Seeking Common Ground

Seven-year-old Fitore Vlashi stood in a pink dress before the third-grade class, caught between cultures.

The young Kosovar refugee had arrived in the United States with little more than the clothes on her back. The schoolchildren brought their own toys as gifts, offering them to Fitore one by one.

As each student approached, Fitore’s mother would whisper fiercely in Albanian, “Stand up, stand up!”--since in Kosovo, it is tradition to receive a gift standing up.

From the other side of the classroom in Bay Laurel Elementary School in Calabasas, Fitore’s American host was doing a little coaching of her own. “What do you say? Thank you,” said Bobbie Black, trying to teach a bit of English as the students handed over each gift.

In the middle of this bicultural etiquette lesson was little Fitore, struggling, like the rest of her family, to negotiate life in a strange new world of Beanie Babies and Barbie dolls, butterfly hair barrettes and in-line skates.

After a little over a week in America, the Vlashi family, one of five Kosovar refugee families now in the San Fernando Valley, is adapting to a life they find not entirely foreign, though certainly not the same as the one left behind.

The outward trappings of their host family’s suburban life in Calabasas are similar to those they enjoyed in their own middle-class life in Kosovo.

But inwardly, theirs is a haunted existence, with the cheerful stability of their new world shadowed by nightmares of war in the old.

Despite the schism, the Vlashis are handling the journey with a sense of humor, surprising grace and a conviction to educate Americans about Kosovo and the repression Albanians there have suffered.

And as the Vlashis make their way here, they are teaching a group of Southern Californians something about themselves.

The tragedy of the refugees has been a bridge between two frequently antagonistic cultures: The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles is the principal agency helping to resettle the Vlashis, who are Muslims.

It has also strengthened and reinvigorated ties among residents of Calabasas, a suburb best known for having one of the highest numbers of gated communities in Los Angeles.

In Kosovo, the Vlashis had a four-bedroom, two-bath house. An annual 10-day vacation at the beach. A Renault in the driveway. Roses in the frontyard and a garden out back.

By American standards, the family is slightly larger than normal. There are Hazir, 47, a taxi driver, and his wife, Fatime, 47, born three days apart. Two older daughters, Lumnie, 22, and Ganimete, 21, both skilled seamstresses.

A son, Besnik, 17, with an earring in his left ear and an electric guitar he played in a rock band. And the youngest, Fitore, painfully shy and missing a front tooth.

But behind this seemingly placid suburban existence, the war, and a decade of Serbian repression of Albanians, intruded on every aspect of their lives.

This is the second time the Vlashis have been forced from Kosovo. In 1991, a few years after Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic began stripping Kosovo Albanians of their civil rights, they sought refuge in Sweden for two years.

They returned during a period of relative calm, but the situation soon grew worse.

Forbidden to take classes in their own language, Besnik, the Vlashis’ teenage son, attended school in secret. His father, Hazir, was fired from a job at a Styrofoam factory because he is Albanian.

Frequent shelling near their home left Fitore huddled into a corner behind a door, curled into a tight ball.

“I am 21 now, and I feel I’ve never been happy,” said Ganimete through an interpreter. “I feel like we’ve never lived a normal life.”

Events Drove Family to Flee

The event that finally drove the Vlashis from their home occurred a few weeks before NATO bombing began.

On March 11, Hazir was detained by police. He is a top Albanian political official in the town of Djeneral Jankovic, called Hani Elezit by Albanians. He later told his family he was beaten savagely with repeated blows from a rifle butt to the kidneys.

Though barely able to move, Hazir decided to flee to relatives in Macedonia, a 30-minute drive away. But his daughter, Lumnie, had no passport to allow her out of Kosovo.

The family left Lumnie with other relatives, hoping to rejoin her later. Instead, the war started March 24, and Lumnie was forced, along with other relatives, to flee into the mountains that separate Kosovo from Macedonia.

The family recalled the ordeal during a visit this week to the third-grade class of Dusty Black, one of Bobbie Black’s sons.

Lumnie said she had to walk 15 hours through snowy mountains. “I had to melt the snow to drink,” she said.

Her mother described their reunion. When she saw her daughter, she was filthy, Fatime said, looking out at the circle of children surrounding her.

“Her feet were muddy up to her knees,” Fatime said. “She was muddy, and I began washing her feet.”

She stopped for a moment, her face twisted in grief. Then she began to cry. So did Bobbie Black. And so did Lisa Turek, the teacher.

