She knows their fears can be overwhelming: flying into the United States, thousands of miles away from their homes. Many don’t speak English or have any understanding of American culture. Their wealth is often limited to the clothes on their back. They’re coming to one of the colder parts of the United States: Erie, Pennsylvania, where wintertime high temperatures are below freezing even in mid-March. It’s a shock for most refugees used to the desert or subtropical weather.
But Senada (whose name is pronounced “sonata”) is there to say: You can do it. I did.
About a dozen years ago, she and her young family were uprooted from their Bosnian city. She was in her mid-twenties, with a four-year-old and a toddler, when the war started in 1992 in that part of disintegrating Yugoslavia. She had watched on television the old socialist republic crumble as Croatia erupted into war the year earlier. But she never thought it would spread and have an impact on her family.
“We were living in peace,” she remembers. “It was a normal life. My husband, Nedim, managed a warehouse distribution center and I stayed at home to take care of our children. We owned our house free and clear. My parents-in-law built a house for each of their kids. It was a very good life. Then suddenly one day your whole life changes.
“At that time I didn’t understand—I still can’t comprehend. But you don’t appreciate peace until something happens. Peace is standard—it comes as everyday life. But when you have war, you start thinking how lucky you have been. With peace, you didn’t need to run from all the bombs.”
Senada decided to go back to her mother’s home in neighboring Slovenia, an area that had escaped the civil war. She didn’t want to leave her husband, but her year-old baby was sick, and there was no medicine for him in Bosnia.
Her husband stayed behind to protect their home and his family. But the Serbian forces started rooting out Muslim men in Bosnia. “They just picked up all the males from sixteen to seventy,” Senada says.
At the time it was a shock. For decades, Christians and Muslims had lived peacefully side by side. Under Tito, Communist Yugoslavia had banned religion but leaders looked the other way when people attended religious services. (Senada was considered a good student and offered a spot in a youth camp that trained young Communists. When she said she couldn’t, since she went to mosque regularly, the school administrators said she could still be a Communist. Nevertheless, she declined.)
In the former Yugoslavia, Senada says that Christians and Muslims respected each other. Senada can remember learning about Catholicism from a parish priest in the Bosnian city Sanski Most, where her grandmother still lived and where Senada met Nedim. Indeed, her Muslim grandmother urged her to go to church: She wanted her granddaughter to learn about Christianity as a way of honoring their Christian friends and neighbors.
“My grandmother was religious. She would stress love and respect and health—and not to lie and steal.”
Not only did Christians and Muslims intermingle, they intermarried. “Even after the war my brother married a Catholic. My other brother married a Serbian girl, an Orthodox Christian.”
Yugoslavian Muslims were more secular from their years of Communist rule. Muslims and Christians even looked alike in that part of Europe: Muslim women did not cover their heads or wear clothing that separated them from other women.
To this day, Senada does not pray the required five times a day. Nor does she believe she has to. She remembers her grandmother advising her to concentrate on the crux of Islam—being loving and respectful to others—rather than to follow rules about praying.
So it came as a shock to her and other Yugoslavian Muslims when the Serbs began their assault, supposedly to avenge the rule of the Muslim Ottoman Empire hundreds of years earlier. Those whom they had thought of as fellow countrymen were now their attackers, even their killers. The tanks, bombs, and other military equipment the Bosnians had once paid for as part of the country’s defense system were now being used against them.
Her husband found himself facing soldiers and loaded guns. He was among those rounded up in May 1992. Destination: a barbed wire concentration camp. His head was shaved. He lost fifty-eight pounds.
By the time the International Red Cross found his camp six months later and demanded its liberation, he was emaciated and sick. He and the other liberated prisoners were taken to Croatia. Senada was shocked to see his shrunken frame. She barely recognized him.
While he and the others were recovering, the Red Cross gave him the option of leaving Bosnia and starting over in another country. As he felt he had nothing to return to in Bosnia, he asked what countries would accept him and his family. Only the United States, he was told.
They arrived in Erie in September 1993. As Senada explains, “They just assign you here—you don’t choose where you are going.”
It would be their luck that during that winter of 1993–94 Erie would endure one of the coldest ever. Senada, who had grown up in Slovenia where it never snowed, was stunned at Erie’s frigid cold and icy winds.
“I thought, oh my God, this is Siberia.”
On top of this they had the stresses of starting a new life. As a twenty-something she was embarrassed at not speaking English, but she was determined to change this. She began reading aloud newspaper ads. She stumbled over pronouncing the foreign words, but she kept at it. “My husband used to laugh at me,” she says. Today she has her reward: She speaks fluent English.
Meanwhile, he was coping with a new job—the former manager found himself doing menial work at a plastics factory and a bakery. He worked long hours for a small paycheck. Every penny counted. The family had to furnish an apartment, buy food, clothes, and toiletries. “You come and you don’t have anything,” Senada says. She and her husband also had to set aside precious dollars to buy a car so her husband could get to work. For a while, he had been forced to wait for buses, or for other refugees to give him a ride if they were working in the same factory. But a car would give him greater flexibility in finding a better-paying job. They scrimped for a year to buy—on credit—a small used car. He would eventually retrain for a job that helped elevate them to the middle-class: He is now a technical worker who helps prepare electrical motors for a small company that has a contract with General Electric.
