The alternative Balkan postal system

It’s still dark while I go down to Petrarkija Street, toward the Music Academy, disoriented and confused with the reality of the early Sarajevo morning. From the bell tower of the cathedral, right there around the corner, six o’clock rings out.

With the last toll of the church bell, the irritating sound of a Viber call pierces my sleepy mind. What is it now? I pick up the phone.

“Hey, where are you?”

She sounds angry.

I glance at my phone: 6:02. Damn cathedral. Is it possible God slept in this morning too?

“What’s the problem? I’m only two minutes late!” I say, getting angry myself. “We aren’t in Switzerland!”

At that moment I see her below — right at the corner of Štadler and Pehlivanuša, where we’d agreed, as she squats in front of her car. She spots me too. We both put our phones down. “Hajde, hurry up!”, she calls to me.

Rada doesn’t like when passengers are late. And not because she can’t be patient. When her job requires patience, she will wait, even for hours if she has to. But not today. Rada has a very tight schedule. At 6:05, just above Parkuša, we pick up a package. Dobrinja, 6:25, a young guy is waiting for us, he’s going to work in a hotel on the Albanian coast. Then at 6:30, in the Mojmilo neighborhood, across from the King Fahd Mosque — the biggest in Sarajevo, a gift from Saudi Arabia — we pick up a doctor. An upstanding woman, she often takes this ride. And then towards Pale, from where Ivana, a programmer, is heading to Belgrade for a work meeting and a family visit.

Rada knows that if I’m two, three or five minutes late, everyone else will need to wait at least that long, or perhaps longer, if we get caught at a traffic light. And Rada hates for her passengers to wait. Those awaiting her passengers and those who aren’t awaiting passengers but rather the packages Rada carries with her, which are usually not any less important, also hate to wait. Above all, Rada wants us to reach the Drina River and cross the border before traffic gets bad, which starts around 8:30. If we fail, all these people will wait a lot longer.

“You get it now, what the problem is?” she asks brusquely, after giving me an in-depth rundown of the situation as we blast down the empty Tito Street toward Marin Dvor at the speed of light.

I’m a bit ashamed.

“But what are you gonna do? We’ll get there,” she says. “How are you? What’s new with you? How’s your mother?”

***

Since she started taking passengers between Sarajevo and Belgrade 20 years ago, Rada has been performing an additional, but no less important, transport function, working as part of an informal postal network. She transports anything anyone wants to send, as long as it’s legal and can fit in a car. In most cases it can.

“One time a woman came up to me in Belgrade, she’d bought everything you can imagine, just walked into shops and started filling her bags. Gimme this, gimme that. She brings two huge sacks and asks, will there be enough room in the trunk? I take a look and on top of one of the sacks sits a giant bag of popcorn. Well, alright ma’am, I think to myself, do you really need to send the popcorn too? There’s popcorn in Sarajevo! But what can you do, she is sending it to her mother. We’ll find the room!”

This time around, it’s not just Rada on the job. My bag is also full of packages. I’m bringing a carton of Sarajevo’s Drina-brand cigarettes for a friend and the night before I was given an envelope with documents — what they are or who they’re for I don’t know, but it’s important that they arrive in Belgrade as soon as possible — as well as a pouch full of some strange powder with big chunks and a coarse texture. The man who handed me the pouch said the name of the substance but I didn’t understand what he was saying. Then he repeated it. I still didn’t understand but I decided to pretend I had. Now I’m wondering if it’s legal. I hope it is. He looked like a fine guy. The person who put us into contact to hand the package off also seemed fine. At any rate, better not to mention this to Rada. If there is room for the popcorn, there must be room for my weird powder.

***

A leap of 300 kilometers in distance and a few months in time, into a bustling spring afternoon at the Belgrade bus station.

With broad strides I head toward the hall of ticket counters. My steps grow tighter; the narrow hallway between the counters and the departure platforms is packed with passengers, suitcases, shouts, rushing, confused looks, hugs and kisses.

Amid the commotion, my eyes are drawn to an old analog station clock. The long white hands show a calming sight: it’s 15:49. I love it when I arrive early, even if it’s just one minute.

At that moment, my phone rings. “Where are you?” He doesn’t sound angry but it does sound like he arrived before me, and on time. I start saying that I was the one who came early, but then I glance at my phone. It’s 15:52. Oh God.

We meet at the entrance to the platform. We don’t know each other but recognize each other easily. He is holding a large box with a synthesizer inside, a package I need to deliver to a mutual friend.

I take the box. “Okay, that’s that,” and we part ways. I’m a mailman on an important mission and I don’t have the time to waste on courtesies. I run to a counter and buy a ticket.

Outside, at platform number four, the bus for Prishtina is filling up.

***

I started my “job” as a mailman in autumn 2020, when I first began traveling between Belgrade and Prishtina so often that people started noticing, and for people to notice it’s enough that you’re traveling more often than, well, never.

And so one day I got a call from a friend I hadn’t spoken with for a while but who somehow knew about my recent travels. A family from Prishtina was on vacation in Belgrade and their daughter had left her doll behind when they returned home. While the weather map on Radio Television Serbia shows Prishtina as part of Serbia, as far as the Serbian postal service is concerned, this city doesn’t exist, just like other places in Kosovo where Serbs aren’t the majority. Private delivery services are way too expensive. The only way the doll could reach Prishtina was for somebody to take it with them.

Would you mind doing that? It’s not urgent. But, actually it is. It’s her favorite doll.

The next time, a request came from the other side: Hey, do they still have that Skenderbeg drink? Please pack two for me, I really miss it! Then, in Prishtina: It’s not easy to find film for analog cameras, and there’s that one shop in Belgrade where it’s not expensive. Can you bring me some? A few months later, on the list of my successfully completed tasks were vinyl records of Belgrade’s New Wave, a kilogram of dried sausage, the keys to someone’s apartment, and the books by Petrit Imami about the common history of Serbs and Albanians (happily, but ironically, they had immediately sold out in Belgrade).

