A Return to the Past - Serbia

Photo: Mercy Corps

"We only want what we had before," said the director of the high school in Kursumlja, Southern Serbia. "Up until the eighties, we had the best conditions---now look at our computers, they haven't been changed since then. And the bathrooms....try not to enter. You may never know what will fall from the sky!"

“Please help me before I die”, said another community member. “My husband died because the road is so bad he couldn’t get to the doctor. By next year, the same thing will happen to me! If you don’t fix the road, who will?”

Communities in Serbia have for decades relied on the government to take care of the needs of villages and villagers. Few people in each community had to worry about the condition of the school or the availability of the doctor, most villagers agreeing that the responsibility was in the hands of the government. Although people were not rich, no one doubted that they would have something to eat the next day.

After 10 years of wars, embargos, and political problems, most of the government structures that people relied on are gone, and people are left with a sense of uttermost hopelessness. So how do you mobilize them?

Mobilizing Serbian communities, in many ways, means returning hope to them, having them see that there is something that they themselves can do about their future. Through the Community Revitalization through Democratic Action (CRDA) program in Serbia, Mercy Corps has been trying to help people from different sectors of Serbian society (farmers, educators, politicians, women, youth, handicapped people) come together to decide on a plan to address the most urgent needs of their communities. The leaders that Mercy Corps works with are given clear instructions for success, including ways to involve community members throughout the process. This gives the voice back to the average community member who, through participation in the process, realizes the challenges and opportunities facing the community and its government, learning to work together with leadership structures and coming up with formulas for future success.

The community mobilization process has been very practical, consisting mostly of building the capacity of communities to submit successful projects, projects that reflect the learning and motivation of the average community member. In a way, though, it has been far easier than expected, for reasons that were really impossible to predict: people in Serbia seem to have always wanted to participate. Nothing seems to be more important than the revitalization of their village.

Many older community members, in fact, talk about how much they would like to have all the comforts of the past. They talk about returning to past standards of living, of knowing that basic needs are taken care of. But when community members are asked about what they would like to see their government do, no one says that they would like to have the governments of the past. All agree that one of the greatest achievements of Mercy Corps has been the demystification of the government – helping the government know how to include the people. This “double” mobilization approach (helping the community members participate in the life of the community and facilitating the interaction between the average community member and the government) makes the work of Mercy Corps sustainable, and makes it possible for people to realize that the future may be far better than the past.