THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 28, 1994 TAG: 9409280030
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By KERRY DEROCHI, Staff writer
LENGTH: Long : 178 lines
EMPTY WEEKDAY mornings seem to stretch forever when you cannot speak the language and you have no one to wave to from your wide living room window.
You sit alone on a frayed pin-stripe recliner and stare for hours at the parking lot outside, waiting for your husband to return from his job painting houses, waiting for your two boys to come home from the crowded apartment swimming pool.
Waiting. Always waiting.
``Sometimes I think about having a neighbor, someone to have a cup of coffee with,'' said Zora Pavlovic, through an interpreter.
``Sometimes I sit and ask, `Why, why, why?' ''
The answer hasn't been found in the apartment off Norfolk Avenue in Virginia Beach where Zora; her husband, Savo; and their sons have come seeking refuge from the horrors of war.
One of three Bosnian families to arrive in Hampton Roads this year, they came carrying plastic satchels of belongings and a giddy excitement about what was ahead. They were greeted with fervor. There were media interviews and trips to shopping malls and fast-food restaurants.
It was a new beginning, a chance to live free from the threat of prison camps, nightly beatings and probable death. Here, everything was going to be all right. The smiles of the children were infectious.
But sometime this summer - when the glare of the cameras stopped and the headlines disappeared - loneliness set in.
The attention that seemed once to choke the three families waned. The crowd of onlookers who had wanted to help them, to simply be near them, disappeared. Money grew tight. Donations were exhausted, leaving minimum-wage salaries to cover the rent and other bills.
The families, in many ways, were on their own.
``These people have been dumped,'' said Gisella Buen, a Norfolk woman who befriended the families. ``They are just sitting here lost.''
Those who work with refugees say the loneliness, the frustration and the anger are part of adjusting to a new life and a new country. The families are only now coming to terms with what has happened. It will take months to heal.
``Remember, these people have been through a traumatic experience,'' said Dick Hogan, assistant director of refugee processing for the U.S. Catholic Conference in New York.
``They come here to the United States with expectations, then they find they need to settle down, start working and start building their lives,'' Hogan said. ``Yet they've lost their families. They've lost their homes.''
Those losses can be measured in the color photographs that are displayed in each of the families' Virginia Beach apartments.
A spacious home just built in the suburbs of Sarajevo. A vacation on the lush coast of Yugoslavia. A younger brother who has been killed.
It is here, among the memories, in a courtyard of brick town houses off Birdneck Road, that two of the families must start over. The third lives a few miles away.
Jobs have been arranged with a paint contractor and a manufacturing plant near Lynnhaven Mall. Volunteers drop by to teach English.
``Our goal is to get them on their feet and to get them autonomous,'' said Skip Horton, sponsorship coordinator for the Refugee Immigration Services in Norfolk. ``We try to do that in 90 days.''
Each family has received $250 per person through the U.S. Catholic Conference, which this year brought about 5,000 refugees from the former Republic of Yugoslavia to the United States.
State grants are available for emergencies. The rest must come from volunteers.
Horton knows it is not enough. Despair is often the result.
Refugees come to this country with an inflated view of the lifestyle, he said. They have seen the America of Hollywood movies and Western television. They don't understand that many struggle to make ends meet.
``This was not what they expected, this is America, right?'' Horton said. ``We're so affluent. We can give them everything they need.' But, of course, that's not the case.
``Once the dust settles, the balloons have been popped, they are alone.''
Horton's office, which is serving 17 families from Bosnia, Haiti and Asia, depends on volunteers, who usually come from the community, to make the program work.
Unlike refugees from other countries, the Bosnian families have not had a large local population to rely on. What is here has been splintered by the long, drawn out war.
``We don't have as much a support system for the Bosnians,'' Horton said. ``Most of these people want to go home, and listening to them talk about their lives, I don't blame them. They had a tremendous sense of community that we can't begin to match.''
For Ranko and Nevenka Man-ojlovic, despair is having to ask for money to buy toilet paper.
Each morning, Ranko rises at 5:30 a.m. and climbs on the rusted gold bicycle he rides to work at an assembly plant near Lynnhaven Mall. It takes him 50 minutes.
