Supporter: Kristin Griffith

Amira will receive grass to cover the wooden frame of her camp dwelling, which will house her and her three sons. Photo: Kristin Griffith/Mercy Corps

The arrival of rainy season usually marks the highly anticipated start of planting season in western Sudan. For Amira, this year's rains means only that she and her family will remain wet.

Amira is one of thousands of new arrivals to camps in Um Dukhun, a Sudanese border town in the center of an increasingly unstable region. They're coming not only from elsewhere in Darfur, but from neighboring Chad as well as nearby Central African Republic (CAR).

A week ago, Amira and her husband gathered up their three young sons, stuffed whatever belongings they could fit into a bag, and fled their village in South Darfur. Tensions in the village had been ratcheting up for two months as inter-tribal conflicts escalated. Amira's neighbors suffered as their livestock and household belongings were slowly looted. Finally, when a neighbor was shot while thieves attempted to steal a goat, Amira and her family decided their lives would be at risk if they stayed any longer.

The family set out on foot, walking for two days before reaching Um Dafok, a town on Sudan's border with CAR. There, they found a truck heading to the larger town of Um Dukhun, well-known as a hub for aid agencies offering relief to Darfur's displaced. Standing alongside the truck, a tearful separation ensued: Amira and her sons were allowed to buy passage and climb in, but her husband was not.

A day later, the truck arrived in Um Dukhun's Jeddida camp, one of ten camps inside Um Dukhun where Mercy Corps is providing shelter, latrines, water and other basic necessities to families. Amira and her fellow passengers are among 300 families who have arrived in the past four days.

Mercy Corps opened its Um Dukhun office last October in response to an increasing number of displaced people there. Agency aid teams continue to help build latrines, provide drinking water, teach livelihood skills, and promote good-hygiene practices among roughly 14,000 people.

Toward the end of May, simultaneous fighting in eastern Chad as well as in Um Dafok resulted in hundreds of new families arriving in Um Dukhun. Mercy Corps teams worked with other agencies and the local government authorities to rapidly erect a camp for an anticipated 650 families. By July 3, more than 1,300 families had arrived. Still more come each day.

In recent days, Mercy Corps has shipped truckloads of materials to Jeddida camp to build shelters and latrines to meet the needs of the surging population.

One of these trucks ferried grass mats and bamboo; they'll be distributed tomorrow to Amira and other families. For now, Amira says that she is simply "waiting": for the supplies and for her husband, who she hopes will come and join her. Most of all, she is waiting for the day her family will be able to return home, and join Sudanese families heralding the start of rainy season in their fields.

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By KRISTIN GRIFFITH AND RUTH ALLEN

Until the spring of 1999, many Americans had never heard of Kosovo, a Connecticut-sized province of Serbia. In March of that year, NATO airstrikes ended Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleaning against the region's ethnic Albanians. The fighting stopped, and the peacekeepers and aid workers arrived as the ethnic minority Serbs fled in fear of retribution from the returning majority Albanians. Soon Kosovo drifted back out of the collective consciousness -- another half-solved problem.

This spring, Kosovo will be back in the news, looking for the second half of its solution. This week, UN special envoy for Kosovo Martti Ahtisaari presented his plan for the "final status" of Kosovo and in the next few months, the United Nations Security Council will approve a way forward: the region will either receive conditional independence or remain part of Serbia with some degree of autonomy.

Settling Kosovo's political and legal status is the critical next step in bringing long-term peace and stability to the region, but let's be clear about this: a status decision is necessary but not sufficient in guaranteeing a decent future for Kosovars.

Independent or not, Kosovo is poor and divided. More than half of Kosovars live on less than $1.60 a day. With a per capita gross domestic product of less than $1,300, Kosovo ranks below places such as Afghanistan and Rwanda in wealth per person. Given this level of poverty, it's not surprising that tension between the region's majority Kosovar Albanians and minority Kosovar Serbians persists. One in 3 Kosovar Serbs feel the Albanians aren't trying hard enough to integrate them; more than 1 in 4 Kosovar Albanians don't think the Serbs want to integrate at all.

Luckily, the international community has learned some lessons about what works and what doesn't in Kosovo, and these lessons need to be applied if the region is to have any hope of peace and prosperity.

First, in order to create lasting stability, all ethnic groups must feel they have some control over their future. Years of distrust, tension, and conflict have left both ethnic majority and minority residents unable or unwilling to participate in governance activities.

In implementing Kosovo's final status decision, the international community and local authorities need to prioritize investments that strengthen ' vertical linkages' -- the connecting points between the government and its citizens. Without a role in public decision making, citizens lack confidence in their government, and in turn government is less responsive to the people.

Kosovo has lots of tough public decisions to make in the near future, and those decisions are only going to hold if people see their government officials as legitimate representatives of their interests. That trust is earned, not granted, and the international community needs to help politicians understand that.

