Bosnian can't go to college without help

Like new graduates everywhere, Irena Sliskovic is feeling excited and unsettled at the same time.

She marched through Notre Dame Academy's commencement Thursday night and has been accepted by Thomas More College for the fall.

But since 1992, uncertainty has haunted Irena's life.

Irena is Bosnian. Her hometown is Sarajevo. She has spent her senior year with a Florence family as part of Project Shelter, which brought 29 Bosnian high school students to the United States for a year of education, safety and normalcy.

Now, while her classmates ease into one last carefree summer before college, Irena worries about fall. Thomas More College has offered her a $5,000 partial scholarship. She needs $6,000 more to attend.

Her failure to find it has more serious consequences than taking a semester off and finding a temporary job. If she is not enrolled in college, she must return to Bosnia.

Her heart has been there all along, in the safekeeping of her mother and her friends. But Irena, whose young, happy life was torn apart when civil war broke out in 1992, knows well what is missing in her homeland.

She remembers the three years without electricity, adequate food, running water. She remembers the whistling sound of incoming shells and the low flash of light that told her there were only seconds to find cover. She shakes her head at American classmates who passed out during a staged auto accident for an anti-drinking campaign. She has seen human beings die on her doorstep.

Her freshman year, before the start of war, was spent at the city's top high school, studying French, Latin, physics, history. Her next two years were spent in the dark, sooty basements of homes, in makeshift classrooms with multiple teachers. Actually, her sophomore and junior "years" consisted of three months of study each.

It was a lonely, hidden life, a life underground. The buses and trams she once loved riding through Sarajevo's lovely old sections stopped running. The stores were destroyed by shellings or emptied by war profiteers.

The young, like other Sarajevans, simply sat, worried, waited. Bedtime came early, with no TV to watch or CDs to listen to. Mornings came hard, scrubbing off the blackening soot from makeshift oil lights. Sometimes the day brought death to a friend or acquaintance, and almost always destruction.

Being realistic

But she knows it will be a long time coming.

"I talked to my mother about going back," says Irena, curled up against a sofa on her host family's living room floor. "You can work if you can find a job, but there are not many there. Most of the universities have been destroyed. Many of the educated, professional people left. Most of the computers were destroyed."

Irena plans to study computer science. She wants to return to Bosnia as an educated worker who can help rebuild the economy. It is her only career goal.

But she knows that, right now, there is little her country can do to prepare her. "I wonder," she says slowly. "If I go back, will I have a teacher? Will I even see a computer in four years?"

Rick Deerwester, a local businessman, is the force behind Project Shelter. He started it as a way for his family to bring over one Bosnian student. He ended up bringing 29. It was a chance, he says, for ordinary Americans to do one small, good act in the face of the Bosnian tragedy.

And now Irena and some of the 29 other students offer the rest of us a second chance. Fifteen students are applying to U.S. colleges. Most, like Irena, need additional funds to enroll.

If you've considered international investment, this is the place to dive in. You may never see your dividend, but a devastated nation will.

To donate to a college fund for Bosnian students, send checks made out to Project Shelter to Project Shelter Inc., Box 121, Union, Ky. 41091.

Krista Ramsey's column appears in The Enquirer on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati 45202, or fax at 768-8340.

Published June 1, 1996.