And that’s when I started noticing that almost all the personal exchange that exists between Kosovo and Serbia — between close family members, cousins and friends, between those who left, those who fled, those who stayed and those who were caught somewhere in-between — all this exchange depends on three buses that run day and night between Belgrade, Prishtina and Prizren, and on the small group of people who travel on these buses.

***

While the drivers in neat white shirts are hurriedly loading luggage, my attention is drawn to an old lady in black who is standing next to a giant plaid bag. It’s not clear to me how she got it here. She’s patiently waiting in line. She smiles at me. I think she likes me. We start talking.

“Where to in Kosovo?”

“I’m not traveling, son. I’m sending things to my family.”

I start to ask her what she’s sending them, but one glance at the enormous Chinese-made bag answers my question. It’s full of homemade food packed carefully into plastic ice cream boxes and large glass jars. Is that sarma? I also see an old plastic box of a brand of cheese from Sombor, wrapped in thick rubber bands so that whatever mystery it holds, perhaps a salad, doesn’t spill out during travel.

Her sister lives with her family in Gračanica, near Prishtina. She hasn’t stayed with them since corona broke out. She hopes to visit soon, perhaps next month, when she is done with some medical check-ups.

“Are you often sending things?”

“Not that often. They have food there, it’s not that they don’t. But they love it when I cook for them. Recently, my granddaughter celebrated her birthday. So, there is cake! It’s convenient this way, I just put it on the bus. Otherwise, it would be impossible.”

I stop and think how it would look at the counter in the post office to send homemade food. The serious face of the clerk looks you over through the glass. What’s in the box? A strawberry cake and sarma with dried ribs! How fast do you want it delivered? Immediately, so that it doesn’t go bad, you see how hot it’s been these days! Declared value? Priceless!

***

As I will find out through several trips and dozens of conversations with people who send and receive things across the Balkans, it’s not all just an issue of food and its perishability.

Uncle Pera is returning to Lipjan; that’s where his home has been for over 60 years. He had been on a visit to Belgrade. We are sitting together on a bus. Somewhere around the toll ramp at Bubanj Potok, I offered him some Plazma cookies. In return, when we stopped for a pause at a gas station somewhere around Pojate, he gave me a cigarette. I ask him whether he sends or receives anything from Serbia by mail. He decidedly says “no.”

“You never know with them! Two months ago, my son was looking for some car documents from a friend in Kraljevo. They still haven’t arrived.”

Uncle Pera clearly doesn’t trust institutions. And judging by the number of things that travel by bus everyday, he isn’t alone.

Sitting with the drivers in the semi-dark of a roadside cafe with the longing name of “Evropa,” I’m trying to figure out what everyone is sending. Most of the travelers sit outside waiting for the sign for departure.

“Are you trying to see if we’re carrying any drugs?” one guy asks me gruffly, as he offers me a piece of chicken he just pulled out of some aluminum foil.

He offered me chicken out of common courtesy. He asked the question out of open distrust. A journalist who writes about people who are sending stuff by bus? Why would anyone do something like that? And what does that exactly mean — are they sending some interesting things? What could be interesting there?

“Don’t worry, I’m not a police officer,” I tell him. I take out my journalist’s credentials. Afrim wipes his fingers and takes a look with genuine curiosity. A thought comes to me that people in this cafe have probably taken many things out of their pockets, but it is certain that this was the first time that somebody had taken out a card from the International Federation of Journalists. It seems to have some effect on him.

“What are people sending? Well, everything. Documents mostly,” Afrim says. “Paperwork for pensions up there, in Belgrade, for those who worked in firms before the war, for real estate, if somebody is selling something in Kosovo. Medicine. People also send money. Mobile phones, clothes. All types of stuff.”

“Do you sometimes experience any trouble?” I ask. Afrim gives me a sharp look. He again thinks that I’m a cop.

His colleague Edin enters the conversation: “It happens sometimes that people don’t show up to pick up their things. Or they ask us to wait for them someplace else… How the hell am I supposed to wait?”

“What happens with those things?”

“We return them to the agency and the sender goes to pick it up there.”

“Does it sometimes happen that no one picks it up?” I ask, imagining a magical antique shop, with various objects scattered around because people forgot about them over the years, each with its own history, ordinary and unusual story… Now, that would be something!

Afrim rudely interrupts my fantasy. “No, never. They always come. Come on, let’s go.”

***

Sending packages by bus or taxi, by driver, friend or acquaintance, is one of the most functional social inventions in the Balkans. It’s as fast as the speed of a car or bus. And in a place where railway and airline connections have been destroyed or simply canceled, it’s the fastest way to send or receive things.

One specific person — driver, friend or acquaintance — takes care of the delivery. It is a person you either know or at least met, someone you’ve shaken hands with at some point and exchanged a few words. It seems in those 30 or 60 seconds a level of trust is built that is so much greater than it’s possible to establish with any postal service worker, hidden behind the counter with their promotional stock photos of yellow vans that always arrive on time.

Who would you trust more, a company with a slogan that guarantees your shipment will be delivered in the next 48 hours, and which offers you the possibility to follow your shipment through a special code, or a driver who, when asked “when will it arrive, approximately?” — asked bashfully so as not to appear as if you are, God forbid, rushing him because he has every right to get there whenever he wishes — first looks into the distance, inhales a smoke, and exhales: “it depends on the rush hour, but not before nine”? And they always give you a time that’s too early. Better for you to wait, than for the whole bus.

Somehow, for an astonishingly high number of people in the Balkans, the right answer is B.

***

Finally, there is the issue of pricing.

When you send by mail, there are a number of relevant criteria. The weight of the object, its value and the distance and speed of the delivery. Postal websites and applications are filled with detailed tables and calculations enabling you to estimate the price down to the cent. With a calculator or without one, it’s often quite high. For example, to send a half-kilogram package from Serbia to Bosnia, without a return receipt, separate handling or air transportation, it will cost you around 18 euros. If you want to send that package to Kosovo via DHL, the price is around 50 euros.

