After years of living in near complete autarky, Albania freed itself from an oppressive regime in 1992. It is only at this time, as for the first time information from the outside entered the previously hermetic frontiers, that many inhabitants discovered how desperately poor and desolate the country was. This picture shows the main birth clinic of Tirana, the capital city. It was also the most modern of the country. Just next to this rooms, doctors where giving birth to a child through Caesarean, while a cat was licking the blood from the floor.

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