“I don’t understand living for yourself when the rest of the world is suffering,” Janet Reineck – dancer, anthropologist and aid worker - tells me passionately. “When you have water to drink, food to eat and shelter you’re doing better than 83% of the people in the planet.” She is the founder and Executive Director of World Dance for Humanity – the local non-profit, which through dance classes raises funds that help people in need by supporting small, sustainable, grassroots projects locally and in the developing world – particularly in Rwanda.
Her life has been exciting. “I had the most extraordinary experiences,” she tells me. After earning a Bachelors degree in Ethnic Arts, a Master’s degree in Dance Ethnology from UCLA, and a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, Janet went to live in Kosovo (former Yugoslavia) in 1981 as an anthropologist. People told her not to go for she was a woman and she’d be eaten alive. “I traveled in the Balkans and encountered Albanians - and I was drawn to them,” she recalls. She lived in a Muslim society where women couldn’t be alone – and in a country that was also under Martial Law. “I was in love with the place,” she says. “It’s inexplicable.”
In the 1990s, Oxfam asked her to return to Kosovo as the director of rural development projects. She was assigned to the county of Viti – where the population was comprised of a mix of Serbians and Albanians. “I’m trying to build a septic tank and nobody would speak to one another,” she recalls of the dynamic. It was a brave and courageous thing she did, as the country was then in the middle of a Serbian crackdown. “We were able to build a well - to build schools,” she shares. “We got girls to go to school, and we were able to do all that despite the fact that it was illegal.”