TIRANA, Albania -- Fatmira Kruda is a cleaner with five children.
Fatos Lubonja is a writer and former dissident. Fatmira took in ten Kosovo refugees. Fatos opened his home to 17 members of the Kryeziu family from Prizren.
Their generosity is typical of the way ordinary Albanians throughout Europe's poorest country have rallied to help their ethnic kin fleeing Kosovo.
This "spontaneous solidarity," as Fatos calls it, contrasts with official complacency in the face of the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe. There's an Albanian proverb for the situation: 'Share your poverty - but not your wealth.' Fatmira lives in a two-bedroom house with no running water and an outhouse in the back. She earns about $150 a month. Her 15-year-old son saw the ten Kosovo refugees sleeping in the street and invited them in. "I couldn't turn them away," she said.
Fatos, a 50-year-old newspaper columnist, says "I didn't do much. I went to the sports stadium, gave them my telephone number and told them to call me if they needed anything." He used to earn $400 a month for writing a weekly column for Koha Ditore, the Pristina-based independent daily. But since that newspaper was burned down several weeks ago, he now writes for a variety of local newspapers and magazines to make ends meet.
The Kryeziu family consists of two brothers, four women whose husbands stayed behind to fight with the Kosovo Liberation Army and nine children between the ages of two and fifteen. Fatos lent them his mobile phone to call relatives in Germany.
Like many of the refugees here, the Kryezius have since moved on to be housed in an army barracks, a 15 minute drive out of the center of Tirana. "As soon as I find someone with a car, I plan to go see them," Fatos said.
For much of this century Albanians have been divided between several Balkan states, living principally in Albania and Kosovo, but also in Greece and Macedonia. Those in Albania proper were cut off from their ethnic kin during close to half a century of self-inflicted isolation under the regime of the late Communist dictator Enver Hoxha.
Albania's isolation ended with the collapse of communism in 1991.
Since then, Kosovo Albanians have been frequent visitors to this country. These two Albanian communities were united by the fact that they both lived under oppressive regimes, but they were divided as to who was the greater victim: Kosovo Albanians who lived under foreign tutelage or the Albanians from Albania proper whose oppression was home-grown.
But these differences disappeared once Serbian forces began driving ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo. Although there are no official figures, it seems that practically every Albanian family, from Kukes in the north to Saranda in the south, has taken in some refugees.
In Kukes, a town just over the border from Kosovo, almost every family has turned over part of its home to refugees. Over morning coffee in a local cafe, police officers debate how to make ends meet with an extra 10 to 15 people on a $100-a-month salary. They wonder how long this will last.
"I am embarrassed to admit this, but our own poverty will force us one day to turn them out on the street." said one police officer who declined to give his name. "I will endure until the end, but I hope to God that the end is not too far off." Meanwhile, state-run television runs recruitment advertisements for the Kosovo Liberation Army. "The KLA needs you now!" it urges. Radio and television here runs programs trying to help reunite Kosovo Albanians with missing family members.
The generosity shown by ordinary Albanians does not appear to be shared by their political leaders, most of whom can be found during the day and evening with local business leaders drinking in the Western-style hotels. Few if any of them have themselves taken any action to assist the refugees.
Nonetheless, these same politicians are eager to speak out against Belgrade and quick to demand deployment of NATO ground troops. They continue to call for international aid to any Western or local reporter willing to listen. Every interview ends with the same sound bite: "We have very limited resources and are doing our best to accommodate our brothers and sisters".
Fron Nazi is a senior editor at the London-based Institute for War & Peace Reporting.