David Cale
Woman from Kosova

The woman from Kosova who lives in London sat across from me at the Greenwich Village Coffee Shop. We had met the day before at an event about the war in Kosova. As I had handed her my business card so she could call and set the time of a coffee date to hear more of her story, she had looked down at my name, back up at me, down again and said "I look to see if you are Serbian, to see if you would maybe try to kill me."

We met the next afternoon, she brought an Albanian friend who is active in the women's organizations that have played such a critical rational role before, during and since the war.

Looking at her photographs of haystacks and farmers in Kosova, I asked her if agriculture was in her family's background. "Oh yes" she replied softly, "for hundreds of years we have been bee-keepers. My grandfather still is. Just last month, when the time came and he was forced to leave, my grandfather knew that they would burn his home, so he took his poems and hid them in the beehives, thinking that maybe they wouldn't destroy the beehives. And perhaps they are still there, will be there, if he can ever go home...waiting amongst the bees, being covered in honey."