A bright-yellow schoolbag stuffed with colour pencils and copybooks is the stuff of hope for the children of Kosovo. Thousands of youngsters have been displaced by the conflict between ethnic Albanians and their Serb masters. Some of them have seen their homes burned to the ground and their parents killed. International agencies are now in the Balkan province, trying to patch and mend a people, their community and their spirit.

One initiative carried out recently by Unicef, the UN Children's Fund with a vibrant Irish operation, was the distribution of the 80,000 yellow backpacks. This was largely to give heart to a society which has had nearly one fifth of its schools destroyed, and many more left without sanitation or heating, in the months since the war between the Serbian army and the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) entered its most vicious phase.

"Every child likes to have a nice new bag like that at the start of the year, and these kids are no different," says Maura Quinn, executive director of Unicef Ireland, who is just back from two weeks in Kosovo. "But it means more to them, because the destruction of their education is one of the main aims for the Serb forces."

She saw for herself the devastation wrought on village communities in what was already one of the poorest regions of Europe, with one of the highest birth-rates. Of the 900 schools in Kosovo, 163 (nearly 20 per cent) have been destroyed or seriously damaged. One-third have no water supply. Many of the schools which are still functioning have had their power source destroyed, so it is freezing inside during the hard Balkan winter.

"There is very strong evidence that the Serbs deliberately targeted schools," Quinn says. Sometimes the whole building would be destroyed. "It was very eerie, coming in to some of the villages which had been attacked, to see empty buildings, street after street of them. The Serbs' method seems to be to burn the buildings from the inside out, not just torch them, which means it is less likely anything can be salvaged."

The reason for targeting education is that the ethnic Albanians - 90 per cent of the 2 million population of Kosovo, the remaining 10 per cent being Serb - want their own education in their own language. To this end they are dedicated. "They are in effect running a parallel education system, in Albanian," says Quinn.

This is anathema to Belgrade, where Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic insists the southernmost province of Serbia (partner with Montenegro in the Yugoslav federation) is an integral part of his country. The residents should accept this and embrace Serbian culture. However, they are determined.

"We spoke to teachers in the Kosovo schools who hadn't been paid for seven months," Quinn says. "Even when they were being paid it was only the equivalent of $140 a month. But they wanted to keep the Albanian schools going. We asked them: `what are you surviving on?' Some said they were getting money from relatives abroad, some had special communal funds in their villages to pay teachers."

This spirit she and her Irish Unicef companion, Niamh Malone, saw across the province, amid the ruins. "The level of volunteer work, in health centres and humanitarian efforts, is huge," Quinn said. "Unicef, for example, has a big presence in Kosovo but nearly all the field staff are ethnic Albanian, mostly volunteers."

One memorable experience was the village of Blatte. South west of the Kosovar capital, Pristina, this village had been shelled severely in October. The school was one of the main targets. Because of its ruined homes, the whole population had moved into the inhospitable mountains around Blatte. When Quinn visited the community, while still camping out, was rebuilding the village piecemeal, starting with the school. The building had lost its roof and no longer had heating or toilets.

"Because they had no electricity they could only hold classes during daylight hours, so they ran three school shifts a day, starting at 7.30 a.m. and finishing just before 5 p.m. when the light was fading. There were 630 kids from all around coming in, many on foot, including 38 children who were displaced from another part of Kosovo. They had 36 teachers, which was actually quite a good ratio to pupils."

The situation is grim, although not necessarily depressing, because of the goodwill and determination of the people under siege. "The children look OK at first, but many of them are stunted because of their diet," Quinn says. "A child you think is seven will turn out to be 10."

This is no wonder, considering what they eat. "The basic diet is flour and water, with a little olive oil. They make a sort of bread with the flour and water, and then deep-fry that. There is very little fruit or vegetables, and conditions like head lice and scabies are epidemic."

Access to clean water, one of the benchmarks of acceptable living conditions, is greatly disturbed by the war. Another favourite ploy of the Serb army is to mine wells, so the whole thing blows up when people come to get water. Sometimes the damage is incomplete, leaving water, but undrinkable. A survey done by the Institute of Public Health in Pristina found water from wells in the area was 98 per cent contaminated.

Maura Quinn and Niamh Malone were in the happy position of arriving in Kosovo at the same time as a desperately-needed gift of one million water-purification tablets from Medentec in Cork, which the company offered after publicity about the conflict in Kosovo late last year. "If people ring up and want to give us shoes, for example, it is difficult for us because we can't ship them," Quinn says. Donations or gifts for which the shipping is arranged, such as Medentec's, are desperately needed.

One satisfactory development on the education front is an arrangement with the neighbouring Yugoslav republic of Montenegro for displaced children whose families have fled across the border to attend schools there. On February 13th a memorandum of understanding allowing 2,000 primary-age Kosovar children to attend Montenegrin schools was signed, involving Montenegro, Unicef and UNHCR (the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). Solidarity among those most threatened by Serb ambitions means these children can have at least some normality in their disrupted lives.

Unicef's Irish office is at 28 Lower Ormond Quay, Dublin 1. Tel: 01-8783000