Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 5, 1994 TAG: 9409060055
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MEGAN SCHNABEL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Just ask the Stamatovic family. They fled their home in war-torn Bosnia and came to Roanoke in June with nothing - no belongings, no friends, no jobs.
Now, thanks to a small but active group of supporters, Milan and Dyelila Stamatovic and their children have a future.
"We are happy," Dyelila Stamatovic said in broken English as she fixed a cup of coffee for a visitor. "People here, they are wonderful."
Through the local office of Refugee and Immigration Services, the family got an apartment and Milan Stamatovic landed a job at Cycle Systems in Roanoke.
And thanks to a local man - a complete stranger - they have furniture and a close friend.
Jimmy Spichek, whose parents were Croatian, has been collecting furniture for Bosnian refugees through his business, Croatian Jimmy's Thrift Store, and through classified ads. Just about every piece of furniture in the Stamatovic apartment came from Spichek, Dyelila Stamatovic said.
"He's a wonderful man," she said.
The Stamatovics were not the first Bosnian refugees to settle in Roanoke. Since early spring, five families have moved into the area, said Barbara Smith, director of the Refugee and Immigration Services office in Roanoke.
The Bosnian community here is still small, Smith said, but it provides a vital support network for new families arriving with horrific memories of the war.
"It's important that they have a community base they can talk to about their experiences," Smith said. Only someone who has lived through the war can truly provide support to a recent arrival who needs help, she said.
"It not only makes their life a lot easier, it makes our life a lot easier, too," Smith said.
The Stamatovic family left behind family and home in search of a safe place to settle, away from the fighting.
As partners in a mixed marriage - she is Muslim, he is Serbian - they would have been caught in the middle of the ethnic warfare, forced to choose sides somehow, Milan said.
And so the family left Svebrenica, Bosnia, in April 1992, just two days before the war reached their city and the borders were closed. They went to Serbia, where they lived with family members.
But the fighting kept inching closer, Milan said. Finally, afraid of what the war would do to their children, they applied for refugee status from the United States.
Since then, the family has been quietly adjusting to its new home. The Stamatovic children - Nino, 10, and Vanya, 3 - already seem to be quite happy with their American life.
During a recent visit to the family's apartment, a guest found the two boys glued to the TV, watching "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
Nino, the only Stamatovic who speaks English fluently, assured the visitor that he didn't mind missing the show so he could translate the interview with his parents.
"This is an old episode," he said with a dismissive wave. "I have seen it before."
Classes start Monday for Nino, who will be a fourth-grader at Huff Lane Elementary School.
School has never been much of a problem for him, he said matter-of-factly.
"In different grades, I had all A's," he said with a grin. "I love to learn."
But even Nino, for all his bravado, isn't immune to first-day jitters. Although he's eager to make new friends, the thought of starting a strange school makes him "a little nervous," he admitted.
Or maybe more than just a little.
"Hah," Dyelila Stamatovic chuckled. "Too much nervous."
Because Nino speaks English so well - he studied at an international school in Bosnia - he'll have a leg up on many of the other foreign students starting school here. Pat Baril, school liaison for the refugee center, said refugee kids are usually fast learners, but that the language barrier often presents a considerable stumbling block.
"They are prepared for school, but by and large their English is just not there," Baril said.
That creates a dilemma for the schools: Should the new students be placed with kids their own age - at the risk of losing them in the language - or should they be set back a few years to give their English time to improve?
"You can't just stick them in a class if they don't know English," Baril said. But older kids cannot be returned to first grade, either, she said.
Such students typically take some art or vocational classes to help them get accustomed to the school system and to expose them to English, she said.
Students who need extra help with English also are enrolled in English as a Second Language classes. Depending on their age and their needs - and the availability of teachers - students may get special tutoring every day or once a week, Baril said.
Judy Marlow, an English as a Second Language teacher with Roanoke city schools, has worked with the children from Roanoke's first Bosnian refugee family, the Kurdics, who arrived in March.
While the boys were eager learners and picked up the language quickly, mastering a new language can be frustrating for children, Marlow said.
And when students who are very bright and articulate in their own language realize that they lack even the basic English to express their frustration, discipline problems may arise, she said.
Peer tutoring programs that pair new foreign students with their more established counterparts can help alleviate such problems, Marlow said.
"Very often, these kids learn a whole lot more than just their academic subjects when they have a peer tutor," she said.
Such programs also can help compensate for what Marlow sees as a shortage of English as a Second Language teachers in local school systems. A half-time teacher, she had 26 students last year. Other instructors are responsible for 30 or more students.
"I would love to see more teachers," she said. "I think everybody could benefit from more time. But I'm aware of the limitations."
As with the Stamatovic family, usually it's not only the children who need help with English. For the adults, who typically have had less formal English training than their children, learning a foreign language late in life can be a challenge.
But it's also a necessity. Because their children pick up English so quickly at school, the parents must get heavy-duty tutoring to catch up - or they will become dependent on their kids for translations, upsetting the balance of power within the family.
Adults who need help with English - such as Milan and Dyelila Stamatovic - receive intensive one-on-one tutoring from volunteer English as a Second Language teachers at the refugee center.
They begin by learning what Smith called "survival English," a basic working knowledge of the language that can get them through day-to-day conversations and reduce reliance on their children's language skills.
Because the fastest way to learn a new language is by total immersion, recent refugees are encouraged to join the work force as quickly as possible so they will be exposed to English, Smith said.
Once their English has improved, Milan and Dyelila Stamatovic would like to find jobs more like the ones they held in Bosnia, where he was an agricultural engineer and she an economist. They especially want to begin saving money to send their children to college.
Although they had a good life before the war, they will never go back to Bosnia except as visitors, they agreed.
"Here is good," Dyelila Stamatovic said. "Is hard, but is good."
by CNB