Fleeing Homes Is Familiar For Bosnian Refugees 7 Families Settled In Grand Forks, Seeking New Life In Nice Small Town
Alex Todorovic and his wife, Ivona, are no strangers to fleeing their home, sleeping on cots and trying to make do among thousands of strangers.
“This is how it was when the (Bosnian) war started,” said Todorovic, 27, who works as a computer programmer for United Hospital in Grand Forks. “Lots of people, sleeping in barns.”
His is one of seven Bosnian families in Grand Forks - a tiny community of refugees who fled the war in the former Yugoslavia and once again are shifting for themselves, looking for yet another place to call home.
They are refugees from their own refuge.
In fact, another family is due to arrive Thursday. The most recent family of immigrants - which the other Bosnians still were looking for in the crowd - had flown to North Dakota only a week before the Red River spilled its banks.
“We don’t know where they are,” Marina Kojic said Saturday as she stood outside the monstrous cargo plane hangar where her family is staying. There are about 2,400 people sharing the space, normally a maintenance facility for C-130 flying tankers.
She, her husband, Marko, and their 4-year-old daughter have been in the United States since last May. But the trickle of Bosnians started to arrive in Grand Forks two years ago when Nick Todorovic, Alex’s cousin, decided he’d like to find a nice small town in which to live.
He’d been a prisoner in a concentration camp during the fighting in central Bosnia, and after he was released, he enrolled in a special resettlement program offered by U.S. immigration officials.
Todorovic opted for Grand Forks, and like millions of immigrants before him, he sent word to family and friends that they would be welcome in America.
His cousin, Alex, then moved to Grand Forks. He and his wife just had a son, Daniel, now 9 months old - the first child born to the Bosnian families in North Dakota.
“I’d hoped that he would grow up without being a refugee, without the kind of experience we had,” said the boy’s father. “But this isn’t that bad, really.”
All the Bosnians at the Air Force Base seem to be taking the experience in stride. They found a corner of one hangar bay to call their own, where they sleep and try to keep their children herded together.
And for her part, Ivona Todorovic seemed practically buoyant as she wheeled her son among the cots and luggage on the hangar floor.
A teacher in Bosnia, she has found work at an elementary school in Grand Forks.
“In 1993, it was horrible for us,” she said. “Our town was surrounded by Croatians and Muslims - it was everybody against everybody, shooting all the time.
“This, here, is nothing. You can’t get away from the shots and the guns, but this - this is only a disaster.”