The silence that dominates within four walls is broken only by the monotonous ticking of the clock’s hands. Long days and nights are passing here, in a cramped space. This is the daily life of Hetem Fejzullahu, a 77-year-old man who lives in a rented house in the center of Pristina. Since the death of his mother in 2008, he has lived alone and has rare encounters with others.
He sleeps, wakes up, prepares food—alone.
Hetem has forgotten the last time someone knocked on his door.
Amid loneliness and a hard life, the elderly man from Pristina shares with KosovaPress the heavy burden of old age.
“Who cares about you, who loves you—no one. No one comes here. What can I do? No one comes, no… We are not without sorrow. But what can I do now? I say, God helps us… All my [family members] have died—my mother, father, brother, everyone. I’m alone, for now at least,” he says.
“I walk a bit, rest a bit, then go out again…” That’s how Hetem describes his day.
With a weary and sad face, he explains that he often goes to bed hungry.
“You can’t sleep when you’re hungry. Have you ever gone to bed hungry? You can’t fall asleep. Sometimes it happens, what can I do… ‘Holidays – passed me by,’ all of them. No one calls you, and I don’t have money to go where others are,” Fejzullahu adds.
Besides loneliness, he also struggles to survive on the 120 euros he receives from social assistance.
“Medicines are very expensive. Very expensive… Just this [he shows a type of medication] costs 15 euros. Then there are other things that you simply can’t afford,” he concludes.
Hetem is not the only one living without family care and in extremely difficult conditions.
“What we’ve noticed is an increase in the number of elderly people who are alone and without family care. A year ago, we had about 500 people across the country that we took care of, and now the number is around 700–750 people whom we try to support… In terms of the elderly [the highest number of cases], Kamenica stands out a bit, but in general, the municipalities are quite similar—we can’t say that one is significantly different from the others,” says Armend Shala from the Red Cross of Kosovo.
The Ministry of Finance, Labor and Transfers has not provided data on how many people in Kosovo live without family care, nor how many are housed in nursing homes.
Hetem Fejzullahu’s call from Pristina is a plea for help.
He asks all good-hearted people to help him build a house.
