Elizabeth Gowing Livres

This is a true story of living and learning - being confused and comforted - with the excluded Ashkali people of Kosovo; an account of the challenges and delights of what happens when you find your community but it's a long way from home. Hatemja, a rubbish-picker's wife, lives in the poorest community in the poorest country in Europe. When Elizabeth Gowing is befriended by her, the women learn with, from and about one another. How can you find the best rubbish pastures for scavenging? How can you free children to go to school rather than to go out begging? How do you then convince the local school to accept them? Can mayonnaise deal with headlice? How best to teach the 36 letters of the Albanian alphabet? How would Facebook help evacuate a family from a rat-infested hovel? How do you make baklava? And through it all, how do you maintain a precious friendship that's helped you find out the best you can be?

Kosovo: the name conjures up blood: ethnic cleansing and war. This book reveals another side to the newest country in the world a land of generous families, strong tastes and lush landscapes: a land of honey. Elizabeth Gowing is rushed to Kosovo, on a blind date with the place, when her partner is suddenly offered the position of adviser to Prime Minister Agim ?eku. Knowing nothing of the language or politics, she is thrown into a world of unpronounceable nouns, unfamiliar foods and bewilderingly hospitable people. On her first birthday in Kosovo she is given a beehive as a gift, and starts on a beekeeping apprenticeship with an unknown family; through their friendship and history she begins to understand her new home. Her apprenticeship leads her to other beekeepers too: retired guerrilla fighters, victims of human trafficking, political activists, a women's beekeeping group who teach her how to dance, and the Prime Minister himself. She dons a beekeeper's veil, sees the bees safely through winter, manages to use a smoker, learns about wicker skeps, gets stung, harvests her honey and drizzles it over everything. In between, she starts working at Pristina s forgotten Ethnological Museum, runs a project in a restored stone house below the Accursed Mountains and falls in love with a country she had known only as a war.

A journey through two centuries of Balkan history in the company of eight inspiring women: pioneers and fighters in very diverse ways, they were determined to build lives for themselves, and in doing so they influenced the lives of others. Each was distinctive and distinguished and swam against the social current; and yet each was a representative of their land and their time, and has something to teach us about the realities for women in all countries and ages. Staka Skenderova (1831-1891) Bosnia-Herzegovina Maria Juric Zagorka (1873-1957) Croatia Xenia Petrovic-Njegos (1881-1960) Montenegro Maga Magazinovic (1882-1968) Serbia Margaret Hasluck (1885-1948) Albania Shote Galica (1895-1927) Kosovo Musine Kokalari (1917-1983) Albania Esma Redzepova (1943-2016) North Macedonia

Unlikely Positions (in Unlikely Places) - Holiday reads and travel literature following unlikely yogini Elizabeth Gowing on her yoga journey around Britain, from stand-up paddleboard yoga and Kundalini to Iyengar, doga and Brahma Kumaris, Cornwall and London to Yorkshire and Scotland: a humorous, compassionate narrative ultimately about community.