Mehdi Hyseni (right) with his sons Durim, 18, (left) and Albasan, 26, at their Quincy apartment.
(Tom Herde for the boston globe)
It has been nine years since the Hyseni family fled Kosovo, after Bosnian Serbs burned down their house and killed a close friend and two of his sons. The family escaped to Pristina, where they again were forced out, this time given five minutes to grab some belongings and leave.
Then it was on to a refugee camp on the Macedonian border, followed by resettlement in America, first at Fort Dix in New Jersey and finally in Quincy about eight years ago. They arrived with nothing, speaking no English, and yet they considered themselves blessed.
This week, the family is celebrating the news that Kosovo has declared independence from Serbia. "I cried yesterday all day long," says Ajshe Hyseni. "We've waited for this for 100 years. Five generations never saw freedom." Her grandfather and his father were both killed by Serb forces, who confiscated the family's property.
"I was born like a refugee because my mother and father didn't have anything. They moved from one city to another." Then she and Mehdi got married and slowly built a life in Kosovo, rearing five children and becoming part of the professional class.
That life ended with the brutal Serbian crackdown on ethnic Albanians, many of them living in Kosovo. In 1999, NATO launched airstrikes against the military. Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was ousted and later extradited to The Hague for war crimes. It was all front-page headlines in the 1990s and into the new millennium.
But then the terrorist attacks of 9/11 stunned the world, and the Serbian headlines faded. People forgot about folks like the Hysenis and their three sons.
The boys have done just fine, as children will. Durim, who was 9 years old when he arrived here, is a senior at Quincy High School, an honors student looking at colleges. Berat, who was a senior at Milton High School, graduated from UMass-Amherst and is married and living in Canton. Albasan is finishing up at UMass-Boston.
For their parents, it hasn't been so easy.
Imagine leaving an entire life behind: your home, your language, your friends, family and culture. Worse, they left two daughters: Mergime, a translator for the United Nations in Kosovo, and Albiona, who lives in Hungary. The rest of the family has seen little of the girls in the past decade: Airfares are prohibitive for those with low-paying jobs, and the two have been unable to get visas. It's a heartache, says their mother, that never leaves her.
But from a rocky start, they've made it, more or less. They've learned how to speak English and negotiate the T. Ajshe took classes in early childhood education at Quincy Junior College and works as a teacher for Head Start. For years, Mehdi, now 60, worked as a security guard at Logan Airport; now he does the same at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He has a PhD in international relations from Kosovo.
It's a long way from their professions back home, where Mehdi was a writer, professor, and former president of the National Democratic Albanian Party of Kosovo and Ajshe taught language in a high school.
They pay $1,500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in Quincy. Mehdi and Ajshe work opposite shifts and seldom see each other. Like three-quarters of her fellow Kosovars, Ajshe suffers kidney problems from the impure water supply back home.
She has returned to Kosovo once since she left - two years ago, to see her daughter Mergime, her siblings, and her elderly mother-in-law. When she saw her old apartment, she was devastated. "There was absolutely nothing left. The Serbian military lived there when they made us leave. They broke every single thing and took every single document and book Medhi ever had. All my pictures were gone. I was so sad I was sick for three weeks."
Mergime, now 28, had moved back into the apartment when the Serbs left, but she never told her parents about the destruction. "She didn't want to make me sad," says Ajshe.
Even though the country has declared its independence, it faces enormous problems of unemployment, poverty, inadequate infrastructure, and official corruption. The 100,000 Serbs living there have been subject to abuse and discrimination and many have taken to the streets to protest the independence. Though Washington and most of its Western European allies have recognized the new country, Russia and Serbia strongly object to it.
Ajshe and Mehdi Hyseni know that their homeland will continue to struggle, just as they will continue to struggle here. But their sons are "totally American," says Ajshe. "There's more freedom for them here, more opportunities for school and for work. It's hardest for Mehdi and me, because we had good jobs. Now, at our age, to work this kind of job where Mehdi stands up for eight hours at a time for $9 an hour . . . sometimes, we can't pay our rent on time."
Mehdi is jubilant about the newfound freedom in his country; it's what he spent much of his life working toward. But he won't go back. He'll become an American citizen on March 6 - Ajshe and the boys have already taken their oaths - and he hopes to find a better job, perhaps in government. It's refreshing, given the flagging international reputation of the United States, to hear him rhapsodize about America.
"This country is really my homeland because of what it did for us," he says. "And not only for us, but for 2 million Albanian people in Kosovo who thank the US that they are still alive. My people are very happy and very grateful and very conscious of who helped us."
Now, if they could only bring their girls over, perhaps the Hysenis' American dream would be complete.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
