From one home to another(’s)

By Jack Butcher

My decision to leave Prishtina had caught me somewhat by surprise. 

Forced into a choice between being indefinitely locked down alone in the city that had captured my heart five years earlier and heading for a faraway village from a former and increasingly distant life, it hadn’t been my first instinct. 

I’d had no thoughts of leaving as Kosovo’s first cases of COVID-19 were announced on that Friday 13 as I sat with colleagues working late in the office to get the story out. And I still hadn’t considered it the next day as we trawled through the swathe of imposing new restrictions brought in overnight that limited almost every area of citizens’ lives.

But after some frantic — and rather emotional — phone calls with family members back in the UK after they’d got wind of the lockdown and imminent border closure, I found the tug of my roots to be overwhelming during a moment of such global uncertainty.

With hours to go until the borders slammed shut and with airlines rapidly cancelling flights, I desperately threw what I could of my life into a backpack and, in the dead of night, headed to the airport. A few hours later, still in shock, I huddled into a plane seat on the last flight out of Kosovo and watched the bright lights of my adopted home disappear beneath me — unsure when I would be able to return. 

And so here I was, amongst the rolling foothills of a remote and rugged National Park, in the quaint English hamlet that I had grown up in but that I hadn’t called home for over a decade. The familiar sounds of tallava or hip-hop leaking unabashed from the built-up traffic was replaced by the occasional hum of a neighbour’s lawnmower somewhere down the valley; the rhythm of the call to prayer in the old part of the city replaced by the chatter of songbirds seeking food for their young.

I spent much of that spring in denial, telling few people of my knee-jerk decision to desert; the less people who knew, the easier it was to will myself back into my abandoned home. So as if to assuage my guilt at having left at the first sign of crisis, I threw myself into every aspect of lockdown life back in Prishtina, from closely scrutinizing the latest pandemic-related restrictions to hosting online parties for my friends.

Part of that also meant diving even deeper than ever into my work as an editor at K2.0. 

Now, as my colleagues and I scrabbled to make sense of what the overnight upheaval meant for workers, single mothers and individuals already struggling with their mental health, we also found ourselves covering a simultaneous political crisis. With citizens trapped in their apartments and impotent to act, shady dealings by local actors coupled with the last flings of desperation from the Trump administration in the U.S. unceremoniously brought down Kosovo’s newly elected “Government of Hope.”

The anger, incredulity and deep sense of injustice I shared with my friends and colleagues in Kosovo was hard to reconcile with the sedate and tranquil world I was physically inhabiting. In my room, in video calls, I talked of government collapse and constitutional coups, while outside my window primrose bulbs or the closure of the local café were discussed over freshly baked brownies. 

There may have been the occasional chatter about PM Boris Johnson’s health or another dodgy emergency contract issued to a mate of a minister, and the ever-present post-Brexit fallout inevitably hovered somewhere beneath the surface. But for the most part I blanked out this noise, considering it small fry compared to the far more pressing issues back home in Kosovo.

I insisted that my friends in Prishtina take me out — via their phones — onto their balconies each evening to join the nightly protests as citizens bashed pots, pans or anything they could get their hands on to register their opposition to the underhand wrestling of power. Meanwhile, once a week, I would step outside onto the front drive alongside all the neighbours to politely clap for the UK’s beleaguered health workers as the number of cases, deaths and hospitalisations continued to rise at an alarming rate. 

In those moments of prescribed national solidarity, it was hard not to resent the people around me, lining the sides of a street made up largely of detached houses and bungalows, all nicely spaced by over-attended gardens. We may have all been facing the same pandemic, but what did they know about the existential fears facing those close to me but now indefinitely cut off on the other side of the continent? The pandemic may have introduced uncertainty into these neighbours’ lives, but what was a little uncertainty amongst such apparent luxury?

My rejection of my surroundings extended to the beauty of the unassuming natural environment all around me. How could a place that cared so little about the rest of the world deserve to be so breathtakingly perfect with its ancient meandering lanes, abundance of spring flowers and lush greenery as far as the eye can see? How could a place bursting with perennial life be so detached from those who truly valued what it meant to be alive?

Unwilling to accept the cushy local conformity and unable to do nothing in the face of injustice, I resorted to a late night action to try and shake things up. I had done my best to preserve my energy in the early months of the pandemic in the UK by holding my tongue as the Conservative government badly mismanaged its response by firstly ignoring the threat, then playing it down before finally bumbling into a series of chaotic and often disastrous actions. But after a particularly galling example of cronyism, hypocrisy and dishonesty, I made my own poster with challenging statements about “truth,” “trust” and “democracy” and crept out after dark to anonymously pin up copies around the village. 

And yet over time, as I passed my poster slowly fading in the phone box window on my daily walk, I came to feel a sense of unease about it. Not that my feelings behind the issues it protested had changed — they hadn’t. But in a small and tight-knit community such as this, where issues of “truth” and “trust” were lived experiences that bonded people together from all walks of life, I questioned whether this was really the right way to use my voice. 

I had learnt through my job following protests, talks and discussions that principled defiance has its place. But as I gradually came to engage with the surprisingly diverse range of neighbours around me, I remembered that dialogue and compassion are equally important in affecting change — without these, we become trapped within our own bubbles and fail to see that the vast majority are doing what they can in their own way.

I’d been adamant when I first arrived back that the village of my childhood had nothing left to teach me. Yet, in its own unique way, each home leaves its mark.