Refugees Find a Friend in Agency That Finds Them Jobs

Irena Janjic and her family left Bosnia six years ago with nothing but the clothes they were wearing, fleeing a war that ravaged their lives as well as their hometown of Sarajevo. In April, 19-year-old Irena arrived in the United States and now has what often eludes arriving refugees: a job.

With the help of the Los Angeles staff of the International Rescue Committee, which provides aid to refugees worldwide, Janjic was employed as a restaurant hostess in Santa Monica within five weeks of her arrival here.

“The future of the country was going nowhere,” Janjic said in explaining her decision to leave her family and homeland to live in Brentwood with her cousin, a USC student. “I felt like I could do so much more in America, where nationality doesn’t matter and where I can go to school and have a career. I just wanted a clean start.”

Janjic is one of about 45 refugee clients who will get that clean start this year with help from the Koreatown-based organization’s early employment program, designed to get refugees into jobs soon after their arrival and keep them off welfare.

The organization--formed in the 1930s at the suggestion of Albert Einstein to help opponents of Adolf Hitler escape Nazi Germany--uses funds from a federal Office for Refugee Resettlement grant to help arriving refugees pay for necessities such as rent and food.

But perhaps as important in the long run are the efforts of the organization’s staff to find suitable jobs for their clients.

“You come here and you’re lost, you don’t know where to look. . . . At the crucial moment, they are there for you,” said Janjic, who was steered toward her job at Lago restaurant on the Third Street Promenade by Vera Mijojlic, who runs the early employment program.

Since the program got underway in January, Mijojlic has placed a Russian Jewish refugee in an accounting firm in Beverly Hills, helped an 18-year-old man from Iran get trained and hired as a certified nurse’s aide, and secured a job for an Armenian man as an auto mechanic at a service station owned by a former Cuban refugee.

Mijojlic sometimes has to talk employers into hiring newly arrived refugees, many of whom speak little English and don’t enter the job market offering American-style resumes.

But she benefits from a healthy economy and the sympathies of some foreign-born employers. The good matches, she said, are extremely rewarding.

“I do not necessarily make my pitch that it’s going to be great for the company or something--I do it more on a personal level, that this is a great person and you as another human being should give me a chance,” Mijojlic said.

“You tell [them], ‘Imagine you succeed, and then you feel good because you made a difference in the life of a person.’ ”

Like Janjic and her family, Velid Cosic, his wife, Amela, and their two young daughters fled Sarajevo under siege in 1992.

They lived in Germany for six years, but that country would not allow them to settle there permanently, so on Aug. 20 the family came to live in West Hollywood, bringing only a few suitcases of belongings.

On Wednesday, barely six weeks after his arrival, 33-year-old Velid Cosic started work installing cable for a telecommunications company, a job he found with Mijojlic’s help.

Cosic’s supervisor is a former Bosnian refugee.

Cosic said he also looked for work on his own, but found the obstacles formidable: Employers wanted to know his employment history in the United States, or required him to have a car, or in one case were probably trying to cheat him out of an “application fee” for a job that would never materialize.

“Everywhere it’s the same: If you want to live good, you must work,” Cosic said last week at the organization’s offices. “I’m very thankful to America to give us the chance that we can live [normally] here. . . . I feel now I can make [this] my home.”

Having a job brings not only the promise of financial stability, it also builds confidence in those who have been plunged into a strange culture.

After starting her three-day-a-week restaurant job, Janjic found a second job at a Banana Republic clothing store to quell the homesickness that kept creeping in during her free time. She also enrolled in classes at Santa Monica College two days a week.

Although both she and the Cosic family are still in the throes of adjusting to life in California, Janjic has made some friends and thinks she will succeed more readily here than in Bosnia.

In her homeland, she said, even educated, energetic people can face discrimination on the basis of their nationality or simply wither for lack of good job opportunities.

In the United States, she said, “You have all these beautiful things ahead of you, and you have to go for it.”