The world passing before nine-year-old Yasmina has grown terribly busy since the end of the war. From her perch behind the railings of the province's only mental asylum, she watches the constant procession of trucks and tanks and aid convoys.
"Where are you going? Are you going home? Can I go home too?" she cries, undiscouraged by the belching fumes and whirling duststorms. Sometimes, passing drivers slow down and gawk at Yasmina and her shrieking, gesturing, half-naked fellow residents. Then they speed on.
The asylum at Shtimjle is a marker for everything that is wrong with post-war Kosovo, and a few things that are right. For in spite of the massive military and aid effort by the Western powers, life for Shtimjle's 300 residents has hardly improved one whit.
Entry to Shtimjle is a one-way ticket. There is no treatment here, no cure for inner torments. There isn't even a qualified psychiatrist.
Along dank, foul-smelling corridors, men and women hobble past or cower by the walls. Some carry wounds that are open and festering and probably self-inflicted. A woman moans on her cot, having just had a tooth pulled by means of a piece of string.
Children live here too, 70 of them, from as young as six. Ask the staff have they got families and you are answered with a shrug of the shoulders. In one room, six small boys, all said to be from the Serb enclave of Voyvodina, lie in states of utter apathy. Like Yas mina, they could pass their entire lives without a single visitor.
During the war, the Serb staff fled with their army, leaving the patients to fend for themselves without food, water or medicines. My colleague Kathy Sheridan visited Shtimjle in June and found "a vision of hell unique even to Kosovo". Without the drugs to calm them, the patients were running amok, copulating indiscriminately, inflicting harm on themselves and others.
Today, order has been reimposed, and the gates are locked again. Conditions, however, have hardly improved since before the war. The director, Dr Sadik Muslim, says he hasn't been paid since February. Psychiatrists come from Pristina and leave after a week. There are half as many staff as before the war. The patients used to keep chickens and pigs in a small farm, but the animals were slaughtered for food during the war. There is no money to replace them.
Two American agencies have stepped in to supply food and medicines, but no other help has been offered so far. The international community plans to spend $2 billion in Kosovo, but none of it has got to Shtimjle yet.
"We only need small things to make life better for our people," says Dr Muslim. Replacing the chickens, for example, would cost only a few hundred pounds, but so far no one has offered to do this. He says he may leave, too, if he doesn't get professional help. But under the UN's plans for Kosovo's health services, Shtimjle may have to make do with even fewer staff.
The UN mission in Kosovo is planning to cut senior medical jobs in favour of expanding primary health care. The problem, aid workers say, is that nobody has consulted the locals.
Ironically, Shtimjle is one of the few multi-ethnic enclaves left in the new Kosovo. All but one of the Serb staff have left, but the patients are a mixture of Serbs, Albanians and Roma.
In Kosovo, it seems, only the mad can live together.