An Albanian woman writes about her experience with prostitution and drug dealing in Greece (defending her choices all the way), setting up a grassroots support organisation, and about NGOs in Albania as agents for the interests of centralised elites. This was first published in the Harm Reduction Communication newsletter, Summer 2001, but is still relevant considering the increasing presence of EU/NATO military forces and NGOs in the area given Kosovo's imminent declaration of independence. It also offers a more candid perspective on immigrant sex work than the ongoing compassion campaigns about - and deportation of - the 'victims of sex trafficking'.

At the age of fourteen I was engaged to young man from a nearby village who had regular work in Greece, although he was undocumented. We married and I moved with him to Greece, where we worked on a farm and shared a little house with several other undocumented couples. Unfortunately my husband was severely injured in an accident. Being “illegals” we had no insurance or right to medical care. Friends took my husband back to Albania. His mother agreed to nurse him.

An all-too-believeable first-hand account from Spiked (http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/3730/) of the heroic Civil Obedience at the pro-Behaviour Modification protest camp outside Heathrow.  (Although Spiked's habit of labelling this lot 'Puritans' seems a bit unfair on 17th century Calvinists, given the latter group's social-levelling tendencies, hatred of superstition and insistence on independent thought.)  There are particularly telling moments when protest spokesman John Jordan says the muddy austerity of the camp exemplifies the kind of 'simple life' that everyone should live, and when another camper says all 'mainstream media' are the enemy, with two noble exceptions: Indymedia and The Independent.