But when you send it informally, that’s when you enter the field of a magical Balkan ritual, bounded by clear rules within which absolutely nothing is clear. When a friend or acquaintance takes a package, offering money for the service is like cursing their mother. An unwritten rule calls for inviting the helper to a glass of juice or coffee, but discreetly, to make it look like you aren’t inviting them only because they helped you out, but because you really want to get a drink with them.

At the same time, it is almost expected that they will reject the refreshment because neither of you has time nor desire for drinks. If the two of you wanted a drink, you would drink, without any packages. Though without that drink, you become indebted to the helper. Rest assured, if you ever do anything to displease this person, they will go around and say how they foolishly helped you when you needed it and this is how you repay them!

When it comes to bus drivers, things are a bit different. Every day, sometimes twice a day, they carry packages across borders, taking a risk (although, they often check what is inside; if it appears illegal, dangerous, or that it could break easily, they will refuse no matter how much money they are offered). They carefully keep track of what they are carrying and for whom and where people will await them. They write down names and phone numbers, call senders from dimly lit stops by the side of highways, arguing with people who are late or have simply forgotten to show up to pick up their packages.

To put it shortly, they expect you to pay them, and for good reason. But transporting things by bus isn’t quite standard, nor do the bus companies officially permit it, so there usually isn’t any official price list. It depends on what you’re sending and sometimes on the mood of the driver, but some charge the equivalent of a full bus ticket, others a half. Others allow you to independently set the price for the service.

And so we arrive at the precious social rule known as “However much you can give” (“Kol’ko daš”). As with everything else in this region, the rule isn’t what it claims to be. On the surface, you are free to independently assess the value of the service. However, what you are actually assessing is the assessment of the other side of the transaction, that is, how much money will it take so the other person is not offended. That’s why more often than not you pay more than the service is really worth.

All the same, it’s still cheaper than the postal service, and incomparably more fun.

***

We’re on a tight schedule but Rada allows for a quick break at the gas station because someone needs to go to the toilet. I use the opportunity to grab a cigarette, or rather, that’s what I wanted to do when I realized that I have none left. Luckily, I have a carton of Drina cigarettes that I brought to deliver to my Belgrade friend Bojan. He won’t mind.

The terms Drina and Sarajevo play a significant role in his life, and not just because of cigarettes. Bojan belongs to a small group of journalists in Serbia who have been bravely and consistently writing about Serbian war crimes in Bosnia of the 1990s. Every week, links to articles arrive in my inbox that, I fear, almost no one reads.

But Bojan isn’t giving up. He is currently working on a documentary about The Belgrade Circle, a not-so-small group of liberal intellectuals and peace activists that stood up against Milošević’s regime, wars and crimes in the early 1990s. Thirty years later not even a distant echo of their voices remains in Serbia’s political scene. It’s now just a memory in the heads of a small circle of devotees.

While we drive through Romanija, I feel like we are traveling through one of his stories. We pass through the beautiful nature of eastern Bosnia and see road signs with some of the most horrible toponyms from the war, places that many in Serbia have only heard about from Hague testimonies, as symbols of massacres, rapes, and ethnic cleansing. Here, just before Sokolac, that’s where we find the turn to Rogatica. You travel upward to reach Han Pijesak, then you go to Vlasenica, then Milići and Zvornik, and if you were to travel south from Zvornik, you’d reach Srebrenica.

Rada, a Serb refugee from Sarajevo, who fled the city at the start of the war, now lives in Pale, with a distinctly clear attitude about this topic: “We were lucky. Neither my family nor I were hurt by anyone, nor have we inflicted harm upon anyone.” If it were any different, I suspect that it would be impossible to do her job: “I went to Sarajevo immediately after the war. I have nothing to hide.”

Finally we reach the Drina River.

“I used to smoke Yorks from Rovinj,” Bojan tells me, “until all ties were severed with Croatia in 1991, so I switched to Drinas.”

Bad call, Bojan, because the ties with Bosnia didn’t last long either. He started smoking them again in the early 2000s in Sarajevo. Bojan loves Sarajevo; sometimes he just disappears there and comes back more alive than ever.

And why the heck am I bringing him Drinas, aren’t there any in Belgrade? Somehow, in March 2022 the 140-year-old Sarajevo Tobacco Factory, located in a country where almost a third of the adult population are passionate smokers, shut down. Old Drinas are still in stock though, and Bojan wants to smoke them as long as they last.

I wonder if we could claim the same thing for The Belgrade Circle. The anti-war idea in Serbia has broken down, and we have been smoking stocked goods for years. But they’re dwindling.

***

Gone are the days when the Merdare border crossing was a place where you expected problems, either as a Serb at the Kosovo checkpoint or an Albanian at the Serbian checkpoint. Nevertheless, as we approach from Kuršumlija, the bus somehow always settles down and the atmosphere becomes darker and tenser. There’s a feeling of sinister anticipation. Perhaps the scenes of desolation all around us contribute to that. Empty fields, empty streets, empty houses. And a completely empty road, which seems to lead to the end of the world.

Here and there, on signs along the road you see Albanian toponyms: Kastrat, Ljuša. The village Arbanaška is also nearby. But there have been no Albanians here for a long time. On a hill near Degrmen, two kilometers from Merdare, arise the dark ruins of Beć’s church, which was built starting in 1912 with money from Serb immigrants arriving from the Sandžak, Montenegro and Zubin Potok, who came for the lands of Albanians and Turks who fled to Kosovo after the 1876 Serbian-Ottoman War. Due to the poverty after World War I, work on the church was postponed for better times, which never came. There are not many Serbs left here either; the crumbling road to mythical Kosovo takes you through one of the poorest municipalities in Serbia.

