From strife-torn homeland to Amherst, Kosovar student maps new road to future

by Sarah R. Buchholz, Chronicle staff

Neshe Gafuri used to think studying at an American university was only a dream. (Stan Sherer photo)

ontinuing Education is an appropriate name for the division in which Kosovar student Neshe Gafuri finds herself studying this semester. Gafuri, 24, has fought to continue learning through persecution, personal loss, financial troubles, war and the rebuilding that follows it.

     Attending the University on a Presidential Scholarship this year, Gafuri hopes soon to be studying at the Isenberg School of Management. She's no strang-er to business. Her family's financial difficulties in the wake of her father's death when she was 9 years old eventually led her to open her own business at 15, importing and selling cosmetics. Running the business involved traveling outside the country and maintaining a small shop in the city of Peje, her hometown.

     "It was difficult to combine both school and work," she wrote in a letter of application to President William M. Bulger. "However, I managed."

     Six years passed. Gafuri finished high school and began pursuing higher education, first full-time at a university business school then, when that became too much on top of her business, part-time at a teacher-training college. But a new problem arose: War broke out in Kosovo in early 1998 between Serbs and Albanians. Violence was particularly prevalent in the western part of the region, where Gafuri, an ethnic Albanian lived.

     "We began to be harassed regularly by the Serbs and this affected me very much in my business," she wrote. "I was constantly visited by the Serb police and was forced to pay bribes and had much of my stock stolen. It became impossible to operate the shop so I sold it at a considerable loss." The war also prevented her from commuting the 30 kilometers to the teachers' college, and Albanians began to be excluded from teaching in or attending state schools. Those who persisted were harassed, beaten, interrogated and even killed, Gafuri said.

     By the end of the year, Gafuri, her mother, and her younger brother and sister were virtually prisoners in their home.

     "We couldn't go out, we couldn't work, we couldn't go to school," she said. Her mother had lost a government job in 1990 because of her ethnicity, and with Gafuri's business closed, the family had to rely on help from nearby extended family members.

     She recalls a week of terror, when killing and other violence were rampant in the city. She and her family huddled in their locked basement without food, not knowing when it would be safe to emerge.

     In January of 1999, desperate to earn some money for her family, Gafuri, who speaks Turkish and Serbo-Croatian in addition to Albanian and English, applied to work at a non-government organization (NGO) called the International Rescue Committee (IRC). Although Serbs singled out Albanians who worked for NGOs for harsh treatment, she said, "I was so happy [to get the job] because of the money."

     Her first day of work she was in a rural town, translating for English and American relief workers, who were interviewing people as part of an assessment for a home winterization program in the villages. She was shocked by what she saw.

     "The snow was this high," she said, holding her hand two feet above the ground. "There were people outside with nowhere to stay. We had some cases where there were 50 people in one room."

     It was while working at the IRC that she met engineer Eamonn Kilmartin, who now lives in West Hartford, Conn. He repeatedly encouraged her to think about studying in the United States, but she considered such an idea to be only a dream.

     In April 1999, after working for the IRC for three months, Neshe and her family were visited by Serbian officials.

     "They told us, 'You are Albanians, you can leave the country but you must go back to Albania,'" she said. Gafuri has Turkish, as well as Albanian ancestry and her family had been in Kosovo for three generations.

     After an extended-family meeting, most of her relatives decided to leave, not for Albania as ordered but for nearby Montenegro, which was also part of Yugoslvia but had an independent police force and minimal discord. A great-uncle and his disabled wife elected to remain behind. The rest of the family squeezed into two cars to make the 30-kilometer journey.

     We did see everything during our trip," she said. "We were lucky we had the cars." But before they could reach the border, they were stopped by Serbian officials.

     "We were in one way lucky," she said. "They didn't kill us. They did other people. We had just material loss." The officials took the more expensive of the two cars and all of the family's money. Gafuri walked the remainder of the trip, which took six hours.
"During this walk, we met with a lot of journalists," she said. "My uncle was English teacher, so he gave an interview for them."

     An Albanian family in Montenegro took them in.

     "When we got there it was easier," she said. "We didn't hide and we had enough food." Her great-uncle and -aunt joined them a few days later. Serbs had expelled them from their home, so her uncle had pushed his wife to the border in makeshift wheelchair.

     Gafuri soon found a position with Medicins Sans Frontieres, an international independent humanitarian medical aid agency. After a harrowing experience on the job, she took a different position with the United Nations High Commission on Refugees.
"It was a big deal," she said. "You had to speak fluent English, have education and be at least 25." Because the local office was understaffed, the organization waived the age requirement.

     "Working in the UNHCR was like school," she said. "There were a lot of different people from different countries. I was working with computers [and other equipment], learning from other people."

     After the war, she managed to transfer back to Kosovo to be near her repatriated family, and at that time she reconnected with her friend Kilmartin and his family. He again suggested she apply to U.S. schools.

     Saddened by the condition of her former hometown and intrigued by Kilmartin's reports of a good university near his American home, she wrote a letter of application to Bulger.

     In late spring of this year she got an e-mail message from Susan Kelly in the President's Office, saying she had been granted a fellowship to cover tuition and fees.

     "I was so happy; I started screaming and yelling in the office," she said.

     She now works four hours a day in the Chancellor's Office, typing, filing and photocopying, and takes General Education courses in math, science and writing skills.
And she spends weekends in West Hartford with her American family, the Kilmartins, who also have contributed to her American education with trips to New York City and Boston.