The next day, she is wearing it when an observer tells her that the markings on the sweater are Serbian. It would be safer to take it off when she drives through Albanian strongholds. Even a simple sweater-vest can tell a deadly story.

[You Ask Me for a Real Solution]

Here's a story that everyone around Prizren knows, not because it is a legend, but because some version of its horror has touched almost everyone's life: When a paramilitary gang entered town, an Albanian mother hid her young son in a secret passageway, thinking that the soldiers wouldn't harm her or her daughters. She was wrong. The soldiers slit her throat, then raped and killed her daughters. The boy was too frightened to move. When the screaming stopped, he heard his mother call to him for water. Terrified, he left his hiding place, held her in his arms, and put the water to her lips. She died before she could take a sip. After that, the boy could barely eat or drink. His throat had closed up.

Trauma is change sickness -- the mind's way of dealing with change so stark that it simply cannot be absorbed. Maier-Witt's work in Kosovo uses economics, but it is mostly about trauma psychology. She is trying to help the women in Kosovo and the surrounding villages overcome their past -- and, in the process, perhaps, overcome her own. The world around Kosovo has become a matriarchy, one with scars and nightmares. Maier-Witt works with women who have been raped, widowed, made homeless, seen their children killed, or all of the above. One village is home to 185 widows. "Women succeed in chaos, where there is no status quo to limit them," she says.

She works with women not because the men are all dead or off fighting, but because they are hopelessly damaged and seemingly incapable of constructive action. One man recently settled a dispute with his brother over who would inherit the family store by using dynamite to blow it up.

Maier-Witt explains that according to trauma psychology, people tell three stories to explain their lives and make sense of their experience. There's the victim story, which is the favorite. People love to see themselves as victims. There is the hero story. But trauma sufferers seldom cast themselves in the role of someone who has triumphed over adversity. And there is the epic, which is the healthiest story.

In an epic tale, life unfolds as an adventure. Every day you make the choice to accept your fate without trying to change everything about it. Your role is not to fight or to fix; it is to see and to experience. The goal is to become more aware and more sensitive. You change things by the example of how you live each day.

"If someone is constantly reliving their loss or their fear or their moment of shame, then you have them tell their story avoiding the emotions, concentrating on the facts and the details," Maier-Witt says. "Then you bring the emotion in later. If you talk about emotion in a detached way, you can look at yourself having emotions, and then you can find means to overcome it. Some of these people who suffer from trauma don't have emotions anymore. They can't feel anything. I've visited some women who can't even cry. You tell them that if they can feel grief, they can still feel happiness. If people can see that crises and losses are the experiences they learn the most from, then they have a better chance of surviving."

Maier-Witt is tired of unrelenting violence and untimely death. Revolution, the violent overthrow of the past in a frantic search for a better future, is almost always a prescription for failure. Look at all of the revolutions in Bosnia, Serbia, and Kosovo, and nothing has changed, save for the multiplication of graves. "In a world of so much real suffering, why promote unnecessary suffering?" she asks.

Harriet Rubin (hrubin@fastcompany.com) is a senior writer at Fast Company. Contact Silke Maier-Witt by email (silkemw@gmx.de).

Sidebar: Ten Rules for Nonrevolutionaries

Silke Maier-Witt's hard-learned lessons on change:

1. Change is happening now. My challenge is, How open can I be? Can I be open to whatever is happening in the moment, not to some distant ideal of what life should be?

2. Build bridges. I define change as this: I want to bring people together. If the Serbs see me being friendly to the Albanians, or vice versa, they distrust me. If each side accepts me, then I feel I can bring them together. Whatever each side appreciates in me means they have a link with each other.

3. Forget ideals. You always want to live up to something. You do have ideals in your youth. Later you find out that it's not that easy.

4. Judge not. Do not judge too early, or at all. It is too easy to be on the wrong side. Even a murderer is a human being; I learned this in prison. It does not help to be disgusted by another person.