The call echoes through the bus in Serbian and Albanian: “Prepare your IDs!” In honor of the mutual non-recognition of Serbia and Kosovo, for Kosovar and Serbian citizens, passports are invalid here. First, the Serbian policeman enters. In dead silence, he collects our IDs and carefully sorts them in his palm, and then goes out. After the check, the driver brings us our IDs back, but we get to keep them only for a minute, as it is now the Kosovar policeman that enters. The entire procedure is repeated.

All of a sudden, there’s a problem. The customs officer is lingering around the back trunk. He argues with the driver and shows him something. Passengers on the right side of the bus stare at him intently, and the left-side passengers stare intently at those on the right side because they can’t see the customs officer. What did he find? Will they let us through? Deeply buried fears rise to the surface. Suddenly, we know that anything is possible.

The driver shakes his head. The customs officer also shakes his head. It’s as if he doesn’t want to have to deal with this stuff. He slams the trunk door closed. I had the feeling that we all could breathe again.

We enter Kosovo. Now we begin seeing signs with Serbian toponyms, but no Serbs.

***

Belgrade, late May.

Lula greets me in the inner courtyard of an old villa in the center of the city. The street is packed with a hellish noon crowd. In the yard, full of delicate red and yellow flowers, there is complete silence.

Lula is just like that villa in many ways: elegant, sad and turned inwards. “I haven’t been out at all in a long time,” she tells me. “This is no longer my city.”

The letter and the bag were delivered to her neatly and on time. I decide not to inquire about the contents of theenvelope. I assume there was a reason that it was sealed. But I can’t bear to not ask about the bag of mysterious powder.

“Tarhana,” Lula smiles. “A soup mixture. My aunt Ešrefa from Travnik prepares this for me, and sends it through my nephew. They prepare it differently in Serbia. It’s good too, but I like hers. In Serbia, they usually say ‘tarana,’ as they don’t like that ‘h’ here because it was adopted from Turkish. Just like in Bosnia they started to insert it in places where it doesn’t belong.”

Lula has plenty to say about the packages that are sent between Belgrade and Sarajevo. Born in Sarajevo, she has been living in Belgrade since the end of the 1960s. She’s a person who, immediately after the beginning of the Sarajevo siege, collected and shipped humanitarian aid to the besieged city. She struggled for every shipment to reach who it was intended for. And she fought for thousands of them, shipments and people. “When I see cardboard boxes today, I feel nauseous.”

I leave her on the terrace of the old villa, carefully observing the flowers, while she slowly chews over the memory of a time when some resistance existed.

***

We are sitting in the restaurant Kraljevo, not far away from a big parking lot on Sarajevska Street in Belgrade, where Rada traditionally picks up and drops off passengers. Where else?

She spent the whole day in the car and is very tired but she finds the time to talk. She tells me how she has been fainting lately. The other day, she barely got in the car, but she didn’t give up. She transported her passengers and packages. She is receiving regular therapy now, and things will get better.

It’s a hot day. We order a light lunch, soups and cabbage salad. The tavern is empty and the waiter is bored, so he makes inappropriate jokes. Rada charmingly ignores them.

“Anyway, I have a story for you,” she tells me:

“In Sarajevo, there is this woman, Mirsada. She had a husband and a son. And the son had a friend, Marko, who didn’t have parents. She liked him a lot. So, anyway, Marko… Until then no one cared about what names people had. Normal people didn’t care about names. But that’s when the war started. She wondered what to do with him. Mirsada hid Marko in her house, so he wouldn’t get killed. She told me, ‘Rada, I kept him in the freezer. My child went off to the battlefield, and Marko was in the freezer.’

“She hid him until she found a person, somebody she could trust, so that she could get him into the territory of Republika Srpska, and then to Belgrade.

“And so, time goes by, and Marko becomes a very successful man. He starts a family, starts a business and everything goes flawlessly for him. And Mirsada, her husband dies, she stays with her son. And I don’t know the details, but somehow they got in touch with Marko. Imagine, after all these years…”

“And then,” Rada pauses, “then her son dies too. And Mirsada is left alone, and Marko becomes the only light in her life.

“Since then, since I’ve been working, he keeps sending her stuff. A bag of beans, peppers, walnuts, kajmak, a jar of honey. And he makes sure to send some money, 50 or 100 euros, but always with some food.

“So, I asked him once — Marko, my boy, you buy this food, and she has to go out and collect it and carry it back up to her apartment — wouldn’t it be easier for you to send her the money so she can buy it herself?

“He tells me, ‘Rada, I tried doing that but she is happy when she gets that box of kajmak and she can say — look at what my dear Marko sent me!”

And that’s when I finally got it. It’s not things that travel, it’s people. And only when people can’t, do they send things. But even then, in actuality, it’s not things that travel — but people’s feelings.

Editor’s Note: By request of the interviewees, some of the names in the text have been changed.

One in every five Polish vets has considered suicide: “I broke down on December 23rd when I had to put down nine animals in one day.”

A preliminary task: count the amount of people around you who have committed suicide in recent years.

Vets are conscientious, detail-oriented, and great at science. Calculations are a normal part of their work. 

Magda Jaszczak takes a moment to consider. One, two, three… Thirteen people, she counts. 

The first was a doctor who employed her in a clinic in northern England sixteen years ago. He was kind enough to give Magda two months to move out of a neighbouring town and organise her life in the new environment. When she moved there for good, he was already dead. Next, there were three female vets. In 2019, they passed away one by one, all within a span of three months. One of them used to be Magda’s mentor. She had just founded a thriving clinic. The second one was an internationally renowned academic teacher. She trained veterinary nurses. A few months ago, another acquaintance of Magda, a 50-year-old vet, passed away, also having committed suicide. In the Swedish town where she currently runs a clinic, a vet killed himself four years ago. Quite recently, at a hospital in a large city next door, it was a young female graduate, an intern. And so on.

Magda: “In this industry, everyone has a colleague who has died in this way, regardless of whether you work in Poland, England or Sweden.”