The family spent two months with a relative in Skopje before coming to the U.S. at the invitation of a relative here. All told, 28 members of the extended Vlashi clan arrived in the U.S. on May 20.

Though injured, Hazir opted to stay in Macedonia to fight with the Kosovo Liberation Army. Only recently has he decided to come to the U.S.

The family hopes he will arrive soon. In the meantime, Besnik, who speaks some English, has become translator and father figure.

“I feel very responsible,” the 17-year-old said.

Teenagers Find Familiar Themes

It looked like a typical after-school scene: a group of teens talking outside their high school, waiting for buses and carpools.

But these teens were Black’s daughter and friends talking with Besnik. And they were discussing some of the finer points of American adolescence.

“People think that they were poor, but they were a very much, like, a normal family,” said Katie Black, 17, a junior, explaining to her friends.

“Yes, young people had parties and fun and music,” Besnik added.

Katie and her friends perked up.

“See, Mom? I can take them to a party,” Katie said.

“Yeah, what kind of party?” Black said skeptically. “I don’t see that happening.”

The conversation then moved to clothes. Besnik suggested his family had received too many. The teens hastened to correct him.

“You need all those clothes,” said Andrea Froehlich, 16, a junior. “A regular kid at this school will have a closetful of clothes.”

Although the girls’ boast of each having more than 50 pairs of shoes seemed to catch Besnik and his sisters off guard, the family has seen little that fazes them.

“Shakespeare in Love” was playing at theaters in Macedonia when they left town. The local mall in Skopje was a teen hangout. And even Black’s suggestion of a visit to the roller coasters at Six Flags’ Magic Mountain didn’t seem too out of the ordinary. Ganimete had ridden one nine times during their exile in Sweden.

Language is the biggest difference. The Blacks don’t speak Albanian, and Besnik’s English, learned mostly from television, is hesitant. Much communication is done by pantomime.

There are the surreal moments, many of them revolving around their newfound fame. They are still being followed by the media. On Wednesday, Fox News spent the day as the Vlashis made their first trip to an American shopping mall.

Before the trip, Black tried to convince Besnik to play his guitar for the interview, but he refused, saying he would not feel right playing music on TV while his friends suffer in Kosovo.

Later, with the cameras off, he sang a song about peace he had written with friends, he said.

“White dove with light wings, I’m waiting for you to come. Come quicker, please.”

Neighbors Drop In to Help Refugees

Just a day after the Vlashi family stepped off the plane last week, there was a stack of clothes nearly 5 feet high on Bobbie Black’s front porch.

She had put out the call for donations for the Vlashis, who arrived with their lives tucked into three small duffel bags. The community responded then and hasn’t stopped since.

As Black does her daily errands, SUVs constantly pull up next to her, laden with clothes and other goods. During a visit to Topanga Plaza last week, the mall’s assistant manager donated $50 to the family for shopping.

“Everybody thanks me. I always say, ‘Thank you.’ Everybody is helping out,” Black said.

Calabasas has always prided itself on being a small-town place. But the Vlashis have proved a rallying point for neighbors to meet each other, exchange news and to see the results of their charity up close.

“It’s been a really neat community feeling,” said Lisa Turek, the third-grade teacher, who also donated clothes. “We don’t think twice about it.”

Family Faces Mounting Hurdles

The Vlashis got the first inkling of their future last week.

There, in a small room at the Jewish Federation Valley Alliance, a counselor went over coming hurdles: a new apartment, schooling for the children, jobs for the mother and older daughters, English classes for all.

All that on $1,610 a month for a family of five--the assistance they will get from the federal government and federation for their first month.

Though the family plans to return to Kosovo some day, there’s no telling when that will be. Ganimete will go back only if there are no more Serbs in Kosovo, she said. In the meantime, the family must prepare for the possibility of a long stay.

Lumnie, who went to school only through the eighth grade, said she wanted to become a lawyer.

“You want to be a lawyer?” asked Luba Shtern, the counselor. “To become a lawyer might take 15 years.”

Lumnie’s face fell.

Counselors and social workers will see the family through the process for the next three months, said Miriam Prum Hess, a top official with the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

First, and most important, the families will begin learning English.

Already, Prum Hess said, the youngest children are picking up a few words. And that, in itself, is a good sign.

Said Prum Hess: “It’s the beginning of the Americanization.”