A Better Bridge

Once a site of tragedy, this bridge in southern Serbia has come to symbolize Fata's growing optimism. Photo: Layton Croft/Mercy Corps

One day a woman was walking across a bridge. She was carrying a four-month old baby. A car entered the narrow passage and suddenly swerved toward the woman. Frightened, she dropped her baby, who fell into the river and died.

Fata can't tell this story without stopping to cry, and lighting another cigarette.

"I have seen so much hell," she says.

Indeed, Fata's own story makes you want to cry, and perhaps take up smoking. After graduating with honors from her hometown high school, Fata left Serbia to study philosophy in Macedonia. She returned with high hopes, which soon crashed.

Fata spent the next 15 years struggling to get a job, to fight ethnic discrimination, and to find any kind of happiness, or reason to keep going.

It was the late 1980s, and Slobodan Milosevic was tightening his communist control over the former Yugoslavia. Fata's municipality in the Sandzak region of southeastern Serbia, not far from Kosovo, was, and still is, the poorest and most neglected region in all of Serbia. Though 95 percent of the people in her town are Bosniak Muslim and only five percent are Serb, all local government officials at that time were Serbian and not even from Sandzak.

"The local authorities who used to run this town despised it," she said. "They didn't live here, they didn't think about us or the town."

Flatly refused employment on countless occasions, the proud and confident young university graduate joined what she describes as Serbia's first non-governmental organization, called the Unemployed Association. They were mostly educated Bosniaks determined to fight injustice and discrimination. They were radical, sponsoring unprecedented hunger strikes and protests, and they paid a price for speaking out.

"We all got black files in our police records," she said, "and we could go nowhere."

Like many young males in the Sandzak at the time, Fata's brother fled to Germany with his family, where they still live. Single and unemployed, Fata struggled to survive with her mother and father, whose pittance of a pension was enough to live on for about five days out of the month.

Small private shops were starting to pop up around town, and Fata decided to get out of the humiliating cycle of working menial jobs for two or three months at a time until a Serb woman who had just graduated from high school would replace her. But local authorities simply refused to accept her application to set up her own kiosk. Fed up and reaching a breaking point, Fata marched into the local government offices one day, demanded a small business permit, and threatened to blow up the building with a bomb if she didn't get one. This tactic worked, sort of, as the plot of land assigned for her kiosk was located next to the townÕs public toilet.

Her troubles didn't stop there. All of Fata's neighboring shop owners had contacts in local government or with the police, and were able to purchase their bulk goods for sale without any problem. But Fata always paid more, and even ended up procuring her supply from her competitor kiosk neighbors at retail prices, forcing her to resell those goods at a loss.

"I never turned a profit, not even close," Fata says. "But I somehow managed to survive."

Finally, at the end of the 1990s, as Milosevic was losing favor across the broken former Yugoslavia, and especially in southern Serbia, elections in Fata's town resulted in her former Unemployed Association colleagues winning most all high posts in local government.

"I don't like what resulted from the previous regime, the previous political system," she said. "It had horrible consequences. What does community mean? A country, or what...? The law defines the state as community, but it forces certain relationships on us, and some of those relationships are not okay."

Tides were slowly turning, and Fata's old friends running the new government told her that her place is not in a bankrupt kiosk next to the toilet. She was offered what she describes as her "dream job of 15 years," and has been program manager for the Municipal cultural center even since.

"Our current government is the first to like our town. They planted the first new tree in 30 years, and they cleaned the town. I participated in all these things. I like to see the town clean," she said.

Fata's spirit is resuscitating, along with the spirit of her community. Since the summer of 2001, she has actively participated in Mercy Corps's new Community Revitalization through Democratic Action program, funded by USAID. Mercy Corps facilitates a participatory prioritization and decision-making process in which community development interests are articulated and responded to, in the form of small infrastructure projects. Fata is a member of a Mercy Corps-initiated community development council, which prioritizes community needs and decides how to spend limited funding to address them.

The bridge where the woman's baby died several years ago was identified by Fata's development council as the number one development priority in the community. The bridge spans a river the runs through town, and is the only way to get to and from the nearest urban center, where many local people commute for work.

Fata has known the bridge since her childhood, and says it has always been hazardous. The bridge is very narrow, with no sidewalks, and yet accommodates myriad cars, trucks, bicycles, pedestrians, horse-drawn carts, and water runoff every day and night.

Fata and her community activist peers decided to allocate limited Mercy Corps funding to widen the bridge and build guard-railed pedestrian sidewalks on both sides. Proper traffic signs will be posted, and finally the bridge will easily and safely accommodate two-way vehicle and pedestrian traffic, day and night.

"I am satisfied when I see bridges being built, I am satisfied to see certain projects that have passed through all the proper steps, and the first cornerstone being laid in a new building. I have felt all these new things happening as if they are mine, my own property, because I want everything in the town to change for the better, for better lives of citizens here," she said.

Fata has gone from what she describes as hell to hope. She laments the fact that she was forced to spend so many years, and so much energy fighting for a normal life. But today she is reenergized, and driven to make a better one. Mercy Corps helps fuel fighters, and dreamers, like Fata.

"What I wished didn't happen is that I took so much time to get to now," Fata said. "It cost me a lot of nerves, and it broke me in a psychological sense, and in other ways. I regret I couldn't give more in my youth. When a man goes to war for even one year, he returns a different man, not as sane or sound as before. My war lasted 15 years."

Most women in the Sandzak region marry in their 20s or 30s, but Fata is single at 40. Nonetheless, she still dreams of having a family. It seems that despite all her hardship and pain, she still pursues dreams. She seems to believe in herself despite having lost everything, including herself. And now she wants to believe in others.

"That bridge (where the woman's baby died) has always been considered a dangerous thing, it was never marked, no signs or traffic lights," Fata said. "But now we are improving it. The bridge is symbolic. There are bridges everywhere, everyone needs bridges. They connect people."

Fata is a pseudonym.