Natalia Strokowska, a vet working in Warsaw, says that for her, it’s three people. “Last year, it was a friend from university. She suffered from bipolar disorder. Earlier, a colleague who I helped find a job abroad. He was addicted to drugs. Oh, and a veterinary technician. He treated my guinea pig once. He had been stealing drugs, he was addicted to them. Nobody knew.”

Szymon Najdora, the owner of a veterinary clinic in Katowice, knows two people: “Four years ago, it was one of my employees. A great vet who was adored by her clients. A few hours before she had called me to ask about her vacation; she had wanted to extend it to meet a friend. At that time, we were taking care of a dog at the clinic who had had a strange accident. He was left at home with a group of children, and when the parents returned, his hind legs were paralysed. The owners left him with us. They did not want to contribute to the treatment. It was a tough experience for the entire team, but this girl was hit the hardest. She fought hard for that dog. We even got him a trolley so that he could move around. The dog is doing well now, the partner of our late colleague adopted him. 

I went to another funeral last November. She was a young, talented woman who had achieved a lot. Also around 30 years old. That’s why it hurts so much. Among my other colleagues, there have been five suicide attempts in the past few years.”

Paula Dziubińska-Bartylak is the owner of a clinic in Bydgoszcz and specializes in exotic animals, dogs and cats: “In 2020, my close friend committed suicide. A few years earlier, in the first year that I worked in Poznań, it was a female colleague who was on duty on New Year’s Eve. At another clinic, years ago, another female colleague. She tried to do it at the clinic. Our chief, who went out to consult on a horse, came back because she’d forgotten to take her equipment and medication with her. She arrived just in time. The girl was lying on the office floor, and they managed to resuscitate her. If I were to count the suicide attempts among my colleagues and close friends in the industry, I would run out of fingers.”

A few years ago in the UK, vets were asked, “If you couldn’t treat animals, what kind of profession would be an alternative for you?” Many of them filled in accounting. Magda: “Yes, it makes sense. Most of us are perfectionists, proficient in sciences. Maybe if we were dealing with figures and not animals, we wouldn’t lose so many people.”

The murderous training begins at university: veterinary medicine is one of the most difficult and demanding programs. Before the first major exam, students need to learn the anatomical systems of several species: from pigs and cows to horses, sheep, dogs and cats. You need to remember every bone name in both Polish and in Latin. And this is just the beginning. There is also mental conditioning, an aspect where students, especially female ones, learn that they are nobody.  

Natalia Strokowska is originally from Kraków. Seven years ago, she completed her course in veterinary medicine at Warsaw University of Life Sciences (SGGW). For the first three years of the program, she alternately studied, worked, and slept. She hardly had time for private life. She spent half of her time breathing formalin fumes in the dissecting room and the other half looking through a microscope. From the very beginning, lecturers told her she wouldn’t make it. Students took to sedatives. Every now and then, someone ‘disappeared.’ They dropped out of university, took a medical leave of absence, or ended up in a psychiatric hospital. It was whispered about in the university corridors. 

Natalia also ended up consulting a psychiatrist during the third year of her studies. She received a referral for publicly-financed therapy in her hometown Kraków. She could not afford a course of private therapy in Warsaw, so every Friday she would buy a cheap ticket for a TLK train to Kraków, attend a therapy session, gather strength among her relatives and friends, and then on Monday she would return to the capital for classes. Natalia is an attractive, tall blonde woman and over time she started to earn extra money by modeling. She also took part in the Miss SGGW competition. One professor asked her, “My dear, would you prefer to become a vet or walk down the runway?” Another lecturer, infamous for his ‘weakness’ for pretty girls, handed her a note after a class inviting her to his office. A few years later, he got dismissed on a disciplinary basis. There was also another professor who liked to lean against female students under the pretext of peering into the microscope from behind their backs. He flunked Natalia by a quarter-point, forcing her to resit exams in the September session. At the end, he commented, “I hope this time you can demonstrate your abilities.” He currently teaches at another university.

Today, Natalia is completing her PhD thesis and is a lecturer herself. She notes that some of her students are no longer capable of even hiding signs of self-harm. Natalia sees the suffering in their pale, tired, grey faces. She is able to guess their condition by looking at the pulled-down sleeves of their jerseys. And although the current authorities at her university are aware of the importance of the mental health of future vets, the measures taken are just a drop in the ocean of their needs.

Natalia: “The profile of a veterinary surgeon has changed during the last thirty years. Until the 1990s, the profession was dominated by men who treated farm animals. Today, there is a demand for the treatment of pets, and it’s mostly women who want to study veterinary medicine. They often have a strong sense of purpose, they love animals and want to save them. Then, once they’re at university, they bump into old-school lecturers who sometimes openly show their disrespect. There is an unwritten rule of ‘survival of the strongest.’ In my class, after the first two semesters, the drop-out rate was 40%. In the following years, we were joined by the so-called “parachutists,” those who ended up a class down to repeat a year. The record-holder in my class repeated his year three times, he was several years older than us.” 

Magda graduated from Warsaw University of Life Sciences 16 years ago. “After the third year, I had a mental breakdown and took a leave of absence. Mobbing was ubiquitous at the Faculty. Any pretext was good enough for the lecturers to flunk a student at the exam. One of the lecturers derided me for having red hair. I got a diploma with a mere Pass. When I did my specialisation course in England, I graduated with honours.”

In England, Magda became involved in the activities of Vetlife Charity, which runs a helpline for vets and veterinary students. “In England, they see changes similar to those occurring in Poland. There, the 50-year-old vets in checked shirts and dirty gloves are being replaced by the so-called “pony girls,” the daughters of wealthy parents who loved their ponies so much that they decided to study veterinary medicine. Then, when such a “ponygirl” is confronted with reality, she experiences shock. They are often perfectionists, slim, flawless women wearing well-fitting clothes who, unlike their older colleagues, do not take to drink but suffer from anorexia or torture their bodies in gyms. While I was working at the charity, we received about 20 emails a day from male and female vets. They wrote about self-harm, anorexia, depression, suicidal thoughts, and problems with their clients and bosses. Our task was to offer them support, which included referring them to an appropriate therapist.”

