No Foreigner to Hardship : Aftermath of Earthquake Reminded Royal’s Grubisic of Her Life in Croatia

No electricity. No water. No school. Who says you can’t go home again?

For Royal High’s Bruna Grubisic, the immediate aftermath of the Northridge earthquake brought to mind life in her homeland, Croatia.

The exchange student and basketball player from Split--a port on the Adriatic Sea in southern Croatia--was moved by the quake to recall her native city during offshore bombing by Serb forces a couple of years ago.

“When we had the earthquake, she said, ‘This is what it was like when we were being attacked--lights out, windows closed or blackened,’ ” said Sandy Hofford, the mother of Grubisic’s host family in Simi Valley.

Said Grubisic: “The few months that we are in war at Split, there wasn’t regular school. Sometimes we have it, sometimes we don’t. We went 10 months without normal electricity. And there were some--what do you call it? Sniperists?”

She knocks on a picnic table outside Royal’s gym. “Nobody I know has been killed.”

And snipers being considerably harder to find in Simi Valley than in Croatia, Grubisic must relish the relative safety and quiet of the suburbs, plate tectonics aside. Right?

“Actually, I think she’s bored,” Hofford said.

True, the gregarious 18-year-old point guard finds Simi Valley a bit sleepy, and misses staying out until midnight every night amid the bustle of Croatia’s second-largest city. But she’s glad she split from Split, finding herself giddily awash in choices and personal freedoms she didn’t enjoy in Croatia.

On Dec. 29, she arrived in the United States. Now, she hopes to receive a basketball scholarship so she can stay here after graduating from Royal in June.

Typically, Grubisic is quick to adapt . . . and thrive. She practiced with the Highlanders only twice before Coach Paula Getty-Shear inserted Grubisic into a game. One game later, she was a starter. Then she was moved from shooting guard to point guard and leads Royal in assists.

“She’s picked up things in a few games that it’s taken our girls a whole year to learn,” Getty-Shear said. “She understands the game better than anyone else on the team.”

A pass-first, shoot-later player, Grubisic only recently has looked to score, averaging 10.3 points in her last three games.

“There’s times when I feel like she could have scored every time down, but she’s always looking to pass,” Getty-Shear said. “Our team learned a lot about teamwork from her, being as unselfish as she is.”

Grubisic is well-served by her experience as one of Croatia’s better youth players, a shooting guard for Split’s 18-and-under team that twice was champion of Croatia. But though she has won those championships and played in such places as Sweden, Austria and Greece, Grubisic said playing American high school basketball is more exhilarating.

“In Croatia, they don’t take care of (girls’ basketball),” she said in accented but clear English. “Men’s basketball is much popular. There are lots of problems: no money, nobody wants to sponsor us. My team was two-time champion of Croatia, we play in European League, and still nobody want to take care of us.

“Here everything is in schools and everything is excitement. You hear music when we are warming up, and lots of people come to watch games and there are cheerleaders. It makes the situation like it is important.”

She appreciates the academic side of school even more.

“It’s different in Croatia,” she said. “Even in the best school in town, the teachers are not very well. If they find out you don’t know something, they will ask it of you in front of everyone and try to make you feel bad.

“Here they try to get the best of me . When they see that I am interested in something, they do everything they can to help me--giving me all the material they have on that subject, all the literature. There is much choice for study here. If you try to do, then you will do the best.”

If her assessment sounds a bit wide-eyed, consider how Grubisic came here.

Weaned on eight years of English classes, Pink Floyd and MTV, Grubisic was spurred to action by her best friend, Gigi. “She always talk about it: ‘America, America, I go to America.’ So I have to find out about it--what is so great?”

Grubisic arranged for a six-month visit through the Center for Educational Travel. “When they found out I played basketball, they said it is good to go in America because you can play there,” she said. “And I want to see everything else. I read California. I read America. It is a big thing and I want to come see for myself.”

And what she sees, she generally likes. The climate. The people. Shopping malls, with their myriad choices. She can take a basic drawing and painting class, unavailable to her in Split.

And the specter of war does not loom here. “I hate war,” she said. “I don’t know why they fight. It’s the 21st century. Everything can be done by talking and planning. But now, (in Croatia) once you finish high school, if you don’t go to university, you have to go to war.”

For all those reasons, Grubisic hopes to extend her time here. First, she must find a new host family, because her stay with the Hoffords was intended to be for only a month.

Then comes college. What are the chances? She doesn’t know, but she dreams, hoping for a reunion with her two best friends, Gigi and Petra, in the United States.

“We have lots of dreams that we’ll be together in America,” Grubisic said. “They are dreams, but maybe they can come true. Who knows? Everything can come true.”