Wednesday, January 31, 2001

Assignment: Bosnia

PTC couple brings home some new friends

By SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
SallieS@Juno.com

It was a year long job assignment in Bosnia for Paula and Ray Kreiner, but in many ways it was life-changing.

When it ended, they became surrogate parents to four young people, bringing them to the United States to complete their education. They are among only about 35 Bosnians who have had this opportunity.

Ray Kreiner went to Sarajevo in October 1998 as director of resource management for MPRI, Military Personal Resources Inc., an American company based in Alexandria, Va. The company is contracted to train and equip the Federation military of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).

His wife joined him on the first day of 1999 and remained there until March, returning again in June and staying until the end of Kreiner's tour that September. For both, it was what Paula Kreiner called "an eye-opening experience," a time during which she learned a little of the all-consuming job it can be simply to maintain a home and craft nutritious meals from limited and frequently unfamiliar foods; to make friends with people whose homes have been destroyed in repeated battles among religious and ethnic groups; to deal with impassable streets and intermittent household utility services.

What does a master gardener from Peachtree City, Ga., know about avoiding land mines and ignoring machine gun-toting security patrols in the streets and shops? The breakup of Yugoslavian states, deep-rooted ethnic conflicts and the hopelessness of the economy combined to inflict a near-lethal blow to a culture that is struggling to survive in a new millennium.

People of conscience and good will find themselves stirred to try to help in some way. But what to do? To a middle-class American, everything about Bosnia is like "a soup sandwich," Paula Kreiner said. "You think you've got an answer and it slides through your fingers."

Ethnic conflicts run deep. "The situation will flare up again and again in our generation," Kreiner said. "They have no economy at all and the laws allow no recourse through the courts. If you've invested, the money is gone, and there's no hope of getting it out of there.

"Not that our way is perfect" she hastens to avoid appearing to be an American who believes the American way is the only way "but if we could take their brightest and give them a chance to see how things can be handled, with their background, maybe they could see how to correct their problems."

Sending their children abroad to study is prohibitively expensive in a country where the average monthly income is less than $300 a month and the cost of living astronomical. Kreiner remembers a price tag of more than $40 U.S. for a muffin pan, and is keenly aware that even if they could enlist financial aid to bring the students here, their leaving home would prove a considerable cost to their families. Their jobs as interpreters helped support their families.

The Kreiners' son married recently and "doesn't need us now," so they decided to "adopt" five Bosnian young people and bring them to the United States to complete their educations. "We realized that in this situation, the only hope for long-term help is to try to get the best out of Bosnia into the United States, [farther away] than just to Europe," Paula Kreiner says.

And they did it. Although one of the five had to return home, four young people, 24 to 30 years of age, have come to the States and started college in Louisiana.

"We tried anything we could think of to get finances that would have enabled us to have them here in Georgia," Kreiner said, but success came when they located an anonymous benefactress who arranged for their room and board, tuition and books, at the University of Louisiana in Monroe, her hometown. "Monroe is the home of Delta Air Lines," Kreiner said, "and the money is there."

Retired Brig. Gen. Herb Lloyd, currently in Nigeria, was program training manager for MRPI, and responsible for approximately 40 interpreter-translators in BiH, including the youths now in America. He helped coordinate their scholarships.

Although at first the Kreiners expected that the woman's largesse would take the students all the way to completion of their degrees, that is now in doubt. Nonetheless, the Kreiners are adamant that they will find a way to secure that goal, preferably in Monroe, a small, quiet town that seems better suited to foreign students than a frenetic metropolis like Atlanta.

The foursome two women and two men spent the holidays in Peachtree City with the Kreiners, who introduced them to friends at an open house earlier in December. Kreiner stressed that she is "not seeking publicity or donations for these young people nor for their homeland, but just awareness."

"They are absolutely delightful, and each has a different story," she said. Three are Croatian Catholics, she said, and the fourth, tall brunette Amira Ceric, 24, is ethnic Montenegrin, a Muslim she was Ray Kreiner's interpreter during his time in Bosnia. Her father is a retired clothing manufacturer and her mother once worked in the courts.

Ceric is majoring in computer science.

Zdravko Markov, the only boy in a family of four sisters, is 27. His mother is retired and his father now in forestry. Like all of the students, his education at home was interrupted by war and the chaos that followed. A finance major, he needed only five more credits to graduate in BiH, but is now only a freshman.

Ivona Jukic, 29, and her sister were in England when fighting broke out at home. They were spared much of the dangers, but during their absence, her father, now retired, and her mom, a technician, had to move to a different state. The attractive blonde is a prelaw major whose goal is a practice in international law.

And Eugen Knezovic, 27, is the son of two teachers. His mom, he said, teaches first through fourth grades, but his dad, who once taught fifth through eighth, is now a city administrator.

"Gene," as he is now known, is a finance major who has been bucking the system since he was about 4 years old. His good grounding in English stems from the choice he made when he first started school, rejecting the study of Russian in the face of government disapproval.

While all of them said they had some idea of what to expect in America, based on television images, they were struck by the quality of life here. Kreiner said the attitude of the American people has been the most overwhelming thing: their generosity, kindness and friendliness, far beyond anything the Bosnians could imagine.

The country's size, geographically and otherwise, amazes them. "Everything's huge," said one. "The stores, even the meals are huge; television has too many channels."

The Kreiners took them to Atlanta where Knezovic saw his first real skyscraper. They've enjoyed shopping at an outlet mall and trying new foods. Ice cream is a favorite, but they didn't care for sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving, and Mexican food has a spice that is not to Jukic's liking.

And while they all admitted a slight homesickness because of the season Christmas for three of them, Ramadan for Ceric, who is having a hard time fasting in America they know their holiday here was much more lavish than that of their families.

Asked how their parents are coping without the income they had represented all worked directly or indirectly as interpreters for MRPI Jukic answered instantaneously: "They are magicians. They can make something out of nothing."

Everyone laughed, but Paula Kreiner backed up her statement with an example of how several "jobs" can be generated out of something so mundane as the delivery of a load of sand for a building project: First a truck-driver has to be found, and then the sand is dumped in the street two blocks from the project, where someone else mixes it with mortar. Moving it to the building site, of course, requires several more entrepreneurs with wheelbarrows and shovels.

Ray Kreiner said the breakup of Yugoslavia set Serb against Muslim, and since the war, the Serbs have become the target for the others.

"The commander of a military unit might be Bosniac, the deputy Croatian," Kreiner said. "It's leadership by consensus that is nonexistent. Everything has deteriorated. To try to get laws passed to encourage development is impossible. At one time more than half the entire economy was aid, and it may be more now."

Markov and Knezovic merely laughed at the mention of parliament. BiH actually has three presidents Bosniac, Croatian, and Serb who rotate power every eight months. Everywhere organization is required, chaos reigns.

But although the young people joked about conditions in their homeland, they turned serious, as Jukic said firmly, "We are determined to go back and set things right."