Paula: “The word ‘leisure’ was removed from my vocabulary when I was first started studying veterinary medicine. The amount of work you have to put in is shocking: the treadmill never stops, you have to give it 120% all the time. There were times when I would go to sleep in my day clothes which I came home from uni and then I would wear them the entire following day. I didn’t want to waste time changing my clothes, I would rather study. Studying veterinary medicine, I learned to reduce my own needs to zero.’

Szymon: “I don’t have bad memories from my studies in Katowice. But I did see the pressure that the female students faced. Derision from the lecturers and claims that there is no place for women in the profession was a daily occurrence. The women had to work a lot harder than the men to achieve the same results.”

If there existed a survival manual for vets, the first chapter would be about the university and might end with something like this: “So you have survived university and believe that it will get only better from now on, huh? You don’t even realize how wrong you are.” Szymon: “Maybe if someone told us right away in the first year that this job is not really about animals only, then we wouldn’t have to attend so many of our colleagues’ funerals.”  

Survival Manual, Chapter Two: “You will barely make ends meet and you’ll be considered a rip-off merchant.”

It’s 2014 and Natalia’s just started her first job at a clinic near Warsaw. The boss mentally abuses doctors and 17 employees pass through the clinic in three years. Natalia’s earnings: PLN 980 handed over in an envelope, no social security. Natalia models on the side so she can get by. When she receives her doctoral scholarship, she reaches 2,000 zlotys a month. For several months she passes through various veterinary clinics in Warsaw where she is employed illegally or part-time. In 2015, she registers as a freelancer and starts teaching Medical English. The doctoral scholarship is spent paying the social security contributions, a bookkeeping service provider and a room at a dormitory. She also gets her first contract for doing on-duty jobs at British clinics. After a few years, she finds jobs in Sweden. This is the first time she sees any savings in her account. 

Sedlak & Sedlak’s report shows that the average net salary of a veterinary surgeon in Poland is PLN 2,900. The research conducted by the company Natalia works for (Vetnolimits) in 2018 shows that more than a half of Polish veterinary surgeons have financial problems.

Natalia: “People often consider a vet to be a rip-off merchant basking in luxury. The reality couldn’t be more different. The wealthy ones are the clinic owners who have worked for their position over the years or the vets that take care of large-scale industrial herds. Single-vet surgeries or small clinics often barely get by. Clients require services at the level of human medicine, so vets go into debt buying very expensive equipment like ultrasound scanners, X-ray scanners and tomographs. Products that amount to hundreds of thousands or even millions of zlotys of credit. On top of that, there are the costs of specialisation courses and life-long training, which we pay for ourselves. And our clients are not always willing to pay for the service delivered. What if the animal does not wake up from anaesthesia after surgery or dies despite our attempts to save it? Has the service been delivered or not? Some think it hasn’t been and are prepared to fight to prove they’re right. I hear from other vets that uncollected bills for veterinary treatment may even exceed 50,000 zlotys.”

Szymon: “People buy a pet at a pet store for 50 zlotys and expect its medical treatment to cost more or less that amount. They are shocked when they learn that a surgical procedure will cost them several hundred zlotys. They raise hell, they insult us. Sometimes clients who cannot afford treatment leave their pet, for instance, a rabbit, with us and then we pass the animal on to charities. This is not a good thing because it teaches people that what is broken can be left behind. Several times a year, we also find animals in serious condition abandoned at the door of our clinic. That’s why I believe that having an animal should be a privilege. A luxury.”

Survival Manual, Chapter Three: “You have no idea what extreme despair or extreme rage truly mean.”

Natalia remembers a woman nine months pregnant who came in to have her old dog examined. An ultrasound examination showed that the animal had a giant, bleeding tumour on its spleen. The owner howled in shock and despair and fell to the floor. She lay with the dog for a dozen or so minutes and wept, holding her pregnant belly. Her mother was sitting next to her, also crying. Natalia sat down next to them and held their hands until they calmed down.

Paula: “When an animal dies during surgery, people can roll on the ground and shout, “It can’t be true! It is not possible!” On such occasions, I don’t know what to do. Go out? Lie down next to them and comfort them? I definitely cannot say, “Please pull yourself together and take a seat.” During our studies, no one prepared us for what it would be like to work with people. We never had psychology classes. At the beginning of my career, I didn’t feel equipped to inform clients about the death of their pets. I would dial the number and hang up because I was crying. Finally, there is also the question of the bill. I might forgo my own remuneration, but what about the cost of the procedure? The fee of the anaesthetist who will send me an invoice?” 

The despair of clients is sometimes paired with aggression. 

Five years ago, Szymon consulted a client about his dog. The animal weighed 10 kilos, half of its intended weight. The dog was vomiting violently, it had a tumour that covered almost half of its leg and a few airgun pellets in its body. The owner reluctantly agreed to euthanasia. Later on, he gave Szymon a single-star internet rating with a comment: “If I hadn’t chosen that particular vet, the dog would probably be alive today.” Szymon: “Not a week goes by without me being called a quack and a murderer. Over time, you’re supposed to become immune to such things, but when someone leaves crying out, “We’ll burn this shack of yours to the ground!”, your skin crawls. The worst part is that these aggressive owners often cause their pets’ fatal conditions themselves. We recently had a rabbit with an enormous tumour on its testicle, decayed teeth, a stone in the urethra, a broken leg, and a tangle of fur and dried faeces. The owner looked straight into my eyes and said, “He was fine yesterday.” He tried to pass on the responsibility for the pet’s condition to me.”

Paula feels like she has already heard everything out there. She was called a “heartless murderess,” and one client threatened to kill her child. There were also those who announced that they would destroy her or “fight her until she broke.” 

