Just now finally got eighteen (!) hours of sleep after our night in the open followed by a long, frustrating day yesterday of getting stuck in the mud wandering dirt roads looking for refugees that we never found, but which AP and Reuters did. To go back two days, on Saturday we spent a day wasted and finally, at night, ran into a dead Serb policeman killed by a KLA sniper on the main road, a damn good picture that they haven’t used (too bloody?) and the next day, Sunday, went to a KLA ceremony marking the first anniversary of their armed struggle, where a KLA commander comes up to me with a xerox of the chicken picture and starts laughing!

Our “extraction force” of Carlotta and Birol (our fixer) show up at eight, as prearranged, and despite our lack of sleep we then spent the day hunting the story, climbed a 3000 feet mountain to find a few KLA fighters who told us to fuck off, no pictures, please…

I was stuck again and again on soft mud from the melting snow, listening to the distant shelling which could be miles away or just over the next hill, it’s hard to tell in the mountains. We get back to Pristina in the afternoon and find out that the one road we didn’t try was the road to 500 refugees camped out in the open, freezing. I fell asleep and got woken up at 6 AM today by Thomas asking me to go down again. I refuse, he gets down there and calls back at 7 AM reporting more heavy shelling, etc. etc. But I am running a fever, totally wasted, so I sleep until 1 PM. Carlotta and I will check it out first thing tomorrow morning. Today is finally a day off, because of sheer exhaustion.

I suppose it is fairly obvious that this Kosovo is a terrible place, much as I and any normal person might be sympathetic to the Albanians, in the end it is so difficult to make pictures because every one tells you to fuck off, etc. A lot of these KLA are Stalinist types, schoolteachers turned guerrillas, and of course the Serbs are worse.