My Report on the Situation in Dubrovnik – January 3rd 1992
The Croatian member of parliament Matko Medo, a resident of Dubrovnik, rang me today to give up-to-date information on the situation there. This is the gist of what he told me: Eighty per cent of houses in Dubrovnik have been affected. Shops and houses have been sacked by marauding soldiers. In the old city the Franciscan monastery received 23 direct hits, although the library has been saved. There have been 17 direct hits on the Dominican monastery and 176 on the lane leading between the monasteries, with damage to the roof of the synagogue. The church of St Blaise has been hit, the cathedral and the museums. The Domus Christi, the oldest hospice in Europe, has had 10 direct hits, the oldest orphanage in Europe, the monastery St Clara, has been damaged, and the hospital on the island of Lokrum. He says one can stand and count with ease roofs which are undamaged.
For more than three months there has been a severe shortage of fresh food, no fishing has been possible, and there have been no milk or milk products.
20,000 people are living in camps outside the city. This includes refugees who came to Dubrovnik to seek shelter and those in Dubrovnik itself whose houses are destroyed. An attack on one camp resulted in 50 dead.
Altogether, there are 20,000 refugees to be cared for. Two thousand are in hotels without heat or running water, and ‘the standard of living is that of the sixteenth century’. Water is rationed to one litre a day and the whole of the old city ‘is a septic tank’.
Many people have stoves which depend on coal or wood for fuel, neither of which is available. At Christmas parts of Dubrovnik had their electricity reconnected, but it is only functioning at 35 per cent of normal capacity. There is no street lighting. A blackout is necessary because soldiers are shooting from the hills above Dubrovnik once night falls. At the moment the temperature in the morning is around zero, and babies and old people are at risk of hypothermia.
We were successful in getting supplies in quickly, so when I sought donations from food firms I asked if they had anything nearing the end of its date code, as well as anything in packaging that was about to be changed. We arranged next day pickups of goods on pallets. This worked especially well for Christmas puddings and mince pies. Since they were both unfamiliar foods in this part of the world, I wrote a leaflet about their history and significance that was distributed with the festive parcels. When alcohol is poured over the puddings and set alight the flame signifies the triumph of good over evil, light over darkness. There was still plenty of slivovitz around, so Christmas puddings were introduced into the culture, with information about their spiritual symbolism.
A local farmshop, Millets, with the enthusiastic support of one of its managers, Brenda Standen, sent a truck load of potatoes, and a local flourmill 11 tons of flour in huge bags. Eian Riddiford, a racing driver, generously drove lorries. On one of his trips he was shot at. Other drivers took in many tonnes of lentils, sweet foods from Lyons Bakeries and Jacobs, canned foods, rice, dried mashed potatoes, chocolates from Rowntree, biscuits (782 cases in one load), beans, soups, canned and dried milk, fruit juice, jam, fruit pies, eggs, candles, bedding, warm clothes, nappies (100,000 in a single load), children’s shoes, big boxes of toys, analgesics and antibiotics given by Oxfordshire GPs (samples from pharmaceutical companies), other medical supplies from Parke-Davis, artificial limbs, zimmer frames, oxygen equipment, hospital lighting, 60,000 sanitary towels from Kimberly-Clark, laundry and other detergents, soap, shampoo, dried spices from Bart Spices (3,000 jars), and felt tips, paper, pencils, crayons and painting books for children.
A Child’s View Of A Terrible War
In July 1992 Uwe went into Dubrovnik on the first of our lorries to be allowed in. The devastation around the city was appalling. Evidence of widespread obscene atrocities was abundant. In the city old people were still sleeping in the underground Aquarium within inches of the glass that separated them from the sharks. From Korčula he delivered some of the boxes that had crammed our house a few weeks earlier to the smaller island of Lastovoon on his boat. He brought back pictures by refugee children in playgroups and primary schools to which we had sent drawing and painting equipment. They were encouraged to draw and paint their experiences as refugees and what was happening in the world around them – wounded parents, planes and guns, ruined buildings and rubble – as a way to come to terms with their experiences of violence and death.
Korčula’s usual population of 16,000 had been overwhelmed by 12,000 refugees, most of them women and children from southern Croatia and – since by then the war over Bosnia-Herzegovina had begun and now Sarajevo was coming under siege – from there as well. Priests, nuns and Red Cross workers who distributed the aid were giving all the love and care they could but the children were unhappy and anxious. Crouched in fetid underground shelters, these children had endured night after night of shelling and weeks of hunger and thirst. Families had been split up and many did not know if their relatives were alive or dead. Some children had seen their mothers raped, their fathers’ throats cut, and their homes burned down. One three-year-old drew a picture of his mother and painted blood pouring out of an abdominal wound.
The killers were often not strangers, but neighbours – men living in a previously close, intermarrying community who turned into murderers. The four-year-old who said, ‘Do not kill me, Uncle! I will be good!’ spoke to the killer as a well-known and trusted adult he was used to calling ‘uncle’. It is as though the child believed that, if only he were good enough, the violence would stop. Some of these children had lost both parents and, like many children, thought the death of those they loved was because they had been naughty. It was a terrible burden of guilt for any child to bear.