She also had cases like this one. A dog already has heavy dyspnoea but the client doesn’t agree to euthanasia because she wants the pet to die at home. It will be in agony for two days because “the owner loves it so much.” Paula questions this love. Because if the owner did love the dog, why didn’t she seek medical treatment for the dog six months earlier instead of waiting for the tumour to drag over the ground, decay and eventually rot? Paula sees multiple cases of such neglect every week: “Most of these animals could have been cured. As it is, instead of curing them, I have to euthanise them or watch their human take them home, thus condemning them to more torment. How am I supposed to recover from something like this?”

At the other extreme, there are clients who are not going to let go. Even now, Paula can remember an old cat with kidney failure whose owners kept dragging it from one specialist to another for a year. They spent thousands on its prolonged death: more pumps, more nasoesophageal probes, more nasopharyngeal tubes and drips. The cat was as good as dead. Paula recalls it spread on the examination table like a wet cloth, surrounded by cables and IV drops and tormented by suffering. Paula couldn’t do a thing. The owner can do what they like in this situation. If they want the animal to suffer at home unattended, no one can stop them. But if they are willing to spend tens of thousands on persistent therapy, the vet is equally helpless. The common denominator of both situations is suffering. The kind of death that Paula would not wish on any human being.

Paula: “Desperate people are capable of anything. Why did no one teach us at the university how to talk to them?”

Natalia: “We shepherd our clients through powerful crises even though we don’t have any psychological training to help us to do so. We do it intuitively, at the price of our own sanity. Over time, some cut themselves off from their own emotions in order to survive. It even has a name: “compassion fatigue.” Emotional exhaustion is caused by your own compassion. But if you’ve stopped feeling anything, it means it’s high time to consider changing your profession. 

In January 2019, the US CDC (Centre for Disease Control and Prevention) published the first large-scale study on mortality rates among American vets. The results were alarming: in male vets, the probability of suicide turned out to be more than twice as high as in the general population; for female vets, this factor is as much as 3.5 times. Research has also shown that vets specialising in the treatment of pets are at the highest risk of death by suicide.

Researchers try to explain these statistics by referring to the specific working conditions of vets: working overtime, poor work-life balance, the growing demands of clients, and the necessity of performing euthanasia – not only in old and sick animals but also in those neglected by their owners. 

But that’s not all. Research done in both the USA and the UK shows that veterinary medicine attracts people of a specific personality type: conscientious, empathetic perfectionists. These traits in themselves can contribute to the development of mental disorders resulting from high levels of stress, and when we add in extreme working conditions, this creates a perfect storm – a combination of circumstances in which tragedy comes easy. The issue of money is also important. Most veterinary medicine graduates leave university with massive debt that they have to pay back over the following years.

In Poland, no statistics similar to the American ones have been collected, but there are many signs that the problem is universal and exists in most European countries. The research of Natalia Strokowska shows that one in every five Polish vets has considered suicide, and 4% of vets have frequent suicidal thoughts. In addition, they suffer from addiction, mostly alcohol and drugs, from financial problems, working overtime, low levels of job satisfaction and disturbed family relationships.

Survival Manual, Chapter Four: “You will see more suffering than you can bear.”

Szymon: “There are happy moments, but in general this is a so-called disaster industry.”

Natalia: “I was devastated by a recent shift during which I put down a dog.”

And it was not so much this single death, but the endless loop: life, death, life, death. The euthanised dog’s owners wanted the presence of a tumour confirmed by post-mortem examination. Natalia carried the dog over to the examination table and opened its stomach. While her hands were inside its still-warm body, the receptionist burst into the room, “You need to hurry up, there’s a client coming with a kitten to be vaccinated.” Natalia put away the liver containing the tumour, took off her gloves, disinfected her hands, and stretched her mouth with a professional smile. It’s a joy to meet a new family member. You need to admire it, stroke it tenderly, and enjoy its arrival together with your client. But your thoughts are elsewhere. They’re next door, with the body of the dog that an hour ago was still very much alive. For which someone is mourning. The client with the kitten left, and Natalia came back to the other room to close the dog’s body. She could not swallow her lunch. Within minutes, she would be performing another planned euthanasia.

Magda: “In England, where I worked for 13 years, I once had to put down a pregnant bitch together with her entire, as-of-yet unborn litter. The client could not afford a caesarean. The bitch was in bad shape and she probably wouldn’t have survived the surgery; despite that, this euthanasia was one of the worst ones for me. In my own clinic, I could have let the client pay for the caesarean in instalments, but it was a veterinary corporation, so I didn’t have that option. The clinic owners only took care of the bottom line. The killing was on me.”

Paula describes her last working day. First, patient number one dies – a rabbit brought in by the owner two days too late. On Saturday, the man sent an email to the clinic, in which he said that the animal refused to eat. He was told to bring the rabbit in immediately. He wrote back that maybe he would find time on Sunday afternoon. He didn’t. He brought in the extremely dehydrated rabbit on Monday. The fight for its life began immediately because the animal no longer had the swallowing reflex. By Tuesday morning, the rabbit was dead. During the post-mortem examination, it turned out that the ulcers had perforated its stomach wall and all the undigested content had spilt into its belly. Patient number two: a guinea pig that suffered from pneumonia. Paula had been fighting for it for months, but on that day, despite resuscitation, the guinea pig died. Patient number three: a rabbit with gastric dilatation. It might survive. 

Paula: “Don’t forget to mention that this was, in theory,  my day off. I just drove over to the clinic to help the girls who just couldn’t handle so many emergency patients.”

Magda: “I broke down on the day on which I had to perform nine euthanasia procedures. It was on the 23rd of December, a date known to vets all over the world as the ‘holiday cleaning’ day.

Paula: “In Poland, we call it the “warehouse clearance.’”

Magda: “In England, we would put down the biggest amount of animals before Christmas Eve. They were mostly old dogs, often in poor condition. However, with a little push, they could live a little longer. But the thing is that an old, deaf dog with a smelly muzzle is hardly attractive to Christmas guests. Especially when a breeder is already waiting for a new puppy to be collected. Pre-Christmas euthanasia procedures are interspersed with vaccinations of puppies. It hits your psyche. The more so because neither in England nor in Sweden am I entitled to refuse to perform euthanasia. There, everything can qualify as persistent therapy and for that, I can be sued.’

