Debt scum: NGOs in Kosovo

I am an Albanian of Kosovo, mid-20s, raised abroad in a Western country (Norwegi). I am writing after two years of frustration gathered from work in many non-profit organisations in Pristina.

You may have worked in the non-profitable sector in Kosovo if:

• The terms of your contract only seldom respect your tasks and hours are added and lowered based on your manager's whims, which is usually executive director.
• Your executive director lives in an expensive apartment, goes through different events abroad and receives invitations to dine at foreign embassies. Your job is to criticize, but no, he never wants to give you a chance to advance in your career.
• Your executive director has the emotional maturity of a 14-year-old. They will never take responsibility for their mistakes, guilt or stupidity. In fact, if you approach them with constructive criticism, you can get fired.
• Most of the indebted elite NGOs in Kosovo are people we west would call half-educated, or in some cases even half-analphabes. These people and their children have occupied nongovernmental organizations, foundations, United Nations agencies, and other international humanitarian organizations. Their ignorance would be comical if it didn't directly affect your work.
• If you work hard and you really do your honest best, it won't be appreciated. You will not be grateful and appreciated. Management will treat your attempt as given, and then you will question your abilities and worth. In fact, they laugh at you for being so devoted.
• You'll never get paid for extra work, and you can never take extra time to work on weekends, nights, or holidays. But your boss can get out any time he touches.
• The board will be filled with friends and executive directors of other nonprofit organisations (or sometimes with former directors of the same organisation!) In fact, they're the same debt that produced your executive director and all the other excusive directors in this small country. They won't protect your interests as a worker.
• You will experience situations that are unrealistic, such as signing a contract for a donor project that you have nothing to do with or contract a service test without the money you pay. You're expected to remain silent.
• Your colleague is going to be doing very well because they are not a threat to the status quo. They can steal from the organization, lie, molest other colleagues, come late to work, and no problem for anyone.
• Managers will be presented as humanistic and good to the donors in fact, to any stranger. Their use and lack of gratitude are reserved for you and other employees, who are treated as helpless hostages.
• If you are not in debt or in high class, if you have not lived or studied abroad, you will be treated as a slave if you have not respected your parents. Rights as a worker don't matter, feelings don't matter, and your colleagues will laugh at you behind your back. The irony is that most colleagues are just a generation away from illiterateness and rural life, even themselves.

If your answers to these questions are “Po”, then congratulations, you have worked (or still work) at Kosovo NGOs!

Dear donors: NO JEPIN LATER PEOPLE. With these people I mean every executive director of NGOs who receive over 20 thousand euros a year. They're an useless elite parasite class that's not capable of empathy, and they have no ambition to achieve something. By giving these fools money, all you're doing is feed the ugly quasi-education register, analysts, unable managers to observe programmes. Poor Kosovo peasants are nothing more than sub-humans in their eyes. I beg you to ignore words about human rights. They pay themselves too much that they could hire two or three young qualified ones. Their projects do nothing against corruption or the poverty of Kosovo, because they are accomplices in corruption and poverty, which they are supposed to fight.

Don't you believe me? Don't talk to executive directors or management. Talk to staff members, with administrative assistants, talk to the cleaning woman because you will get nothing from those directors. Also, have you heard of the title “executive director” being used elsewhere with the same frequency as in Kosovo? These are people with too much fragility, zero emotional maturity, and total disabilities. They shut the staff down with open aggression or even passive aggression of the weak.

I came to Kosovo because I love this country. But I can't keep working in a place where my principles and dignity so often go away. These NGOs are guided by the whims and egos of people who want social status, money and the lustration of civic activism. It's fake. This elite world is filled with exploitation and small class war as it is surrounded by a sea of poverty and despair for which the cock eats. Stop this thing.

A snore Kosovo.

It was translated by Periscope. Written on February 7, 2017.