Kragujevak and Nis, Serbia: July 20 - 21, 2000: Another half hour down the road, we came to the town of Kragujevac. The pediatric hospital there serves a population of about 180,000 people. Dr. Jasmina Knezevic, the hospital director, is a sharp young lady who really takes pride in what she does. She is a pediatric cardiologist, and her husband is also a doctor in Kragujevac. Together they cut quite a wide swath medically in central Serbia.
Dr. Jasmina is desperate for basic supplies for her hospital and is trying to do the best she can with broken lab equipment and antique medical machines. She fixed little truffles and tarts for us, with black tea. The tea was a nice change from the Yugoslavian coffee served in most places, which I’m convinced is made from floodwater mud.
After tea, Jim and I had to hurry on to the city of Nis. The city was once the inland capital of Yugoslavia and today serves a population of about two million. It was about another two-hour drive to Nis from Kragujevac, and it was getting dark by the time we arrived in Nis and checked into the Ambassador hotel on the city square. Jim, the driver, and I wandered around the city until we found a good place to eat dinner.
Thursday, July 20
Jim Peters and I ate breakfast at our hotel this morning and then decided to walk to the Nis Clinical Center. Yugoslavia followed the old Soviet model of together-but-separate hospitals.” There was a separate hospital for each specialty, but they were all clustered together in relatively close proximity. It really wasn’t an efficient method, but it became tradition throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The Nis Clinical Center was set up according to that model.
We located the administrative offices for the complex. Snezana Milošević, the deputy director and head of nursing, had been expecting us. We were then ushered into Dr. Cedo Kutlesic’s spacious office, where Tanja Milošević, the chief business administrator for the hospital complex, and Snezana were invited to meet with us. Dr. Kutlesic is a physically large Serbian with a rather gruff demeanor. He is a very focused individual and serves as the vice dean as well as the general manager for the medical campus.
The Nis hospital is a fifteen-hundred-bed institution with twenty-seven hundred employees, six hundred doctors, and eighteen operating theaters. In addition to taking care of the local population, the hospital now tries to care for several hundred thousand refugees who streamed into central Yugoslavia from the war zones. I could see immediately that if there is a place in Serbia that needs our help, Nis is that place.
We met with hospital administrators for more than an hour before we took a photo tour of the hospital. By that time, Dr. Kutlesic had really warmed up. I told him I really admire what he is doing as a doctor in Serbia and what he is accomplishing as an administrator during such difficult times. He walked over to his glass-secured bookcase and took out a boxed collection of two beautiful volumes on ancient Orthodox monasteries. He opened the first volume and signed it: “To Dr. James Jackson, my big friend from America. Dr. Cedo Kutlesic.”
The doctor stood up, walked over to me, and kissed me three times on alternating cheeks as only family members do in Serbia. The mouths of the two ladies meeting with us dropped open. They work every day with the big, burly doctor, and I doubt they had seen him that open and emotional before. Snezana and Tanja then escorted us around the hospital to finish our needs assessment. All of us became good friends in a short time. Jim and I came to Nis to deliver love and hope, but we received far more love and acceptance than we could ever have dreamed of.
Our next appointment was set for 11:30 a.m. at a psychiatric hospital in the small nearby town of Toponica. But the people at Nis didn’t want us to leave. Our compromise was to quickly perform our needs assessment in Toponica and then return to Nis and have a late lunch with them.
On our way out of the hospital, I saw a woman in a wheelchair struggling to enter an elevator. Both of her legs were missing at the thigh. Snezana helped her onto the elevator. I smiled at her as Snezana told me that the lady was a nurse at the hospital. When the NATO bombs hit the hospital, she watched as her legs were blown off her body. Fortunately she knew what to do to save herself from bleeding to death. Now she is back working at the hospital again and is having a real tough time.
The psychiatric hospital at Toponica was a bit of a misfit for Project C.U.R.E. The hospital director didn’t even want to talk about his medical needs and didn’t want us to tour the facilities—not even the medical clinic. He just kept asking us for money so he could remodel his old building, which was erected in the late 1800s. It really wasn’t too difficult to cut short our evaluation at the Toponica psychiatric hospital.
Back at Nis, Jim and I joined Dr. Kutlesic and his staff for a lovely lunch at an “American” outdoor restaurant. There’s no doubt about it: My obedience and willingness to go to war-torn Yugoslavia has been richly rewarded, and the timing of the visit has been absolutely providential. God, again, has been way out ahead of us in the planning.
It was a long, difficult, four-hour drive back to Belgrade. Jim and I found ourselves eating dinner in Belgrade at about 10:30 p.m.
Friday, July 21
This morning, Alexander Cvetanovic, Jim Peters, and I met early for breakfast. The day was heavily scheduled. Our first assignment was a needs assessment at the Belgrade maternity hospital, where Dr. Slavka Durutovic-Gligorovic is the director. She had been instrumental in helping us get our visas to enter Yugoslavia. She is a great manager and medical doctor. Her maternity hospital sparkled with cleanliness, and her staff was very positive and had things well under control. I took some photos that I really hope will come out good. I think it will be a pleasure to work with the hospital in the future.
Jim and I had promised as a stipulation for receiving our visas that we would meet with the foreign-affairs ministry and the health ministry while we were in Belgrade. We had already met with the foreign-affairs people, but the minister of health was making it difficult to schedule a meeting.
At our lunch in Nis, we had mentioned our problem to Dr. Kutlesic. He simply got on the phone with the minister of health and said, “You really need to meet this guy.”
That was all it took. We were scheduled for a 10:30 a.m. meeting today at the minister of health’s office. Additionally the newspaper article in the official newspaper just came out in Belgrade telling about the American humanitarian organization that had arrived to offer assistance. The health minister’s curiosity had been piqued.
The newspaper announcement came out of our meeting with the Red Cross. A reporter for the official newspaper had been there, and it had taken her no time at all to get the news into print. I’m quickly losing the position I had hoped for of just quietly slipping into Belgrade and quietly leaving without any high-profile exposure. I’m fearful that the publicity will just alert any genuine and aggressive American haters to the fact that there is an American in town.
Dr. Mihajlo Kobac, the health minister for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, is a real medical doctor instead of just a government figurehead. He allowed thirty minutes for our meeting and also invited to the meeting Dr. Vera Ilankovic, the deputy federal minister, and Dr. Ljiljana Stojanovic, the first counselor to the federal minister and two other ministry officials.
The minister of health was very cool and defensive and almost cynical about an American being in Belgrade to see him. It was the Americans who had caused their problems. Had I come to gloat over their misery?
Jim started out by introducing me to the health minister in the Serbian language. He had sat in on about ten official meetings by that time and pretty well knew the Project C.U.R.E. story. Usually that kind of situation drives me nuts, because without them taking time to translate both sides of the conversation, I never know what they’re saying. But all translators will slip into that temptation at some point, because they know the answers to the questions asked and go ahead and give the answer rather than interpreting the question for me, letting me answer, and then saying essentially the same thing the translator would have said to begin with. Translators, I believe, actually think they’re doing me a favor and saving precious time by going ahead and carrying on the conversation without my help. The only problem is that I don’t have any idea where the conversation has gone or is going. Even though the situation is quite understandable, in strategic meetings it’s very dangerous because a translator never really knows how I would have answered the question. He only presumes.
Next Week: Sharing Hope with the Minister of Health