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One year ago, Millennium's three full-time Houston staff served the needs of a handful of teams scattered across the world. One of those teams in Skopje, Macedonia, had modest plans for health and general education in outlying villages and poorer sections of their city. One plan was for the staff nurse to meet with small groups of pregnant women to introduce them to maternal health care.

Their obscure location was thrust onto our TVs in late March as Serb retaliation against the fury of NATO in Kosova resulted in one million refugees emptying into neighboring countries. One team member was among the first foreigners to witness 60,000 Kosovars living in squalor at the border as international politics transformed their small development program into a massive feeding operation for "hidden" refugees -- those outside the care of official camps.

Another team in Istanbul, Turkey, at this time last year had developed and published a pregnancy calendar in the local language to aid expectant mothers in caring for their unborn children through illustrated daily instructions.

Their small person-to-person development efforts kicked into greater urgency when more than 13,000 in their city were killed in the August 17 earthquake, leaving at least 100,000 homeless, and hundreds of thousands more became terrified to return to their homes. They now serve in a variety of otherwise unmet relief functions, some mentioned in this newsletter.

With all the functional changes forced on these teams, they remain steadfast in their commitment to thinking small. They, and teams elsewhere, consistently show ingenuity and sensitivity that belies the low financial cost of their projects.

How much is it worth to serve destitute widows in attaining skills to earn a living in a place where it is neither respectable for women to work nor socially mandated to support them? How can caregivers discern the level of psychological harm done to a child who has witnessed the death and destruction of an earthquake or a war motivated by genocide? In the scope of history, these may seem like trifles, but enduring change challenges at the root of existence and causes one to transform from within.

The greatest torture of my job is making decisions that allocate resources of money, time and services among projects. The decisions may decide whether a third-grader receives an introduction to dental hygiene in the Middle East or we pursue a community rehabilitation project in Central Asia. In particular places the projects may be ingeniously designed. In other places the need may be grinding. In yet other places the media spotlight has given a project relevance in the minds and hearts of people who would not otherwise take notice.

I rebel against the choices. The greatest encouragement is that by the time I see the needs, a field worker has offered a plan to meet the need and pledged the time to implement. All we have to do in our headquarters is find someone who wants to participate in meeting the need.

It has been our pleasure this year to see individuals and groups in the U.S. franchise out these needs, and "own" them. All of them would say they received a blessing in proportion to that rendered.

Millennium's database of offices, implementing partners and projects increases weekly. We engage those projects that show rigorous thinking with a high likelihood of success --- usually those that are small. We expect the trend to continue. See the insert for likely areas of expansion of implementing partnerships. The insert doesn't even mention the many more locations of which we are aware but have not developed action plans.

Would you consider a financial gift to keep these efforts moving?

Thank you for your consideration,

Like all MRDS initiatives, this one functions at the grass roots of the culture, without a burdensome bureaucracy or brittle decisions taken thousands of miles from the field. Also like all the others, it relies on the implementing team's intimate knowledge of the language, customs and attitudes of those served, gained only through long-term commitment to the area.

Lamentably, the beauty of the solution in this case begins with the desperation level of those the program serves. The pastiche of wars involving the Kurds native to Northern Iraq continues to generate widows who are, to be frank, almost perfectly unqualified for their new role. A culture that mandates large families and discourages education for girls, tossed by a series of wars, can only generate widows lacking in literacy, to say nothing of marketable skills.

Factor in the male's prerogative in Islam to marry more than one woman and -- bang! -- one death on the battlefield can render multiple widows and a score of fatherless children. Exacerbating the problem is a class of what might be termed "effective widows," women who become less favored wives and are neglected or abandoned. Their cruel reality varies little from that of women who lose their husbands on the battlefield.

The MRDS team led by Dr. Andres Duncan, a physician, examined their plight and resolved to address it in a way that also included a health component. An outbreak of cholera in the community established a laboratory for teaching responses to that and other diarrheal diseases. Other objectives included teaching basic literacy and marketable skills for women bound to a culture that has denied them education while providing no net of social services.