Along those lines, as the final status agreement is implemented, donor agencies and policy makers must take a hands-on role in strengthening the capacity of government, administration, social service, and security structures at both central and local levels. The international bureaucracy that runs Kosovo now soon will be downsized and local institutions will become increasingly responsible for assuming control over government and associated functions.

Second, it is paramount that relations among the various ethnic groups improve. Normal civic interaction between Kosovar Serb and Albanian communities has largely stopped, with both populations increasingly seeking support and protection within their own ranks. The result is disintegration of 'horizontal linkages' -- those which connect people of different backgrounds.

The international community cannot continue to step in every time there is an ethnically sensitive problem to resolve. In 14 years on the ground in Kosovo, Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian agency, has learned that it is most successful in re establishing or developing new linkages among ethnic groups when community-driven approaches are used to identify and pursue common interests -- developing a shared market, getting a damaged factory back online, expanding a medical facility -- and using the good will generated to catalyze larger change within society.

As one Mercy Corps project participant from a multi ethnic neighborhood said, "Community involvement with both communities is the best way. Through this project, Serbian villagers feel like they are a part of Kosovo society and feel less isolated." While co-existence alone cannot be assumed to result in reintegration or reconciliation, collaboration toward a shared goal can often be an excellent first step.

Finally, Kosovo needs to remain a funding priority for the international community. Despite its many needs, Mercy Corps is seeing drastic cuts in assistance to Kosovo, with donor aid falling by 70 percent between 2000 and 2003 alone -- a trend which continues today.

It would be a grave mistake to assume that the final status decision marks the end of the international community's obligations to Kosovo. The options are clear: invest time, energy and resources in Kosovo now to address underlying issues, or call it good enough, and plan on dealing with another failed state several years from now.

Kristin Griffith is Kosovo mission director for Mercy Corps, a global humanitarian agency. Ruth Allen is a senior program officer in Mercy Corps' in Cambridge.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in The Boston Globe

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Photo: Scott Heidler/Mercy Corps

From November 2001 until May 2003, Mercy Corps Kosovo implemented the USAID-funded Healthy Community Initiatives (HCI). HCI used health as a vehicle for engaging communities as active members and leaders in local decision-making in order to promote community mobilization and strengthen civil society linkages. The program is considered a successful model within Mercy Corps because of its success in mobilizing communities in a relatively short time frame (19 months), the high level of community match, maintenance of the programs, engagement of government and business, and community enthusiasm. This article focuses on the creative use of gender to the benefit of all.

Kosovo is largely a patriarchal society and a key challenge of community mobilization activities in Kosovo is the genuine involvement of women. A contextual analysis had identified that issues relating to health were not only a priority need in but also offered a unique opportunity to engage women. Health has traditionally been a woman's concern in rural Kosovo and this sector not only provided an opportunity to improve the overall health of the community but it also empowered women to participate in other decision-making needs in the community in a manner that was non-threatening to the men.

Basic health education is perceived as primarily the responsibility of the women and does not involve a large investment of resources into the community. The first stage of the project was health education. However the objective of these sessions was not only to increase basic knowledge among the female participants, but also to raise the level of involvement and empowerment of local women. The decision to move into the second, infrastructure phase of the project in any particular village was based on the activeness of the participants in the first phase. The first community meeting was then used not only to describe the possible funding and criteria for future projects, but also to "advertise" the fact that the community had been selected because of the success of the women in the health education phase. This not only increased the self-esteem of women in the village, but from the beginning instilled a sense of ownership of the project. During the infrastructure projects, Mercy Corps staff repeatedly heard women reminding their communities that HCI was in their village because of them.

There were inevitably challenges maintaining the level of involvement of women during the ‘bricks and mortar' phases of the project. One of the first challenges to electing women to the Community Health Advocacy Groups (CHAGs) came from the women themselves. Understanding that involvement in the infrastructure projects and training would be time consuming, many women previously active in health education refused positions on the CHAG because of household and child care duties. Another challenge was the type of roles that women were given once elected to the CHAG. Many women were uncomfortable in taking lead roles in the CHAG, or roles connected to monitoring construction. As a result, it was difficult to keep female CHAG members closely involved as the project shifted to the construction phase. While this is a concern, it should also be kept in mind that realistically there are very few cultures in the world where women would take a central role in construction. HCI staff did their best to ensure female CHAG members were involved and in many cases, although not out in the mud monitoring projects, female CHAGs were directly involved in other key activities such as informing community members about the process of the work, community match, etc.

Another way that HCI implementation was gender aware was to hire mainly female staff for the program. All community workers hired for the program were female. Additionally Mercy Corps Kosovo attempted to hire female engineers. Although this action did help raise the level of comfort among female community members, hiring all female staff did at times mean programmatic activities were more difficult to implement. For example when hiring female staff it is often more difficult to find those with drivers license. Additionally female staff often have more difficulty gaining confidence among male community members, especially in a patriarchal society.

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