You could say that little Adriana Fetahi has had an eventful life. Eventful, that is, if you count a narrow escape from arson and mass murder, followed by a desperate flight into the forests of Kosovo, followed by a 28-day trek across hill and dale in her mother's arms before reaching the safety of the Albanian border, as eventful.
Adriana is now a nicely maturing 10 months old; when she was four months she had been through more than most of us can expect in a lifetime.
She is also back home in her village of Padalishte - or back in what used to be home but is now more of a converted stable or outhouse, patched up temporarily by her parents to keep out some of the bitter Balkan winter.
Adriana smiles a lot, and so does her mother Ganimete. They are a picture of happiness. However, there was very little of that when we met them trudging across the border at Morine on April 26th last, cold, frightened and very, very lost.
Today, the ruins of the home they were forced to abandon stand near to the structure they now inhabit. Those who torched it meant Adriana and her family never to come back. The same is true of the whole village of Padalishte - almost all the houses are wrecked, yet all the villagers are back.
Standing there two weeks ago outside the wrecked home of another family, the Imerajs, one could understand only too easily why Dr Bernard Kouchner has his work cut out. He is head of the UN Mission in Kosovo. As such, he holds down one of the most powerful positions any UN official has held. All executive, legislative and judicial power in Kosovo is vested - temporarily - in him.
On November 23rd, Kouchner stood beside President Clinton in the central town of Ferizaj, and heard him tell the ethnic Albanians: "No one can force you to forgive - but you must try."
It was a message poorly received. Two days later in Padalishte, a weeping middle-aged woman and her equally distraught daughter stood in front of us. The mother told us how her unarmed husband, her son and her nephew had been executed in front of her eyes, just beside where we were standing, last April.
It was shortly after the start of the NATO bombing campaign. She had begged for her young son to be spared, to no avail. The men who did it came early in the morning and surrounded the house. They were Serbs, from the nearby area of Cerkolez, and were known to the Imerajs.
Before he died, Hasan, the father, had pleaded with the would-be executioners. "Don't do this to us, neighbour." The reply was succinct: "There are no neighbours anymore."
It wasn't just that the survivors of this appalling murder were seriously upset at being told by President Clinton to try and forgive such unspeakable acts against them, or the fact that they told us it would not satisfy them to see those guilty have their skin peeled from them with a knife. It was more that neither they nor anyone else could see any realistic prospect of justice being done.
Even the excellent staff of the War Crimes Tribunal in Kosovo had only managed to interview the Imeraj eye-witnesses that very morning, almost eight months since the world was told of what had happened. Much fewer than half the mass graves in Kosovo have been investigated to date - a full year's work lies ahead when the ground thaws.
In this context, and in the absence of any criminal justice system, of any effective policing or of a courts system, to expect forgiveness from families such as the Imerajs might be a bit much. But it is what they are being asked for and, on paper, it is what Dr Kouchner and his "impossible" mission are hoping for.
There's a red tide of hate flowing hard in villages such as that to which baby Adriana has returned. Already the UN has given up on a futile attempt to integrate schools between Albanians and Serbs - and indeed one top UNMIK official told us that UNMIK had recently quietly stopped referring to the goal of a multi-ethnic society. Apparently, it doesn't help such an agency to appear so completely unrealistic.
Dr Kouchner himself describes his task as impossible. He says this to you with a twinkle in his eye, but it appears a kind of gallows humour. He says he and his colleagues did not realise it was impossible, but now they know, they will do it; not, he insists, despite the fact that it's impossible, but because it's impossible. That, he says, is the UN way.
So what's impossible about the job given to Dr Kouchner as special representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Kosovo?
Firstly, it's a job that's never been done before. Never has the UN taken over a territory razed to the ground in the administrative, political and organisational sense that Kosovo has.
Never has it sought to provide basic school, hospital and policing services, courts, transport, judges, political structures, waste disposal, banking, telephones - virtually everything you can think of, including employment - all at the one time.
What is also impossible is the mandate given to UNMIK under Security Council Resolution 1244. Dr Kouchner and his staff acknowledge the contradictions. The area is explicitly described in 1244 as "within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia", (FRY), but the mandate is to set up a substantially autonomous and self-governing system. Dr Kouchner is touchy on the issue of independence. One suspects he hears rather a lot about it from the ethnic Albanian population here.
When challenged with the view that the UN is effectively setting up an independent state, he vigorously denies it. Independence is not in the mandate, he insists; he is not working on it, nor will Yugoslav rule be just a fig-leaf. In fact, Dr Kouchner told me that his model for the area is the old federal constitution of Tito - that worked, he insists, and it is the best model for the future to be found in the whole region.
Suggestions that the Balkan world has changed since are brushed aside. This is a man, classically, who has been handed a definite circle by the UN, told to get on and square it, and that is exactly what he is doing.
In Padalishte, meantime, baby Adriana and her family are living on humanitarian aid. Like everyone else, one of their fervent hopes is that UNMIK will get the power stations working properly again before the full brunt of winter hits. They have lost all their livestock - and much much more - but they have gained their sense of freedom. They appear not unhappy about the deal. Adriana, when she grows up, will have plenty of questions for her parents about her first turbulent year of life. They are hoping that the little girl has already received her full quota of violence and devastation and that more tranquil waters lie ahead. This being the Balkans, one can but hope.
Michael Heney is an RTE television producer. The documentary Baby Adriana's Return to the Future will be broadcast on Prime Time on RTE 1 television at 9.30 p.m. tonight.