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Police detective Jack Kraus has seen it all—drugs, pimps, underage prostitutes, poverty and violence. But don’t let his street-smart and brazen exterior mislead you; inside beats the heart of a compassionate man.
In 2002, the 32-year veteran with Edmonton Police Services applied to the UN Civilian Police Corps for International Peacekeeping. The vice-squad detective had no idea where he would be posted. The UN was in the process of deploying 4,700 civilian police in Kosovo to maintain civil law and develop a future police service, and in East Timor, UN civilian police officers from more than 40 countries were assisting in training that country’s local police. “I initially thought it might be Kosovo. I think it was a toss up between Kosovo and East Timor. It was either too hot with snakes or too cold with no snakes—I don’t like snakes and I’ve been around the cold, so I could work the cold,” he says. “We landed in Kosovo on December 17, 2002, in the snow.”
Little did Kraus know that his nine-month stint training local police would evolve into a mission helping destitute children in the Balkans.
In Kosovo, Kraus found himself in the middle of an ongoing centuries-old conflict between Albanians and Serbians. Despite the presence of United Nations peacekeepers, problems keep flaring up, Kraus says, and ultimately it is civilians who suffer.
“I was assigned to the border police. I went from one end of the country to the other. I went to all the different border points and passed through remote villages. I could see the poverty. I saw children walking in the snow barefoot, poorly clothed, hungry—you could tell by their waists—they were little, skinny waists. I thought, I have to do something about this—and I did.”
In March 2003, Kraus returned to Leduc, Alberta, where he lives with his family, and over a two-week period raised $15,000 for children in Kosovo. “I started going to different financial institutions and to the media and asked if anyone could help me raise money for children in Kosovo. My wife went to the schools.” The project was dubbed “Jack’s Kids in Kosovo.” He appreciates the support his project received from schools of the Black Gold region.
Given Kraus’s personality—forthright and confident—he knew that the only way to get aid to children in Kosovo was to personally oversee how the money was spent. “My promise to everybody was that every penny you send goes directly to the people who need it. I absolutely refused to deal with middlemen, because the money goes sideways. When I could identify a situation, we would analyze it and see what the situation needed. If we needed to buy food and clothes, then we would purchase the items and deliver them, so I knew it was going to the right people. It was hand-delivered.”
Kraus adopted the mountain village of Stutica, located in the Drenica region 40 kilometres west of the Kosovo capital Pristina. In April 1999, Serbian forces swept through the area and massacred many of Stutica’s ethnic Albanians. “Most of the men were gone or dead,” Kraus says. “I think there were approximately 270 people in that village and surrounding area that I gave provisions to for five months. It was my vision that this project was for the poorest of the poor.”
Kraus’s vision, however, needed to be translated into something tangible. Using his organizational skills and more than just a dash of chutzpah, Kraus enlisted a convoy of UN trucks to haul staple goods through the mountains to Stutica. He knew that by feeding the townspeople, especially the children, he was providing them with hope for the future. “How’s a hungry kid going to learn anything?” he asks. “You can give them all the stuff you want, but he’s not going to be able to learn because he’s thinking about eating. So then I transitioned the idea: let’s get them fed, get them healthy and they’ll be in good shape to start school in September.”
Kraus arranged also for the delivery of school books, scribblers, pens, chalk, blackboard erasers and desks.
An anecdote Kraus is particular fond of recounting relates to Bashkim, a young boy blinded by cataracts. He was 15 years old but was no bigger than an eight-year-old and he appeared to have “two big blue dimes on his eyes,” Kraus says. The local police said the boy wanted to attend school. This was Kraus’s cue to assess the situation, which he considered a straightforward matter: either Bashkim stays blind and misses out on his education or he attends school. Bashkim’s mother had arranged a cataract operation for her son in Pristina, but several years had passed since the deal had been made. Kraus visited the doctor, secured his agreement to honour his contract with the mother and arranged for local police to transport Bashkim safely to Pristina and back. “When I was there in April [2005], I saw him and he can see—he’s actually done two or three years of schooling in one year!”
As Kraus talks about his reunion with Bashkim this past April, he pauses a moment to reflect. It is just one of many hardship stories that ends positively, but sometimes it seems a miracle that Kraus made any difference in war-torn Kosovo at all, considering the opposition to his plan to provide food and supplies to Albanians. “In Kosovo, they told me, ‘No, you can’t do this.’ I told them, ‘You have a choice, you can come with me and help or get the hell out of the way, or I’m going over top of you.’ It really created a spark with the local police we were training, and that’s when it started to go, because people saw that somebody was willing to lead.”
Now Kraus is spearheading “Jack’s Kids,” which features children’s artwork from Kosovo and Canada and involves the Rotary Club of Nisku-Leduc. The goal is to auction artwork produced by children in Kosovo and Edmonton, the proceeds of which will go to children overseas and to inner-city schools in Edmonton. The Rotary Club has taken Kraus’s project on as one of its own. The auction of artwork will take place later this year or early next year. In the meantime, financial donations are accepted at all Alberta Treasury Branches and branches of the Bank of Montreal in the greater Edmonton area.
With assistance from the Rotary Club, Kraus plans to return to Kosovo in the near future. “I don’t care about race, colour, religion, gender, creed—nothing. You see that poor kid standing there, and you can tell he’s hungry. Who the hell ever asks a kid here that’s hungry if he’s Catholic, Protestant, white, black, purple? That’s the luxury we have here—you just give him food. That’s just a Canadian perspective of not knowing that the rest of the world works in ignorance. And I’m talking about ignorance in depth—ignorance that I would never have imagined, and that’s why they’re still having problems over there . . . . So I just make it work, and so far I’ve had good luck.”
For more information about “Jack’s Kids,” contact Jack Kraus at Jacks_Kids@hotmail.com.
Raymond Gariépy is associate editor of the ATA Magazine and managing editor of the ATA News and Learning Team.
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