Yet many pictures were vigorous and positive. Houses, even when burning, looked astonishingly solid. The tombs visited by one little girl’s mother are drawn with a monumental permanence which suggests that the ritual of mourning, and its public recognition, helps to heal. Planes dropping bombs are mixed with jolly-looking birds and coloured flags. The image of the ship occurs often in the paintings of the over-fives – ships which bring food, and, above all, hope. Many children drew the Zlarin bringing in canned baby food.
Most of these pictures were done by pre-school children, but we also have ones from older children. In these, there were obvious gender differences. The girls drew flowers, women in frilly dresses and people busy collecting water for cleaning and cooking – somehow conveying a reassuring sense of normality. The older boys, however, focused on the fighting. They drew strutting warriors, men firing guns, bayonets and tanks with intricate detail and precision, often cramming in every weapon of destruction they could. The greatest danger is that children who live with the reality of violence grow up to become violent in their turn. We ought to ask ‘What are we doing to our children’s minds?’ While boys cherish an image of manhood like this, can the killing ever stop?
From January 1992 onwards child-to-child personal gift boxes were organised through schools. I suggested that each of these should be packed with presents for a child of the same age – things like a doll, always some chocolate, a toy car, a construction kit, soap, a hair brush, bright woollen socks, a warm scarf, a teddy bear – and a photograph of the child giving them.
The novelist, Susan Hill, offered help and went round Oxfordshire schools. As a result children became enthused about the project and eagerly got together gift shoe boxes full of the kind of things they would want themselves if they were forced to leave home in the middle of the night with only one bag containing all their belongings. It was an exercise in creative imagination, social understanding, emotional intelligence, as well as international history, geography, and, because the children often wrote letters to the recipients, in English composition. Teachers welcomed the project because it also represented new ways of teaching that cut across formal classes and stimulated children’s eager co-operation.
Our dining hall was piled with filled shoe boxes under the great
oak table and in every gap and cranny, and when the lorry drew up outside our grandson Sam, still a pre-schooler, worked with us enthusiastically to load it. Yvonne Moore, who trained Active Birth Teachers in London, joined in with gusto and collected hundreds of shoe boxes. Her eight-year-old complained at breakfast time, ‘Mummy, I can’t reach the cereal cupboard!’ That’s when she loaded a van and drove her boxes to add to those already in our dining room!
We had sent 800 gift boxes in our first load and, with publicity from Worldwide Television News, 3,000 in the next one. In April 1992 the shoe box scheme was taken over by some Clarks shoe shops and BBC Greater Manchester radio, administered by Sheila Faulkner’s ‘Who Cares?’ programme. 136 shoe shops gave out boxes and welcomed them back packed full of goodies. Then this scheme was expanded to Clarks shops in the London area. Subsequently 12,000 filled boxes were sent to Dubrovnik each week. There were so many that we could also send loads to Zagreb and Split, where there were large number of refugees, and even into areas still under attack – Mostar, Travnik and Sarajevo.
News came from Korčula that private initiatives like ours succeeded in providing 75 per cent of the refugees’ food on the island. Nothing was going to waste, no money was going into administration, and theft was rare. Most relief agencies have to allow for theft. It is expected. But because Tess, our daughter, followed our loads right through to the consumers, we could keep tight control and see exactly what was happening to everything. When the Christmas puddings arrived, for example, a group of soldiers scooped some up and went home to their families each with a pudding under his arm. We were happy about that. The only other theft we discovered was by a priest who stole some packed shoe boxes for the children in an orphanage he ran. We wish he had asked, because we would have earmarked some for them, and he could have re-ordered regularly.
I faced an ethical dilemma when asked by local charities in Croatia to get hold of artificial baby milk from big international firms like SMA and Cow & Gate. From one point of view, introducing large quantities of their products was bound to serve as advertising, increase sales, and undermine women’s attempts at breastfeeding. Yet we couldn’t leave babies to go hungry, and when a mother was not lactating, either because she had suppressed her milk supply or because it had not built up or had dwindled, there was no alternative to feeding a baby on a breast milk substitute.
I was strongly criticised by some breastfeeding organisations in the UK who believed it was wrong to provide any artificial milk and in this way lend support to firms manufacturing and promoting it. But we could not leave babies to be fed unsuitable food like water thickened with flour (it was white and looked like milk) or to starve. So we introduced Chloe Fisher, a skilled and passionately committed lactation counsellor and midwife, to promote the benefits of breastfeeding with doctors, nurses, midwives and mothers, and simultaneously made artificial milk available for those babies who needed it.
Bosnian mothers in rural areas usually breastfed without problems. Muslim mothers expected to breastfeed for at least two years. This certainly saved many babies’ lives. But those in the towns and women in Croatia were more accustomed to breastfeed, if at all, for six weeks or so, and then wean their babies on to the bottle. Many paediatricians had been trained in Germany, where this was the norm. We were challenged by a European culture that was basically anti-breastfeeding.
