Refugees Neither Here Nor There

The man and woman, 6,612 miles from home, sit like statues now, with soft eyes and hard faces, with no place to go and nothing to do but pray and wait for the unknown to take shape.

It’s been that way for three months now, since they ran from a little village of box houses and cows and war in Kosovo and landed in Orange County unsure what day it was, or where they were. Someday it won’t be like that anymore, they pray, but neither can fathom how.

And so Hajriz and Nexhmije Rexhepi--refugees adrift after a since-ended war--are some of the last to remain in a homeless shelter in Garden Grove that in June took in half a dozen Albanian families, giving them clothes and a place to sleep. They have waited for a place to go, found a few words in English to say and, Hajriz says, waited for the leaves to fall so he can find a broom and have something to do.

Even as Kosovo is being rebuilt, according to phone calls and letters from home, the couple’s cows and chickens and a tractor are gone, their well water is poisoned, and all that remains of their house is its frame, doorless and gutted by the enemy. For the couple it’s somehow worse than if it had burned to the ground.

“I built it with my hands,” the 50-year-old Hajriz says in Albanian through a translator. Now his hands shake. Nexhmije says her husband, who earned a living with little more than his bare hands by plowing their four acres of land, is nervous, and his wife, burdened by the freight of her own worries, says she doesn’t know why.

Organizers of the shelter say that most of the refugee families, who totaled about 50 people, all Muslims, either have returned to watch their land rebuild itself from ruin or have let go of their ideas of returning. However, a few families remain. They wash their laundry by hand. The children play, sometimes with toy guns.

Those who have moved on have found apartments and, somehow, despite having only a few words of English at their lips, found work and life among the highways and concrete of Southern California, hostile in its own way to people accustomed to growing potatoes for their dinner. But the Rexhepis are caught somewhere between here and there, immobilized by fear and uncertainty and their need to rest.

Beyond that, Nexhmije, 49, needs doctors to mend her leg, which fractured in two places as she stumbled across a stream while fleeing Kosovo and never healed right. With their five children, ages 14 to 23, her husband brought her to safety by pushing her in a wheelbarrow. The other day she tried to walk to a nearby mosque to pray, but she could not. It’s hard for her to walk 10 feet.

Once Hajriz was a manager in a paper factory, but since 1990 the couple have been farmers, growing their own vegetables and raising their own livestock for meat.

A House, Not a Home

They lived among war with the Serbians for years. Earlier this year, they thought there was an end in sight, but when the war arrived at their village, at their very doorstep, they could only walk away.

The fighting has since stopped. But they exist now in a Garden Grove gray-and-white rambler with 13 bedrooms and bunk beds, stocked with donated clothing--Hajriz wears Birkenstock sandals--and soap and toilet paper. Behind it is a backyard of concrete, where nothing grows.

Bekim Hasani, one of the founders of the American relief effort for Albanians in the Los Angeles area, helped assure the Rexhepis had a place to stay: He said he is helping find them an apartment, something more permanent, maybe in Mission Viejo. A man named Haitham Bundakji, vice chairman of the Islamic Society of Orange County and a real estate investor, bought the Garden Grove house about three years ago and refurbished it as a series of small but private rooms, “so I can give back to the community.”

The Rexhepi family has until May to decide what they will do; the U.S. government will help them return to Kosovo if that’s what they want. Until then, they figure they will rest cradled in Orange County’s Muslim community. Hajriz goes to the mosque three times a day, and prays five, bowing northwest toward Mecca and hoping that somehow it’ll summon the courage in him to go home, even if the water there still is poisoned.

Often, the couple say, they sit at the front of the house with its tired facade, watching the cars pass, and their minds drift, wondering if ever they could make a home here in the United States. It frightens them, and so they seldom leave. In a way, organizers of the shelter say, they have willingly created their own prison--albeit a safe one--where they feel they can shoulder their burdens alone with their God.

Their children, in particular their two younger boys, return from school each day with American words and feel as if they have purpose.

“My kids are happy,” Nexhmije said.

But the adults do not sleep without dark dreams: Hajriz says he dreamed recently of his youngest son’s funeral and that it was at home in Kosovo--the way it was before they ran--and, for him, there was even some solace in its morbidity. As he recalls the dream his 14-year-old son sits nearby with a soft grin. His wife’s eyes, framed by wrinkles in deep sprays, look as if they are trying not to tear.