“The Gift that Keeps on Giving”

A Child Landmine Survivor Struggles to Build a Life

“Seven years after the Kosovo conflict ended, NATO bombs continued to explode (this fall) in the mountains of northern Albania.  This time, however, it was a reassuring sound.  Up in the hills, men in protective gear were setting off bomb lets that alliance warplanes scattered along the Kosovo border during the 78 days of hostilities.

Within earshot but miles away, men and women combed other hillsides, inch by inch, on hands and knees, searching for landmines planted by combatants in the ground war between Serb forces and Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian separatists.

For isolated villages such as Dobruna, it’s been seven years of death, amputations, shrapnel wounds and blown-up farm animals, seven years of blocked-off grazing lands, forests and water supplies.  The explosives have choked off any hope of development here, denying more than 25,000 people access to parts of their land…

Most residents fled the day NATO began bombing Kosovo, March 24, 1999, in a campaign to halt attacks by Serb forces on ethnic Albanians in the breakaway province.  They returned to a familiar landscape made lethal by landmines and booby traps.  Dobruna had become one of the border’s most explosives-contaminated villages…

(Excerpted from Washington Post, “Years After War in Kosovo, Land Mines Scar Albania,” December 10, 2006, Barbara Frye)

History of Regina Murati

Regina Murati was 7 years old when the Gerdec explosion happened. The day of the accident Regina Murati was staying home with her mother, grandmother and her two little sisters. Her house was very near of the Munitions Depot. When the first explosion happened her mother and her grandmother took the children’s and running in the forest to go as far as possible to rescue their life. After the second/big explosion happened the pressure of the air crushed them on the earth and they were separated from each other. When her grandmother stud up stared looking for Regina and when she found her she was covered all with blood, without conscious. She was taken by her grandmother as almost a dead person and send to the hospital at national Trauma Center in Tirana.

Regina has taken her first medication support and one operation in the National Trauma center in Tirana and then later she was send to Greece for more specialized medical interventions. She has made several operations on the head. Regina has stayed in coma for 17 days. In November 2008 Regina had another intervention on the frontal part of the cranium, (Corrective plastic surgery).

Now she goes to school and is planning to make another plastic/corrective operation on her face in September 2009.  She was part on N1KD project and supported to go to school, tutor and other logistic and additional classes.

Assistance Requested to conduct the following:

	To attend English and computer classes
	To attend extra classes in math’s
	To buy school materials
	To get psycho-social-support and recreation activities.

Karen Dixon
an American
volunteer visiting Korab Mula
at his home in Dobrune

Izet ADEMAJ
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Lumturi MUHADRI
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