The team expected the culture to throw up obstacles. It delivered. Canvassing of the city identified one poor neighborhood as a likely target. In it, 86 percent of women were illiterate. The program began in a widow's home with 40 women registered. Almost immediately, her male relatives appeared, demanding their "cut" of the money they assumed she was receiving to play host. Their presence proved so disruptive to this small society of females that the program moved.

Despite the upheaval, enrollment doubled in the second week and was capped at 80. The school in which classes next met soon proved untenable due to bureaucratic issues in the Ministry of Education. The third location, a private home secured for the purpose of holding classes, proved the solution . . . but hardly an end to problems.

Since the United Nations established a protectorate for the Kurds in Northern Iraq in 1990, various aid programs have fostered a culture of dependency. Against this backdrop, the MRDS team had special cause to rejoice when a program designed to teach people to care for themselves and their children was met with such enthusiastic response. All the work involved in creating the materials to teach, reading, writing, basic math and even sewing and marketing skills; all the turmoil of moving weekly in the beginning; all the hassles of teaching local people to abandon the rote learning milieu in which they had been steeped in favor of skill development seemed worth it.

Then the inspector appeared. She worked for the U.N. World Food Program and she promised the women -- apparently through some quixotic reflex -- food for work. Beyond undermining the very premise of self-reliance the MRDS team sought to inculcate in the students, this notion failed to pass the tests of practicality and legality. It simply couldn't happen, but women rooted in a culture of suspicion and dependency leapt to the conclusion that team members were withholding rations for themselves.

Finally, a World Food Program representative appeared in person to apologize and absolve the team of any blame. Everyone went back to school.

A culture that discourages education for girls will hardly revel in grown women, widowed or otherwise, going to class. Attitudes took their toll. Many of the older widows proved unable to withstand the ridicule of women who did not attend. When attrition opened places, however, Duncan's team responded by allowing daughters of widows to enroll. Mothers generally supported their daughters' quest for learning in the hope that the next generation would escape the same plight. The family also benefited in the same proportion because the daughter's income replaced that which her mother would have earned.

After a year, 80 women had completed the program on various tracks designed to meet them at their levels of education and aptitude. Each track included a health and hygiene component. Twenty "honor students" progressed to learning to conduct a feasibility study and basic marketing and administration. They were also sewing children's clothes of high quality when their year was up.

Despite the success, the government might still have found cause to intervene, even to close the program. When the deputy governor of Erbil province visited, however, he declared it among the best he has seen because "the team knows the society, language and local needs."

Pending additional funding, the team can now proceed with an initiative we can only describe as elegant. You Can Help!

--Ed Fowler

The performance was created by a three-person team, including a drama specialist, puppet master and family counselor. The National Puppet Theater of Baku, Azerbaijan, created the puppets under the auspices of Millennium Relief & Development and Scott Breslin, the MRDS liaison office director in Istanbul.

At least one trained trauma counselor will be on-site at each performance to assess and refer people who need further counseling. A booklet based on the play, How to Help Your Children Overcome Fear & Grief, was created for distribution after the performance of the puppet show, giving parents and teachers both practical and theoretical tools to help children overcome fear and grief.

Voices and sound effects were professionally recorded in a sound studio. A puppet show team of five Turkish nationals operate the show, performing in schools and the informal and formal tent cities found through the Marmara region. An estimated 10,000 - 15,000 people are expected to see the plays.

In the play, an old shepherd gives two young children a bird cage with two birds, 'Fear' and 'Grief', and warns the children not to let the birds get too big or get out of the cage. After the earthquake, the birds trick the children into letting them out, and 'Fear' and 'Grief' grow into double-headed monsters that overwhelm and control the lives of the children and their parents. Eventually the old shepherd returns to comfort the family and teach the children how to get 'Fear' and 'Grief' back in the cage so the family can begin to rebuild their lives.