At the same time, Senada’s husband was trying to recover from the trauma of being in a concentration camp.
Then, in 1994, Senada discovered she was going to have their third child.
“I was very depressed. There were so many things to worry about, and then I get pregnant.”
Her husband reassured her that everything would work out and that in the years to come they would be grateful for their new child. He was right. They treasure their youngest, a daughter, now ten.
Her husband, a hard worker, did find better work, and Senada found a career, too.
It was her kindness that led her to her present work. After plodding away at learning English, she was able to help other Bosnian refugees by translating at doctors’ offices, government agencies, and schools. Staff members at the nonprofit International Institute of Erie noticed her volunteer work and asked if she would like a paying job. The agency helps refugees adapt to the United States by helping them find housing, counseling, jobs, and even food. “We are a resettlement agency,” Senada explains. “We help the refugees with everything they need to start a new life.” Senada started at the institute twenty hours a week, perfect for a mother. Now she is working full-time.
She is grateful for this work. Now, with two incomes, the family is assured of a comfortable life.
She finds her work meaningful, and crucial to those she’s helping. She knows what it is like to be a refugee and she wants to help America’s newest arrivals. She feels particularly motherly to a group she calls the “lost boys of Sudan”—orphaned boys who survived bombings, shootings, and even alligators waiting on river banks as they fled their country’s violence. The boys ended up in refugee camps before the United States flew them to Erie
for a new life.
“They are doing very well. Because they were very young, they learned English quickly.”
Some are in college; others have started working, she reports. By helping the lost boys and other refugees, Senada feels she is giving back to a country that helped her family.
Not that her life here hasn’t been bittersweet. She was never able to see her father again. He passed away in 1997. “It was heart attack. He was a young man, only fifty-six, when we lost him.”
And she worries that her children are missing out on their faith. Erie is too small to have a mosque that practices the European style of Islam, and the family doesn’t go to Friday prayers. Senada teaches her children at home about Islam.
The family also socializes with other Bosnians. Senada doesn’t want her children growing up without knowledge of their heritage. So they go, for example, to the yearly Bosnian soccer camp held in Erie. “They play soccer, and after that we have a party.”
Like most refugees she is willing to struggle in America for her family. Her older son is seventeen and will be ready for college in another year. Her younger son is an eighth grader and doing well at school, as is her daughter in fifth grade.
“I can provide for my kids. They can have a better life here, especially when your own country is destroyed by war.”
Senada is happy that her children are thoroughly American and think American—they have that can-do attitude.
This summer, Senada is splurging and taking her children to Bosnia and to visit her mother in Slovenia. Finally, she will be able to see her family again. It will be the first time that she has been back to the Balkans since war changed her life. She’s longing to see the towns she grew up in, and she wants her children to get a taste of the life she knew.
Not that she wants to dwell on her golden years in Bosnia, when she could stay at home with the children, when life seemed so much easier. “I will never have that kind of life again,” she says.
And she is determined to stay in America. “It is good to sacrifice. I know my kids will have a better life.”
30
FARIDA’S JOURNEY BACK TO FREEDOM
FARIDA AZIZI was supposed to be living in the new Afghanistan, the one liberated from the repressive Taliban by the United States. But she found herself resorting to wearing the burqa in Kabul and trying to escape from an angry husband who demanded she submit to him and stay in Afghanistan. He had already taken their two small sons before. Ultimately, he would obtain an Afghan court order to keep her and the boys with him. And Farida, who had appeared in Washington, D.C., with President and Mrs. Bush as well as Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, was trapped. The United States government could not help her, because she was still an Afghan citizen and not yet a permanent U.S. resident. So she did what she has had to do for almost a quarter of a century, since the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. She lived by her wits.
The thirty-three-year-old managed to find a ride to the Pakistani border and smuggle herself and her two small sons to freedom. The head-to-toe burqa came in handy after all. Concealing her boys inside the bulky gown, the border guards couldn’t recognize them as the runaway wife and sons.
Today, they are safe in Arlington, Virginia. The boys are back in elementary school and Farida is once again a special adviser for Afghanistan and the Middle East for the Washington, D.C.–based nonprofit group, Vital Voices Global Partnership. She also returned as a founding member of the Policy Group on Afghan Women that lobbies the United States Congress for direct support to Afghan women. And she sits on the board of the Tahirih Justice Center, the same pro bono legal agency that helped Farida win political asylum in the United States.
There is, however, so much work to be done. As Farida recently said in a Voice of America broadcast, the best way to promote peace and economic advancement in the Third World is to empower the women there by educating them and giving them work.
“If you invest in women you invest in the whole family,” she asserts.
She sees the need in her native country. The Taliban may have been toppled but Afghanistan still is repressive to women.
“It’s not just the Taliban. It’s the way of life, the culture, the daily life. For one hundred years it has been this way. In Afghanistan, change comes so slowly.”