I researched promotional material about breastfeeding, found a good booklet based on cartoons that gave sound and simple advice, had it translated into Serbo-Croat, and UNICEF covered the cost of mass-producing and distributing it free of charge all around the country to every maternity unit and clinic. At the same time Chloe ran workshops for medical personnel and started up mothers’ breastfeeding groups.
Advocates of breastfeeding, especially the mothers, sparkled with enthusiasm, and it turned out to be a very positive, joyful and successful campaign. We were not only saving lives in a country in a state of catastrophe. We were helping to create healthier babies now and in the future.
The astonishing result was that when Nina Smith of the National Childbirth Trust was invited to visit Bosnia 10 years later she told me, ‘They are streets ahead of this country with breastfeeding.’ I got Nina and Chloe together to talk about what had happened, as Chloe was not aware that this had triggered a revolution. When she first arrived in Bosnia, Serbia and Macedonia, mothers without access to artificial baby milk were trying to feed babies on bread and water and sweetened black tea. Only peasants and the Roma breastfed, because it was considered ‘primitive’. Now in Sarajevo, for example, there were drop-in centres where mothers could go with their babies and stay all day, a cartoon leaflet to help them breastfeed based on a snazzy one published by the Royal College of Midwives that I had introduced with UNICEF, and Nina told Chloe ‘They are still using the knitted breasts you took them’ (i.e. to demonstrate how to get babies latched on correctly.)
But back in the early 90s it had bothered me that even if we managed to help mothers and babies breastfeed, they had a difficult start in hospitals that still treated babies as the property of the hospital and kept them away from their mothers except for allotted feeding times. In response to a newspaper photograph of babies in a hospital lined up like sardines in a can, I wrote:
‘The photograph of the newborn babies in a Sarajevo hospital with a nurse trying to warm them with hot water bottles was distressing. The sensible way to keep babies warm is for them to be with their mothers. The risk of artificial heating is that a newborn gets overheated and becomes dehydrated. Crowding babies together in a central nursery also leads to cross-infection.
‘The Sarajevo women who are deprived of their babies because of outdated hospital rules are probably not only cold themselves, but miserable without their babies, and find it difficult to get breastfeeding off to a good start. Bottle feeding is bound to kill babies in a city where there is no electricity, clean water or regular, cheap supplies of dried artificial milk.
‘This year the World Health Organisation and UNICEF launched the Baby Friendly Hospital Initiative; mothers and babies should be able to be together day and night. A hospital environment should support breastfeeding and babies should be free to suckle whenever and for as long as they want. This is impossible when mothers and babies are segregated. Many women long to have their babies with them. A baby-friendly hospital must also be a woman-friendly hospital.’
I learned that moving into a country to provide aid entails action at different levels – practical and administrative, negotiation with national and multi-national firms, cultural understanding: personal relationships, media management and political enterprise. It was a great education for me.
We wound up the operation in early 1993, when the big agencies got going. Our remaining cash went to the Korčula Red Cross with permission to distribute it to local families in need who by then felt neglected in favour of the refugees.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LECTURES AND WORKSHOPS
In the 80s and 90s I was offering a wide range of lectures and workshop topics for the international tours which I undertook – that included the United States, European countries and the Antipodes. To give some examples:
Creating the best environment for birth
I ask what kind of setting is needed to support the spontaneous process of birth.
I illustrated this with slides of my grandson’s birth in water in the family home.
Birth and the transition to motherhood
Birth is not just the delivery of a baby. It is a major emotional and social life transition for a woman and for a couple. This can be obstructed by insensitive and authoritarian patterns of care. An exploration of how women are nurtured during and after childbirth in different traditional cultures, and the relevance of these for our own society.
Getting in touch with the baby during pregnancy
The unborn baby is often seen as a mysterious package, a doll hidden in the toy cupboard, and today, as already a patient. An explora
tion of how a woman can learn more about the baby inside her, and the benefits of this prenatal bonding.
Postnatal counselling
Any woman who has had a bad birth experience needs a friend who can offer non-directive counselling. We explore together how to listen in a way that is active, reflective and validating, and can help a woman integrate this negative experience in her life, and find strength within herself to cope.
The non-violent second stage
The expulsion of a baby is often treated as a race against time. It is stressful, uncoordinated and violent. In this workshop we explore ways of respecting the rhythms of the second stage and achieving a gentle birth.
The benefits and risks of birth plans
What birth plans are and common misconceptions about them. Midwives’ and obstetricians’ criticisms of birth plans as mere shopping lists made by anxious women. How the creation of a birth plan can be an important element in education for birth stimulating discussion and negotiation with caregivers, and help those attending the mother as well as the woman herself.
Midwives and mothers working together towards change
An account of the changes taking place in British hospitals as a result of concerted ventures by midwives and mothers. Discussion of how midwives and mothers can be most effective in working together, and the challenges and opportunities in the future.
Women’s experiences of episiotomy
A Passion for Birth Page 34