My sleep was abruptly interrupted by the alarm ringing in my ears. Despite my room stinking of cigarrete smoke from the bar downstairs and the fact that my room faced onto the road, I had had another good night's sleep. Today I had a couple of meetings with the Mercy Corps team in Novi Pazar. My first was with Ahmet Halilagic who was the senior supervisor of the NP office. Once again I won't dgo into too much detail as I will write up a report of my visit for the website. But Serbia posed a different problem to that I had witnessed in Bosnia. Down here in the Sanzak region, the government in Belgrade have for years neglected the whole region. Indeed the state television weather programme gives the weather for all of Serbia's main towns and yet conspicuously misses out Novi Pazar, citing instead the smaller town of Ras nearby. Road signs to Novi Pazar also only begin 12km away from the town.

In Novi Pazar 10 babies are born each day, a rate much higher than in belgrade. The population is booming and yet the infrastructure is totally inadequate and outdated. The town was built for 10,000 people but nearly 100,000 people live there. Its unique location next to Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia makes for a real cultural and ethnic mix where in many places Bosniak Muslims are in the majority making many Serbs feel threatened. During the Milosevic era ethnic cleansing was rife in the border area with Bosnia and the number of displaced people from Kosovo is staggering. Mercy Corps is working with the local businesses and government with improving the infrastructure through projects totalling nearly $1.2 million and funded by USAID. One of the smaller schemes that it is involved with is the support for small and medium-sized enterprises. Edis who works primarily in the IT tasks but also on the humanitarian side takes me on a tour of several smaller projects in the town. We visit everything from small pastry shops to carpenters and tailors. All the beneficiaries are displaced people who have had small businesses in the past, but require capital to purchase equipment. A donation of just $3,000 is enough to help these people to get started. All the people I visit have thriving small businesses and many are now actively recruiting new employees creating new jobs in a region where the average salary can be as low as a third of what it is in Belgrade. The transformation of these people's lives is incredible and i feel that the town, despite the economic and political pressure and squabbles is once again returning to a thriving town just as it was during the Silk Road days.

After my visits, I take the opportunity to relax in the sun and collect my thoughts sipping turkish coffee before moving to a bar for a few local beers and then sampling the local dishes at the only bar in NP with a TV. As luck would have it I sit down and the English Premiership match between Spurs and West Brom is on - coupled with a few Serbian Spurs supporters in the background. I have an unusual evening watching the match and celebrating the Spurs victory with the locals. In a funny way, watching the Premiership makes me miss home, but its not for long because soon the drinking continues in celebration and I head to bed exhausted.