Still, that doesn’t mean Farida is going to give up. Not by a long shot. She is used to struggle.
She was born into a prominent family in Afghanistan. During her early years she enjoyed wealth and comfort. Her father was a doctor in the Afghan army. She once described to a Washington Post reporter how she grew up on army bases amid the fragrance of orange blossoms and narcissus. Her family went on picnics and attended concerts and movies. That all ended in 1979 when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Soviets bombed the country. Soviet tanks and troops rumbled in. Terrified, her family fled to the refugee camps in Pakistan and ended up living in tents.
“I was nine years old,” she remembers. “We missed the whole school year. At first it was very strange. We couldn’t go out; we couldn’t speak the language. Even the food was strange. And we had little water and no electricity.”
Nevertheless, the family had to adjust to those bleak conditions as their stay stretched into years. Her father treated fellow refugees for free while her mother emphasized the need for the children to become educated. One of her brothers got a good job and was able to move the family to a one-room house with a concrete floor.
“At least we had a roof over our head,” Farida says.
It even had a pump that gave the family running water twice a day, when the water was flowing. Even better, Farida got to go to school and attend a makeshift university of women. She wanted to study medicine, like her father.
“I wanted to be a doctor. It is a highly honored profession. As a doctor or teacher people will protect you because you are helping them as a professional.”
But at her so-called university, she and the other students had to make do with little. “We had no facilities—no labs, no library, no books, no photocopies.” Instead the students had to rely on their professors’ lectures. “We just took notes,” Farida says.
But even that was not to be. Conservative religious leaders (the Mujahideen) in the refugee camp decided her university shouldn’t remain open. They decreed that girls shouldn’t go to school and that to educate women was not Islam. Farida’s father tried to protest. He knew the Quran didn’t prohibit women from learning, and wanted his daughter to go to school.
Her mother, who was not educated but could quote the Quran, also protested.
“But society was not on their side,” Farida says sadly. In the refugee camps, she points out, “you can’t control what you want to do,” especially after the Mujahideen raided the school, its windows and doors shot up. Even the school’s guards were shot at. The university was soon closed down.
She later married a former Afghan army officer that her parents had picked for her. It was an arranged marriage. He was a good man but he had been disabled from a bombing and had few skills beyond the military. All the men in the refugee camps were jobless, but Farida didn’t think to refuse the marriage—it was so ingrained in her culture for the woman to agree. “We don’t want to disrespect the family, so women sacrifice themselves.”
By this time, the early 1990s, the Russians had left and her new husband decided they would go back to the capital, Kabul. Both returned to Afghanistan with high hopes, but they were soon dashed. War had broken out between the various tribes and factions trying to take over from the fleeing Soviets. “There was heavy rocket fire,” Farida recalls. “I was scared.” Some seventy rockets, she counted, ended up near their Kabul home. A hole was left in their living room, and the ground shook whenever a rocket landed nearby.
Like many others, they survived by living underground, amid open sewage. People became ill from the cold, dank, smelly conditions. Farida heard of women being raped. After a week of this, Farida and her husband decided they
had no choice but to return to Pakistan. They crept out at one A.M. during a lull in the rocket fire and walked for hours. “It was winter, and we were freezing,” she remembers.
For more than eight hours, they walked until they reached an area just outside of Kabul where there wasn’t rocket fire. After a week there was a ceasefire and they scrambled to find a bus to Pakistan. Finally they came upon one—which had one empty seat. They shared it.
“My brother was looking for us. When we got there, he was amazed we were alive. He was so happy and shocked to see us.”
Farida worked for a while as an English teacher. But times were difficult: Her husband couldn’t find work and they struggled just to eat. Then Farida discovered she was pregnant. As they had no money for her hospital stay, she sold her jewels. Giving birth to their first son, Farida had no anesthesia. “You have to suffer with the pain until the baby comes,” she says simply.
A mere two weeks later, it was back to looking for work. Her husband did manage to do construction work for three days, earning the equivalent of $6. But they ran out of food. “We had no food for three days. We had tea with sugar. At least I had breast milk for the baby so he would not die.”
The Norwegian Church Aid offered her a job to help Afghan women, and once again Farida was willing to venture back to the war-torn country. The salary was generous, enough to keep her and her husband and their new baby comfortable. They would never go hungry again, and she would be helping her countrywomen learn how to read and get jobs.
But once again, fate intervened. Just as she was re-entering Kabul in 1996, so was the Taliban. There were more rockets and land mines, and once again her young family was on the run.
After three days and nights, she and her family made it back to Pakistan and her Norwegian Church Aid boss was relieved. He was confident that Farida would find her way back.
The agency came up with a new strategy: Farida would venture secretly back to Afghanistan. With the Taliban banning schools for girls, she helped set up secret schools at private homes, the Norwegian Church Aid paying teachers’ salaries. “In the provinces it was not so strict,” she says, and she could do more. She also was able to help the rural women with health care and suggest ways for them to earn money to support their families. She received death threats, but she kept on going, even after a short maternity leave to give birth to her second son.
The Face Behind the Veil Page 18