Paula mentions that before Christmas Eve, the owners try everything to persuade her to perform euthanasia. “He’s definitely going to get worse during Christmas,” is one claim clients often make. In such situations, she says that her decision depends on the outcome of the clinical examination. If she finds the dog to be in very bad shape, she agrees. After all, this is a final act of mercy towards the dog. Since the owner had done nothing for the dog for ten years, they could just as well have taken it out to the forest and abandoned it there before Christmas. Instead, they brought the animal to her. If the dog is not in a desperate condition, Paula informs the client that it needs medical treatment. Some clients take offence and leave. Others change their mind. 

Paula: “I once had a client whom I told that her dog needed a blood test. She looked at me in shocked disbelief, “How’s that? A dog has blood?” I try not to get upset with such things. When I bought my first car, I had no idea that the engine oil needed to be changed at times. The mechanic looked at me with pity. Some people have a similar approach to buying a dog. Then I try and educate them and sometimes I see a change: suddenly they start taking good care of the animal, buy specialist food, and order the most expensive tests. Such miracles also happen.”

Magda took a medical leave after the ‘holiday cleaning.’ The family doctor she saw couldn’t understand what her problem was: Do you have debts? Family problems? Are you in danger of losing your job? Magda shook her head. No, the point was that within a single day she took nine lives. The doctor shrugged and gave her a referral to a psychologist. The therapist was young, a recent graduate. She couldn’t bear to listen to Magda’s story.

Magda: “That’s why we screened the psychologists we employed at the Vetlife Charity. Vets had repeatedly complained that the therapists in England didn’t view them as patients but rather saw them as professionals. Some of them went as far as taking out their phones mid-way of a therapeutic session to present pictures of their own dogs. Or they would ask, “Okay, so which anthelmintic is the most effective in your opinion?”’ 

Chapter Five: “There will always be someone to say you haven’t done enough.”

Natalia: “We often face painful dilemmas. For instance: the animal could be cured, but the owner cannot afford to pay for the treatment. I feel like crying when I read the criticism on the Internet that says that we should save such animals at our own expense because being a vet is a mission in and of itself. My reply would be: Do doctors adopt babies found in baby hatches? Do dentists take pity on the homeless who hang out in front of their offices and put tooth crowns in or give them root canal treatment for free? Because we, vets, constantly pick up injured birds, cat litters, tormented dogs or puppies stuck in boxes at our clinic doors. And we treat them, often for free, and find them new homes. But to many people, especially those who comment anonymously on the internet, this is still isn’t enough.”

Paula: “Not long ago, I had a client whose rabbit did not wake up from anaesthesia after surgery. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I warned the owner beforehand about how this sometimes happens. Despite this, the woman could not believe it had happened. She sat down in my office and, in tears, demanded an explanation. Meanwhile, clinic employees were calling other owners to say that their pets’ surgeries would be delayed. “So what the hell are you doing there all day?” a client waiting for his rabbit to get castrated shouted. That day, we called it a day at one in the morning. It’s impossible to please everybody.”

Chapter Six: “Save yourself.”

Paula: “I’m not tired of my own compassion, I’m tired of death.”

For Paula, the need to keep jumping from mourning to joy and back is similar to bipolar disorder. In 2020, she felt that none of the versions of herself was real. Not one who comforts distraught clients, nor the one who expresses happiness about having cured a dog’s lymphoma. Arriving home from work, she would stare at the wall and feel nothing. She had the impression that she was made of cardboard: clean, without any feelings, perfectly indifferent. And this is where it gets dangerous. It doesn’t matter to a ‘cardboard person’ whether they live or die. When her close friend committed suicide, the thought crossed her mind that ‘just one step and we can be together again.’

Paula: ‘Our entire industry is steeped in dying. To us, death seems a simple and perfect solution. After all, we know everything about it. We are getting accustomed to it every day. This way of thinking is extremely dangerous.’

This year, Paula decided: “Enough is enough. I need help.” She started therapy and also attends classes with a coach to better cope with the management of the clinic. She does it both for herself and for her little daughter. The ‘new Paula’ tries to turn the phone off and reminds herself that she cannot help everyone. The ‘old Paula’ goes to the clinic even on vacation and sometimes doesn’t come back home for three days in a row, sleeping at the office. That’s how she is: someone else’s suffering torments her. As long as it’s possible for her to reduce it to a manageable level, she keeps working. She feels pity for both animals and people, even when the latter’s ignorance or neglect infuriates when. 

Magda has set up her own clinic in Sweden. She’s also become involved in creating the country’s first charity to support vets with mental health problems. For Swedes, who don’t like to speak out about uncomfortable problems or emotions, this is a novelty.

Szymon says that he has therapeutic support available at home because his partner is a psychologist. And when he notices that a client is unable to cope with a pet’s death, he discreetly hands over her business card.

Natalia Strokowska has founded her Vetnolimits company where she offers mentoring and professional support to vets. Not long ago, together with Halszka Witkowska, a suicidologist, she talked about the risk of suicide in her profession at a virtual Congress of Polish Psychiatrists. Several hundred psychiatrists listened to her speak. 

She talks a lot about mental health with her students. Natalia: “This is a generation that is different from mine. They are not ashamed to talk about what hurts them. For them, consulting a psychiatrist or a psychologist is not a reason to feel ashamed but a logical solution when the realities in their life become too difficult. They thank me every time I tell them about my own experiences because it makes them feel less alone. This does not mean, however, that the call for systemic changes should be stopped. First of all, the ways in which vets are trained has to be changed. In order to prevent tragedies, students should learn something about psychology, ethics, and mechanisms of coping with difficult situations during their university years. One thing will not change for sure: this profession will always attract people who are exceptionally sensitive and empathetic beyond compare. We must not let them be destroyed.”