The idea to realize a playground for the school-orphanage of Kotlina it is born following the humanitarian experience lived by close friends to Controprogetto with the association Asvi Italia. Kotlina is a small and complex town of mountain to the border with the Macedonia, attainable only through one excavated hold and steep long seven endless kilometers, only connection with asphalts that it conducts to the town of Hanelezi in the region of Gilane. When the Serb militiamen took the city, the situation was for a long time already tense and difficult and the men of the village had escaped leaving the women, their children and the elderly ones to garrison the houses. That day of 1999, the objective became the school, stings of reference for the whole population (currently constituted by around 150 children and 200 adults. The soldiers captured the young people of the country, they killed them and they buried in a common pit, consuming so a slaughter more of fifty unarmed civilians . At the end of the conflict, that pit was located thanks to the testimony of a boy that, hidden him on top of the minaret, he had assisted impotent to the tragedy under that he consumed of him; this boy is one of the witnesses of accusation to the trial of the Aja against Milosevic for war crimes.
Thirty orphans of war now live to Kotlina assisted by their relatives, adopted in reality by the whole community.
What we would call orphanage is in effects the school of the village and it is also point of meeting, center of sanitary assistance, place for the clearing of the helps. All the children spend their days studying and then playing before. In front of the school however only an excavated lawn and the cemetery. With the friends of the Asvi, to fill this void with a playground, that was able at least partly to fill the days of these children, we have thought about building three mushrooms with bridges and slides, studied then by two of us, a designer and an architect, that are dealt with the most technical part of the project. The days passed and to Controprogetto they cut, it smoothed, and painted, hocking the whole time to disposition and, toward the end, also working the night, actually to reach to see, three days before loading the truck, the 1400 pieces of the structure united and climbed on. The three giant mushrooms have been gotten off and packed, ready to be loaded on the lorry together with the humanitarian helps brought by Asvi.Some of us have finally departed for the Kosovo, destination Kotlina, to finally climb on the plauground. In three days of job, helped by the people of the place, the big mushrooms have been reconstructed and finally inaugurated by the rejoicing children. The experience lived to Kotlina to narrow contact with the population has been a great occasion of knowledge, integration and collaboration: every day we have been guests from a different family and to evening the whole community it gathered him to know us between a tea and the other. The mushrooms have essentially been built with material given by company which the project has been introduced and that they have decided to sustain it. Thanks to these contributions Controprogetto has succeeded in building this park you play reducing her own expenses to 2000 €, between tools and materials.