Kosovo Families Adjusting to Life in the Valley

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

The young Kosovo refugee had arrived in the United States with little more than the clothes on her back. To help out, the children 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 more than a week in America, the Vlashi family, one of five Kosovo 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 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 dichotomy, 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.

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 among the highest numbers of gated communities in Los Angeles.

A Deceiving Normalcy

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 was slightly larger than normal. There was Hazir, 47, a taxi driver, and his wife, Fatime, 47, born three days apart. Two older daughters, Lumnie, 22, and Ganimete, 21, were both skilled seamstresses.

A son, Besnik, 17, with an earring in his left ear and an electric guitar, played in a rock band. And the youngest, Fitore, was 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, the Vlashis’ teenage boy attended school in secret. The father was fired from his job at a Styrofoam factory for being Albanian.

Frequent shelling near their home left Fitore huddled in 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.”

No Turning Back

The event that finally drove the Vlashis from their home happened in March, a few weeks before the NATO bombing began. Hazir was a top Albanian political official in the town of Djeneral Jankovic, called Hani Elezit by Albanians.

On March 11, he was detained by police. He later told his family he was beaten savagely with repeated blows from a rifle butt to the kidneys.

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

The family left Lumnie with relatives, hoping to rejoin her later. Instead, the war started on March 24. 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.

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.

Hazir Vlashi, though injured, wanted to stay in Macedonia to be able 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,” he said.

Learning the Ropes

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

But these teenagers 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.

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

“You need all those clothes,” said Andrea Froehlich, 16, a junior. “A regular kid at this school will have a closet full 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 in the 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 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 the Vlashis’ 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 mall.

Black tried to convince Besnik to play his guitar for the interview before the trip. 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.”

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

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

Every day, Black’s phone rings with more offers. In two hours one morning last week, good Samaritans promised backpacks, more duffel bags and a home-cooked meal.

The largess doesn’t stop there. 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 came up and donated $50 to the family for shopping.

Black is still wrangling to get someone to donate a guitar to Besnik and a trip to Disneyland for the family. But she has been stunned at the outpouring so far.

“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 see the results of their charity up close.

Preparing for the Long Haul

The Vlashis got their 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 is no telling when that will be. Ganimete will only go back if there are no more Serbs in Kosovo, she said. In the meantime, the family must prepare for the possibility of a long stay.

School 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, the families will begin learning English. Already, Prum Hess said, the youngest children are picking up a few words. And that is a good sign.

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