“We need everything. We have nothing,” says a man with bony shoulders and a worn, ruddy complexion.
He is speaking to a delegation of North American Jewish leaders who have traveled to Albania to deliver relief supplies and gain a greater understanding of how Jewish dollars are being spent in the field.
The 29-member United Jewish Communities delegation has flown in from Israel with 10 tons of supplies packed in the cargo hold: tents, mattresses, medicine, baby food and diapers.
With its neat rows of tents as far as the eye can see, the site they visit is the so-called “Hilton of refugee camps,” says Dr. Richard Hodes, a field worker from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Unlike most camps, Piscina has sanitation.
Still, residents shower only once a week after standing in long lines, sharing about 25 showers.
Toilets consist of a row of wooden outhouses with holes in the floor. Those facilities, along with other amenities, had to be added quickly to accommodate the vast numbers of people crowding into the relatively small space.
At this makeshift camp — erected in 24 hours on a site where Albanians, in better times, go to swim and relax in the warm sun — privacy is a luxury of the past. So are rest and recreation. The Dynamo Sport Complex is now a land of confusion, exhaustion.
At midday, residents roam the camp grounds, sitting in tents talking, resting or playing games provided by humanitarian organizations. Some wander into the bustling center of Tirana, where a giant banner reading “NATO E Kosovo” (a show of support for the NATO bombings) adorns a civic building.
In this strange culture of displacement, one day rolls into the next. “We do nothing,” says Abdullah, a 35-year-old refugee who describes seeing his village burned by the Serbian army.
Abdullah and his family sleep in two adjacent tents marked with numbers like addresses on houses. Freshly washed laundry hangs from tent poles, flapping in the wind.
In his tent, as in others, mattresses and cots bump up against each other in a small musty-smelling space. Cardboard boxes hold the family’s few possessions. Still, despite the structure’s transitory nature, it is clear Abdullah and his family, like many of the camp’s residents, take great care to keep their tents orderly.
For now, after all, Piscina is the only home they have.