Monday, June 21, 1999
Ross therapist aiding Albanians
Relying on faith in face of terrorists
BY PERRY BROTHERS
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Consumed by confusion, rage, depression and despair, Kosovar refugees at Camp Ndroq in Albania turn to Kathy Angie, of Ross, Ohio, for answers, or at least a little hope.
For more than 1,300 ethnic Albanian men, women and children in this camp, more struggles lie ahead as Yugoslav forces leave Kosovo have left Kosovo and they prepare to return home.
The 49-year-old family therapist arrived in hot, humid Albania on May 20. She left behind her private practice in Oxford, her husband and five children to work for Presbyterian Church USA's relief effort.
Relying heavily on her faith, she endured the heat and heat stroke and dodged Albanian Mafia violence to help the refugees preserve or regain some sanity after fleeing systematic torture, rape and murder by occupying Serbs.
“We do as much debriefing as possible to try and make sense of what has happened to them,” Mrs. Angie said, speaking by telephone from the home she rented with five other Presbyterian volunteers in Albania's capital, Tirana.
“But, to have all of your friends and neighbors shot before your eyes and then to be tortured, held prisoner and then suddenly released. How do you make sense of that?”
Many ethnic Albanian men held prisoner by Serbians for months were sent to Ndroq (pronounced N-droch) after their sudden, early June release. More than two weeks later, many have yet to utter a word.
“Sometimes,” Mrs. Angie said, “it's too painful to know what you know.”
Her youthful voice quickly regains a chipper tone but many statements flow into heavy pauses.
She saw similar horrors in Croatia and Bosnia about four years ago. Then, she worked through her congregation, College Hill Presbyterian Church, to help refugee children deal constructively with anger caused by Bosnian war atrocities.
Church invited her
Her work on several later trips to Croatia and Bosnia led the denomination to seek her help in Albanian camps.
“War is unbelievably ugly. I'll never get used to that. The systematic torture and killing and rape — I've been a therapist for 25 years, some of these subjects are not new,” she said. “The intensity and the volume of hearing these stories of rape and torture over and over some days is overwhelming.”
Through early August, Mrs. Angie will shuttle between Tirana, Ndroq and Camp Luz E Vogel, which opens next week near the Albanian port city of Durres.
She works through translators and wears the body-concealing clothing — high-necked, long-sleeved, ankle-length dresses — that women in patriarchal Albania are expected to wear.
Her title — psycho-social coordinator — embraces responsibilities from counseling to establishing educational programs and renovating crumbling schoolhouses to determining medical needs.
“As an American woman, I really need to listen very carefully,” Mrs. Angie said. “How do we heal within the context of their own culture?”
To keep her spirits up she relishes moments of joy that others might fail to notice.
A Kosovar boy's 12th birthday party in a refugee tent was more poignant because of a surprise reunion with his mother, from whom he had been separated in Kosovo.
Mrs. Angie is getting to know her neighbors in Tirana.
She is learning Albanian.
And she reads supportive e-mail that pours in from members of College Hill Presbyterian.
Mrs. Angie has a driver to navigate the barely passable roads through the underdeveloped country, where ox carts can be a primary mode of transit.
Those roads concern Joe Angie, 55, Mrs. Angie's husband. “I worry. I worry about the driving more than anything else,” he said during an interview at the family home on Thursday.
Stability elusive
Despite years of varying degrees of civil unrest and revolt, Albania held its first multiparty elections in 1992.
Economic stability has been elusive and home-grown Mafia groups have emerged throughout the country. Crime has skyrocketed.
Mr. Angie, an art teacher for Cincinnati Public Schools and a native of Polgar, Hungary, has lived in the Tristate for 23 years.
He and Kathy married seven years ago after meeting at a church function. Since, they have raised a “Brady Bunch” family of five children — three from his previous marriage and two from hers. The youngest is 17, the oldest, 23.
When the couple visited Mr. Angie's parents in eastern Hungary in the early 1990s, they met Presbyterians who would lead them to their first European missionary trip, to Croatia.
Mr. Angie left Saturday on church mission to Osijek, Croatia, near the Serbian and Montenegrin borders, where he will focus on rejuvenating Croatian congregations.
The couple will unite in Croatia on July 2 and plan to visit Mr. Angie's parents. After that, Mrs Angie will return to Albania for a few more weeks and Mr. Angie will return to Ross.
For the past two months, when telephone and electrical connections allowed, the couple has tried to communicate daily by e-mail and phone.
“We're both independent. People were asking me, "Oh, what are you going to do?' when Kathy left,” Mr. Angie said, chuckling. “I can take care of myself and the children are all old enough to take care of themselves.”
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