Supporter: Layton Croft

You have to drive 20 minutes to get there, and if you don't arrive at least 20 minutes before the game begins, you'll probably have to watch it standing. Unless you're the deputy mayor.

Before he started his career in local government more than a decade ago, when Slobodan Milosevic was tightening his communist grip on Serbian and regional Yugoslav politics, Petar used to be a physical education teacher. And his former students, the youth screaming in the bleachers, remember him fondly, adding his name to their cheerleading chants as he squeezes through a packed arena and takes a courtside seat. It's the day of one of the most important games for Petar's hometown team. They are battling a rival squad from Vojvodina, up north, and the winner of tonight's game will enter the prestigious Division I league, where the best Serbian teams compete.

But with so much on the line, it's really too bad the host team's 'homecourt' is not in its hometown.

Indeed, the fact that local fans have to leave their town to experience a home game is a point of contention here, where locals pride themselves on their athletic ability, and their diehard support of their basketball team. Several years ago, Petar and others in local government responded to expressed community requests for a new sports arena in town. Funds were allocated and a local construction firm contracted. But for some reason, perhaps connected to radical changes in Serbian national and local political leadership in late 2000, no new arena was built. In fact, no work on the project ever began.

Meanwhile, Mercy Corps launched a new community development initiative in town in late summer 2001. Funded by USAID, Mercy Corps's Community Revitalisation through Democratic Action programme brought local activists from across the community, both formal and informal leaders, together. 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.

Petar recalls the first meetings of the new community development council, and how there was overwhelming support for renovating the old, decrepit community sports hall. Participants decided to allocate limited Mercy Corps funding to rebuilding a facility core to the heart and spirit of the community. A modern athletic complex would bring the community, and especially the youth, together in healthy competition. It would keep young people out of trouble, and, as Petar and other hopeful parent activists dreamed, it would keep them from growing up and moving away.

Inspired by the promise of a brighter future and a better place to live, the community development council and Mercy Corps started making plans for construction. But it wasn't long until the seemingly forgotten, though unfulfilled contracts signed a few years before came to light, and Mercy Corps froze project funding until local leaders and previously paid construction bosses talked. For a while tensions rose and acrimony threatened to stifle, not revitalise, the community. It looked as if there would never be a new sports arena.

But after extensive discussions, sometimes mediated by Mercy Corps community development experts, Petar and his colleagues negotiated a deal with the originally contracted firm to commence construction according to the previously signed, and paid, contracts. Workers began building the new sports complex, and Mercy Corps and the community development council re-allocated project funds to other priority needs in town.

Today, after a year of mobilizing groups of committed individuals like Petar across southern Serbia to play more decisive and active roles in revitalising their communities, Mercy Corps has spent more than $2 million US dollars in supporting more than 60 projects. And although none of that money was spent on building the new sports arena, the pro-active, participatory process Mercy Corps catalyzed in Petar's hometown refueled local initiative so that concrete results are, finally, being witnessed by all.

In the end, Petar's team won the decisive May 11 game. And it won't be long until the legions of loyal and spirited youth in his community will not only support their team in Division I competition, but they'll be able to walk to the games.

[Editor's Note: Petar is a pseudonym.]

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Ana used to have every reason not to believe those who talked about a better Serbia, about better lives for Serbians. But now she has every reason to believe, because she's the one talking.

For more than a decade, Ana and the 40,000 others in her southeastern Serbian town experienced a perverse kind of reverse development, in the which the communist rule of Slobodan Milosevic, and the international sanctions induced by his regime, triggered devastating social isolation and economic stagnation.

Then, in late 2000, Milosevic's government was voted out of power and a new generation of optimistic leaders took office, promising reform and brighter days ahead.

But rural Serbs like Ana have begun to weary of political promises and pledges, and are beginning to look more within their own communities, and themselves, for the initiative and gumption to catalyze needed change.

It is precisely this belief in oneself that Mercy Corps works to capitalize on across economically depressed southern Serbia. Since July 2001, Mercy Corps has engaged local community groups and citizens committed to change, like Ana, in the USAID-funded Community Revitalisation through Democratic Action programme.