Through the play, the counseling message demonstrates that:

• healing comes from sharing emotional pain and grief with those we trust;

• fear must be managed/controlled to the point where it is not a person's primary decision center;

• suffering and grief isn't equivalent to God's punishment;

• an accurate evaluation of risk, experience and time/distance helps to control irrational fear;

• the support of the community can help manage or control irrational fear;

• after trauma things don't return to normal; a new normal must be found.

The seed for the show grew out of a meeting that MRDS President Bill Koops attended in Izmir, Turkey, following the earthquake. While numerous organizations have been active in providing physical assistance to earthquake survivors, little had been done to help overcome the trauma these survivors have suffered.

The vision of MRDS is to package the puppet show into a trauma counseling program that could be re-scripted and adapted for use in other parts of the world. Through these puppets, other children and families will be helped to cope with the horrors from a major natural disaster or civil or ethnic strife.

Update: Sample pages from the guidebook and scenes from the drama are available from Millennium. For information on the full-text and usage rights, please contact Millennium at millennium@mrds.org

--Ed Fowler

We had driven 10 hours over a horrific road snaking endlessly through Albanian mountains while children and adults fought a losing battle with carsickness. The last 200 yards made the rest insignificant. Our van crawled past ghosts of homes and pulled up next to the charred remains of Haxhi and Rabi's house. It was better off than the rest. Half of the roof remained. The other houses had only walls left, but no roof. And as is true all over Kosovo, in each a brick chimney stood tall over the rubble, like a frightened scarecrow guarding what was left.

As we stepped out of the van, Haxhi took my arm and began to tell a story I was to hear in numerous variations over the next few days. Every family seemed compelled to share their own story while leading us to the various spots it had unfolded. Since they never cried in the telling, I often fought my own battle to keep back tears. These stories are now the music of life in Kosovo, and it is a pounding requiem of pain.

Haxhi led me to a little couch beside the house. "My uncle died here," he said. He pointed to a spot a few yards away. "That's where they shot him. He was so shocked when my nephew was wounded he just wandered out in the yard. I guess he didn't care anymore."

Haxhi showed me the place in their basement where they had holed up for five days, trapped by the snipers on the hill above them and the terrors around them. He led me through the burned rubble and up concrete stairs littered with broken roof tiles.

Haxhi buried his uncle out in the shed that night. It was the only place he could work while hidden from snipers' sights. He showed me the grave.

As their desperation to flee swelled, they plotted to escape into the hills on foot. After five days of hiding as the paramilitaries burned and looted nearby houses, they saw a long column of refugees snaking through town, heading for the border. Merging into the column, they drove away from the home in which they had raised their three children, wondering if they would ever see it again.

And much more they could not know. They didn't know that within 300 yards of their house they would find 110 bodies, cremated in the furnaces of the local factory. The Serbs had tried to cover the evidence of their massacres by cremating their friends and neighbors, 50 bodies in one furnace and 60 in another.

We left Haxhi and Rabi there, finally home, but unable to explore their yard because of mines. In contrast, the next few hours of our trip would be filled with unforgettable joy. At our next stop, in the town of Gjakovë, we were privileged to become part of a tearful family reunion. Two brothers who had become our close friends while refugees, Ibrahim and Besim, walked with their wives and five children into their home, which had remained undamaged, to find their parents doing fine. Their other two brothers with their wives and children had made it back too! They wept and laughed as they hugged. The youngest of the children, 16-month-old Samed, toddled around the home they had fled three months earlier, grinning from ear to ear. The transformation of the children was especially striking. They ran in and out, laughing and shouting out a joy I had never seen in them. I watched the weight of war drop off their little shoulders. They had come home.

Because we had a van, we were asked to take a group of women cousins to the graveyard the next morning. The requiem of pain was always playing in the background of the conversation the night before, but now it returned full blast.

--Von Golder