramize’s father approaches and gestures for me to sit on the fabric-covered pads lining the far walls.  I sit, with Ramize cuddling into me and laying her head on my shoulder.  Within seconds, I am served steaming chai tea in a diminutive glass goblet with a small metal spoon.  I stir and take a tentative sip.  Should I be drinking this? When I drink, my mouth is filled with an unbelievable sweetness, and I am pleasantly surprised that this is one of the best drinks I have ever had.  Then I realize I am the only one drinking while the family members huddle crossed-legged around me, grinning and saying, “Good?  Good?”

The room is void of furniture.  A loose, charcoal-colored cloth covers the floor.  The pad I am sitting on serves as a makeshift bed at night, and I notice the black smudged line all around the room, head-height, where the family members rest their heads while sitting.  To my surprise, there is a television in the corner, hooked up to God-knows-where, emitting a snowy, black-and-white rendition of Bugs Bunny.  In the opposite corner is the family’s only source of heat–a stout, white, wood-burning stove.  A sullen-faced woman, whom I gather is the aunt (from our pantomiming), squats on the floor and slices thin crescents of cabbage directly on the cloth-carpet, then scoops them up into her hands and into a large wooden bowl.  Wet socks, jeans, and shirts weight down a clothesline stretched hammock-like over the stove.  From one of the nails securing the clothesline hang two plastic bags of fruit.  The clothes obscure a crimson tapestry of a mosque—from where I cannot tell.  The remaining walls are dotted with glossy advertisements from magazines—mostly beautiful women, touting the wonders of hair coloring or shampoo or cigarettes.

Ramize signals me with her finger to “hold on.”  She scrambles high above the television, where stacks of clothes and belongings threaten to topple at any moment.  She removes something and returns to sit by me.  She holds out a gold-chipped, diamond-studded hairband and motions for me to place it on my head.

Let me say this.  I contemplate, for one second, to protest, not because I don’t want to take something from her, but because we have been warned about the prevalence of head lice in the camp.  I have even packed a tiny bottle of lice shampoo with its accompanying tight-toothed comb in my suitcase.  But here is this radiant teenager with sparkling eyes, giving me a gift precious to her, and here I am, the spoiled American, actually considering my options.

I protest by waving my hands and shaking my head.

Ramize nods her head again and raises her arms to place it just so in my hair.  And in that still-framed moment, it becomes a shiny golden crown.  Ramize has absolutely no treasures to cling to, and the one thing she does have, she gives to me.  It’s enough to make the room blur through my blossoming tears.  Her life is so different from mine; she is destitute compared to me.  She gives me the one thing she values.  I can’t remember the last time I took something off my kitchen counter or from my living room shelves and said to a newfound friend, “Here.  Take this.  I want you to have it.”

Ramize pats my head in satisfaction and begins to show me her schoolbooks—more like our empty composition books—filled with the letters and numbers she’s learning in the camp school.  She shows me her drawings—red-topped houses in a green Prishtina countryside.  She takes a pencil from her backpack and writes her first and last name on one of the empty pages in the back of her book.  She hands the pencil to me.  I write “Elissa Elliott,” and she sounds it out and shows her brothers who crowd around us, smiling and staring.

Our visit ends soon enough, and Ramize’s family trails behind me to the clinic, where they will ask for checkups.  Ramize links arms with mine again.  On my way back, through the puddles mirroring the cloudy skies and the mud sucking at my shoes, I gather my gaggle of friends once more.  They are children with tattered clothing and holey shoes; some are barefoot.  They are glued to my side, shifting like waves upon sand.  They are happy, full of life, unaware that they lack anything, except candy and money, which they unabashedly ask for.

I think of my toasty warm house, our two (!) well-maintained cars, ample clothes for four seasons, and enough food to feed ten of these Roma people, and I feel despicable.  How I’ve sequestered myself in a comfy armchair of indifference and complacency!  How is it that I have averted my eyes to this cavernous social gap?  How is it that I’ve done nothing about it?

Ramize’s headband is a grand gift, given by a girl who has nothing.  With a little bit of pride, I travel to the Roma refugee camp and distribute clothing and medications and a bit of love and pat myself on the back.  Ramize trumps me, not competitively, as in a poker game, but innocently.  She loves me back, offering everything she possesses.  With her simple gesture, she changes me.  I return home to take an inventory of my life.  I return home with great unrest in my heart.  I can feed the hungry and clothe the poor, but what am I doing with my hoarded treasures?  The excesses of my life?  I want to be as open-handed and pure-hearted as Ramize.

I’m working on it.