One tent over is a another familiar scene: A group of women sit in a circle, talking, holding babies and tending the children who run in and out between them. Among the group, a pretty woman named Hanifeh Istrefaj, who looks to be in her mid-30s, cuddles a 10-month-old baby girl in red pajamas with booties and cat and flower appliques, letting the children take turns holding her. Handed comfortably from one adoring child to another, the baby, Blerina, looks content, supremely indifferent to her family's harrowing journey from Pristina two weeks ago.

This Neprosteno camp is one of five that NATO troops set up in Macedonia for Kosovo refugees, who number more than 122,000 -- about a third the number in the camps in neighboring Albania. All in all, international officials estimate that some 500,000 of Kosovo's 2 million residents are refugees and an additional 400,000 are displaced from their homes but still trapped in the Kosovo mountains and woods. This camp has been open only a week, but already its new inhabitants have started to re-create the human patterns and routines that make life bearable and familiar -- collecting firewood and bottled water, cleaning, listening to the news, gossiping.

"It helps a lot," says Hanifeh, referring to the group of women talking together. "We did not know each other before, but now we have a lot in common."

Hanifeh and her family are among the lucky ones. Like most of the refugees here, they came from Pristina, where by and large the Serbian police spared the lives of those who were willing to leave the country. Here there is not the striking absence of men of the Albanian camps, where up to 100,000 fighting age men are missing from their families, many presumably killed. And although the refugees here are essentially prisoners, the camp itself is relatively comfortable. There is electricity, outhouses and a few tents set up with showers, as well as a German-run hospital. Every day, German NATO troops bring firewood for the residents.

Yet even as these refugees try to create a semblance of a normal life for themselves and their children, women like Hanifeh are quickly overcome with tears recalling the harrowing journey that brought them here. Although just 10 miles from their homeland, many describe leaving family members behind to an uncertain fate and talk of husbands so consumed with helplessness over their inability to protect their families that they became sick -- usually describing the symptoms of nervous breakdown. In fact, it is common to see men weeping openly here -- an extremely unusual sight in a culture where the males are usually stubbornly reserved about showing emotion.

"He took it very seriously, the decision about leaving Kosovo," Hanifeh says, explaining what led to her husband's illness. "He was all the time listening to the news, trying to sort out what's going to happen. I didn't have time for that because I was taking care of the children. But he didn't sleep for two weeks, worrying about the kids."

After the police came to their house in the Dragodan neighborhood of Pristina and told them they had to leave, the Istrefajs stayed with relatives for a couple days in another neighborhood until the police also expelled them from there. Then they headed to the makeshift train station to be deported, where Hanifeh remembers mass panic and pandemonium.

"I don't have words to describe it," she says. "People were crying, families were divided. Some people were injured, most were robbed. That night I saw two women give birth -- the police were going around the crowd asking for scissors and other things that they needed. They found a nurse in the crowd to help. One woman got on the train with her newborn, the other went to a hospital."

Once they got on the overpacked train, Hanifeh's husband fainted. "A doctor came and gave him some pills and he came back to himself for a short time," she recalls. But when the family finally reached Macedonia and was herded into a squalid, makeshift camp with 50,000 refugees, he broke down. For four days the refugees were kept in the rain in a field with no tents, no running water and little food. "All the time I was crying, afraid we were going to die," Hanifeh shudders. "When my husband got sick, I was left all alone to take care of the baby and the two other children." When they finally were allowed to leave the camp as a family, she says, he regained hope and was able to pull himself together.

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