"When I heard about Mercy Corps, I was so enthusiastic, because somebody remembered our town," she said. "There is a saying, 'The more south you go, the sadder the situation is.' But I believe we are going to do a lot of things here."

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.

Ana is a member of the local Mercy Corps-initiated community development council, which prioritizes community needs and decides how to spend limited funding to address those needs. She brings a refreshing dose of hasty pragmatism to the community development process, and her energy is contagious.

"I just want everything to be solved as soon as possible. I can be impatient," Ana said. "But I haven't always been like this. Maybe it comes with age. I used to be calm and quiet, but not anymore."

On the contrary, Ana is outspoken and aggressive when it comes to mobilizing, and revitalising her community. She says that Mercy Corps came to her town and promised tangible results. Those promises have been kept, which Ana says gave her more hope than ever. The more she believes in her community, she added, the more she believes in herself.

"Our community development council has made many good proposals like an amusement park and a swimming pool. But the dump is a big issue in our community; it's about 100 meters from my office. Water is also a big problem for us. There are many other problems. What to do? Let's solve them one by one. I know the Mercy Corps staff, and somehow I feel safe with them," Ana said.

After a pause, she adds: "It's simple. I trust them."

[Editor's Note: Ana is a pseudonym.]

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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 organisation, 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 favour 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 programme manager for the Municipal cultural centre 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 Revitalisation through Democratic Action programme, 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 centre, 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.

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There are no telephones, landline or mobile, in Lukare. But there should be.

In 1995, Suljo and 50 other community activists from more than 20 neighboring villages in this remote and poor southwestern Serbian region known as the Sandzak, built a new post office in Lukare. With their own money, and their own hands. They did it because the national and local government officials had promised a brand new telephone network, and phone numbers for the region, if there was a modern post and communications facility.

Suljo, who was born and raised in Lukare, led the charge at the grassroots. He organised all fundraising and manual labour efforts. Before long, Lukare had a new post office, and a cluster of mountain communities had done their part in laying the groundwork for finally connecting to the rest of Serbia, and the world.

Devastating war, international sanctions, and a persistently destructive communist regime, led by Slobodan Milosevic, had forced many local villagers to flee to cities and other countries, and had wrecked the local economy. So, the ability to make a phone call from Lukare had virtually come to mean the difference between indefinite social isolation and economic stagnation, or the chance to make a better life.

But after Suljo and company had fulfilled their end of the bargain, the government officials were nowhere to be found. Their promises had proven to be lies, and seven years later, Lukare still has no phones.

"We have written countless letters to government officials - to Belgrade - to get the telephones," Suljo said. "But they always tell us that our villages are not in the national plan for a phone network. ...Republic and Municipal governments have no care for our problems. Instead of facilitating bureaucratic procedures for expediting decisions, our government does something else. ... They always have excuses; we can't do anything about government."

He might be right about that, but Suljo and others involved in Mercy Corps's new community development councils are proving that they can do a lot despite government inaction.

In July 2001, Mercy Corps launched a new, USAID-funded Community Revitalisation through Democratic Action programme in 18 southern Serbian municipalities, which were especially devastated by events of the past decade. And Suljo is a natural leader in Mercy Corps' participatory prioritization and decision-making process, in which community development interests are articulated and responded to, in the form of small infrastructure projects.

But he is also quick to point out that Mercy Corps' assistance is an additive, and not the whole recipe. When, asked how he participates in Mercy Corps activities, Suljo coyly quips, "You mean, how does Mercy Corps participate in our activities?"

This self-awareness and confidence is critical, especially since Lukare has a long way to go. But the community possesses vast development potential, thanks largely to a wealth of human capital and a cadre of social entrepreneurs, like Suljo.

"Our community is not developed in terms of satisfying people's basic human needs...but we are trying to do something for the futures of our children," he said. "Now might not be the same as in the past, but we are doing everything we can to make things better for the future."

Suljo only has a secondary school education, but he is more equipped than most to make positive, lasting change, with his seemingly infinite drive, heart and gumption.

