Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
We drove to Bekim's farm, where I met his whole family. Bekim showed me around his
land as he explained, “I am a farmer. My father was farmer. For thousand years, we farm
this land.”
At first, I didn't believe him, or thought the number was lost in translation. “A
thousand
years? Are you sure?”
Bekim looked at me as though I had just questioned the color of the sky. “Yes,” he ex-
plained. “A thousand years, twenty generations, my family work this land. It is ours. And
we, how you say, we belong to it.”
Well, talk about permanence. Wars had been fought, conquerors had come and gone, the
world had changed, and here Bekim's people remained on the same land through it all.
As Bekim explained to me, his family only had one main source of income: their lone
dairy cow. A thousand years of farming this land, and it was barely giving them enough to
survive.
Bekim and I sat in his yard, looking out at his field as he explained what the land meant
to them, even if he had to work in a local restaurant to make ends meet. “We are connected
with this land like blood and meat together, you know?” Bekim explained. “You under-
stand, like we are born over here; we are grown over here; and we die over here. We can't
live without it.”
“I can feel that,” I told him. “You know, in the Western world we all live with our
iPhones, with computers, with Facebook, with Twitter.”
“No, it all over here also.”
“Really?” I asked, almost forgetting that Bekim was my peer. In fact, he was even
younger than I, and yet in many ways, he felt like he had been a part of this land since its
beginning.
“Yeah, but not like the other places,” he assured me. “We don't have time for it every
day. We have to work our land, and at night when we go home we are tired, very tired, and
we have to rest and sleep. We don't have time for computers.”
Together, we looked back out at the land—how much history had passed over it, from
kings and queens to Soviet troops and Bosnian rebels, to MTV and the iPhone. Years ago
in London, I came across a preserved building from World War II near Farringdon Station.
Its walls were in ruins, the roof long gone, yet life teemed around it. People were heading
to work. Children were walking with their parents. History changes, but the routines of our
lives remain the same.