He returns at 5 p.m., exhausted but scheduled to leave minutes later to wash dishes at an Oceanfront restaurant.
The money is used to pay the $450-a-month rent at the two-story, two-bedroom apartment. The electric bills have cost as much as $150. There has been little money left over.
His wife, Nevenka, stays home with the two children.
On this night, she offers coffee from a plastic red tray that's shaped like an apple. She bought it at the Dollar Store with a friend's money.
A tall woman with curly dark hair and large eyes, Nevenka shuffles through the photographs from home - the field where Ranko used to play soccer, the house they built before the war started.
She points to a stack of letters mailed to relatives left behind. Each has been returned, stamped in red, ``No address because of war.''
Bosnian folk music plays on a small tape player in the corner of the room as they tell of the prison camps where Ranko stayed for more than 16 months. Seized from his home outside Sarajevo, he was beaten and starved in tiny cells that held as many as 115 prisoners.
``I thought my life was over, that I would not survive,'' said Ranko, 29, through the interpreter. I was beaten so badly, there was no more pain.''
A year passed before he heard whether Nevenka or the children were alive. They met again in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where she had fled to escape the war.
They were put in a hotel. Once there, they were approached by refugee officials who asked them if they'd like to come to the United States.
Ranko immediately said yes.
``I heard many good things about the country,'' Ranko said. ``The people live good and were happy here.''
Ranko and Nevenka say they are grateful for the help they've gotten - for the promotions at work, the used car given to them recently from Buen, the friend in Norfolk.
They don't want hand-outs. They just didn't know it would be so hard.
``It is very hard when you cannot talk to anybody, when you cannot explain to anybody,'' said Nevenka, 27. ``Even if people are around you, you are cut off.''
Less than 3 miles away, Zora opens the door of the three-bedroom apartment and apologizes for the dark stains on the beige carpet.
The sons sit on chairs donated by Buen, the friend who has helped the Bosnian family. One watches ``Wheel of Fortune'' on a small television. The other plays with a Gameboy.
It has been three months since the family arrived at Norfolk International Airport. They were taken to the apartment, where the refrigerator was stocked with food. That weekend, they baked cake and made coffee to celebrate.
In the early days, volunteers from the refugee office dropped by to see how they were doing.
Now, it's mostly silence.
Savo, who had been a manager in a factory that repaired farm equipment, got a job painting houses for $6 an hour. He now works with Ranko at a plant near Lynnhaven Mall. Zora, a dental technician for 20 years, accepted a job folding napkins at a Morrison's Cafeteria.
``This is frightening because you have absolutely nothing,'' said Savo, 45, through an interpreter. ``I'm scared because I'm working and I still cannot have life's essentials.
``Since you have no savings, you're constantly wondering what will happen if you get sick, if you stop working.''
The family arrived with three bags of belongings - clothes and a stack of purple and pink photo albums a neighbor had pulled from their house in western Bosnia.
Zora flips through the photo albums, pointing to a portrait of Savo's brother, who was killed in April 1992. He had two kids, she says.
She holds a photograph of a grassy field where clothes flapped gently on a line. It's been destroyed by bombs.
In 1992, Savo was seized and tossed into a prison for five months. He nearly died there. Zora was taken to another camp, where she stayed for more than a year, cut off from her family.
On Aug. 24, 1992, her birthday, she learned that Savo was alive. He was released one month later, weighing less than 100 pounds.
Savo doesn't like to talk about what happened. The memories are strong.
``We lived through things like the camps you saw in World War II movies,'' said Zora, 40. ``We lived through the worst things that we could ever have imagined.
``With what we went through, I believe death cannot happen here,'' Zora said. ``Now what comes is a lot easier. You can see how strong we are. Sometimes we even laugh.''
A silence falls across the apartment as Zora walks to the kitchen to get more coffee. Savo turns and stares through the window. ILLUSTRATION: New Beginnings
PAUL AIKEN/Staff
[Color Photo]
Savo Pavlovic plays soccer with son Goran while wife Zora reflects
on their Virginia Beach apartment.
Bosnian refugee Savo Pavlocic, who speaks almost no English, works
with son Goran on his studies.
KEYWORDS: REFUGEE BOSNIA by CNB