"There is a saying around here, that 'The best place to be is where you were born.' I have always been homesick when I am not here," he said.

Despite all the poverty, lies and obstacles to progress, Suljo and his community development peers have no intentions of leaving. In fact, adversity seems to only strengthen their resolve, and solidarity, to make Lukare a place worth coming back to, or at least calling.

[Editor's Note: Suljo is a pseudonym.]

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To get to him you have to maneuver stomach-churning switchbacks. Right before you reach his town, when peaking southwestern Serbia's gorgeous Sandzak alps, all you need is a little inertia to carry you the rest of the way.

And when it comes to momentum, of the community involvement variety, Mile seems to have an overabundance these days.

"When I started this kind of work, I never thought I'd get so involved," he said. "But when you start something and complete it, and then other opportunities open up, and this goes on and on, suddenly you become completely immersed."

Mile says he has never been busier, or happier, with 'this kind of work,' which, for him, is easier to do than to describe.

"Sometimes it is difficult to express my feelings related to why I am doing this work for free," he said. "It is difficult to explain my feelings of satisfaction, maybe I have this energy because I am relatively new at it."

Indeed, the growing numbers of those involved in community development work is a new phenomenon in this remote mountain town, known mostly as a socialist-era tourist destination. And though Slobodan Milosevic's inefficient state management of 'social property' allowed the infrastructure designed to lure tourists to deteriorate throughout the 1990s, it was the ousting of Milosevic and many of his communist colleagues in October 2000 that ignited a grassroots reform movement.

Mile, a mild-mannered mechanical engineer by training, suddenly found himself swept up by a vortex of homegrown activism.

"Before, a lot of people here wanted to leave this town," he said. "The Serbs wanted to go to Belgrade and the Bosniaks wanted to go to Sarajevo. It's hard to explain how it happened, but in 2000 a lot of us suddenly saw there could be real changes. Many of us who had left returned, wanting to do something for our town. I found that volunteering in local community development groups suits me. People in these groups have had ideas for years, but until now always kept those ideas to themselves. So we tried to do something, to bring some order to this place.

"Since I am an engineer, I like logic, things to be in a certain order. In the past, there was little logic in our government. Nothing was done based on priorities, or with any order. A small group of people made all the decisions for everything in town. Now a much larger number of people participate in making decisions, and people here are more active. Basically, we believe that in spite of our remote location and our small size, our community can develop and increase living standard for people here," Mile said.

It is precisely this belief in oneself that Mercy Corps works to capitalize on across economically depressed southern Serbia. Since July 2001, Mercy Corps has engaged local community groups and energetic and visionary activists like Mile in the USAID-funded Community Revitalisation through Democratic Action programme.

"I want to prove to myself and others what I have started, and I want to see the results," he said. "I want to show myself, and local citizens, that something can be done. Sometimes when people pass by and express their appreciation for my work, it means more to me than the money we lack."

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. Mile is a member of a Mercy Corps-initiated community development council, which prioritizes community needs and decides how to spend limited funding to address these needs.

"Our council doesn't look narrowly at projects to solve the problems of individual members," he said. "Our work with Mercy Corps satisfies our community's needs in a qualitative sense."

Mile appreciates the financial support Mercy Corps provides, and sees it as fuel for the ever-growing legions of like-minded community activists committed to making a local difference. But he also notes a different kind of value Mercy Corps adds to community development. As he says, itÕs a qualitative benefit, and is manifest in the increasingly pluralistic and democratic methods used to make local decisions.

"As a leader, I try to make sure all issues are discussed by everyone, and that people bring their own ideas to our meetings," Mile said. "All ideas are clarified through discussions, which are democratic and tolerant. In the past, discussions were just one person who forced everyone else to accept his decision.

"Now, I allow discussion to be open and lively, but I make sure we come to a clear and final decision, that it is accepted by all. After decisions are made, the project or action must be completed. I always get to completion. Even the Serbian Socialist party has a positive opinion of me, they praise our work."

And when the opposition believes in you, it gives you the strength, or least the inertia, to start moving mountains.

[Editor's Note: Mile is a pseudonym.]

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