A Christmas Gift from a Bosnian Refugee

During Christmas of 2005, my family learned the true meaning of “home for Christmas.” It took a 22-year-old Bosnian refugee visiting the United States to teach us.

I met Ivana two years earlier when I accompanied a humanitarian aid organization, His Work in Progress of Yardley, Pennsylvania, on their first medical mission to Bosnian-Herzegovina refugee camps. When we went to the first refugee camp in Caplijina, Ivana, a young woman who lived in one of the tin huts with her family, greeted us in excellent English and offered her services as a translator. She did a wonderful job and most of the organization’s members working on the mission became very fond of her.

We admired her intelligence, her drive to get a college education, and her determination to find a way for her family to get out of the camp and own a home as they had before the war. The camp was dismal to say the least. Each refugee family—no matter how many members there were in the family—lived in one-room tin huts with dirt floors. No heat, no hot water to speak of, and they used communal bathrooms and showers, none of which had doors to guard against the cold in winter. Yet, each hut we entered was immaculate, as were the children and adults. I have never seen such devotion to God, His Blessed Mother, and the Catholic faith as was exhibited there.

Ivana knew it wouldn’t be easy to find a way out of the camp. Her father had been injured in the war and his hand was seriously injured in a construction accident post-war. Her mother suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as did most of the women in the camps. Ivana was helping to rear her two younger brothers. Yet she smiled every day, translated for us with great enthusiasm, and warmed our hearts. If the long days working in the camps were difficult, leaving Ivana and the other refugees we grew to care about was much more difficult when our Mission ended.

The Balkins War of the 1990s and the plight of the people who were relegated to refugee camps afterward is complicated to explain. Simply put, during the war, whole villages were overtaken, many of the men were executed, the women and children were thrown out of their homes. Some escaped death by hiding in the mountains and forests. At the end of the war, more than 100,000 people had been killed in what was declared "ethnic cleansing." Whoever was living on property was able to stay on it, whether it was originally theirs or not, and who didn’t have a home was relegated to the refugee camps—more than two million people. Because the economy was recovering at a snail’s pace in that region of the world, many of these people were still living in refugee camps more than thirteen years later. Indeed, they raised their families in these camps and many had lost hope of ever leaving.

Upon returning from Bosnia, HWIP began a program to raise money to build homes for the refugees. In order to bring first-hand accounts about the plight of the refugees to the attention of Americans, the organization brought Ivana to America during the month of December 2005 to have her speak to church groups and the media. It was difficult for her to talk about the unspeakable things that happened to her and her family during the war and what it has been like growing up in a refugee camp, but she did so with grace and dignity.

When I first heard she was coming, I was thrilled and also horrified. We were to take turns having her stay in our homes, and I worried about how we could send her back to her cold hut in the middle of the winter after she stayed in our warm homes and ate at our tables laden with food. What would we do if she didn’t want to go back? Was it cruel for us to give her a taste of what living in our homes was like, knowing what she had to face when she returned to Bosnia? I agonized over it before she arrived.

We all took turns entertaining her. She rode on the first carousel she’d ever seen. She went shopping at our local mall. We took her to New York City to see the Radio City Christmas Show and the tree at Rockefeller Center, followed by a carriage ride in Central Park. Members of the group shared family celebrations with her.

On Christmas, she was showered with gifts from every family with additional gifts to take back to her brothers. I saw her eyes fill with tears throughout the day, and again I worried that with all our good intentions, we were hurting her more than helping her. In a few days she’d be returning to Bosnia-Herzegovina and to the cold, gray refugee camp.

She stayed with my family on Christmas night. My daughter and son had grown fond of Ivana, and they watched movies late into the night, made peppermint ice cream sundaes, and took great delight in explaining some of the American slang she didn’t understand.

“I feel so sorry for Ivana,” Mai-Ann told me the next morning. I braced myself for what I had been dreading the whole time—that Ivana wanted to stay and not go back. I was very wrong. “She’s so homesick,” my daughter explained. “She can’t wait to go back to her family. She was crying about it last night.”

Ivana confirmed that later in the day when I questioned her about it.

She was quick to tell me that it wasn’t anything that we had done wrong. “I have had good time. Everyone so good to me,” she told me in her Eastern European accent. And once she realized that I wasn’t offended by her wanting to go home, she explained, “It’s just that I need to be with my family. That is where I am happy, where I belong. I like it here, but they are my home.”

A refugee, who lived in a tin hut without heat and a bathroom, wanted to go home because she knew better than any of us that her home was her family. Not a building. Not a private bedroom with warm comforters and hot running showers. Twenty-five pound turkeys, blazing fireplaces, and ornament-laden Christmas trees are not important. She knew that the love her family shared—even in the worst circumstances—was most important in her life. Her lesson for us, as saccharine and sappy as it sounds, was a beautiful gift that my family treasures to this day.

Ivana’s family did leave the refugee camp, with the help of HWIP, and today she is married with two beautiful children.