Introduction: I interviewed a 28 year old lady from Bosnia named Suada. Suada moved to the U.S. when she was 12 years old on August 15, 2000 with her mom, dad, and two sisters. Swada and her family decide to move away from Bosnia because they were trying to flee from the civil war that was going on in their country. The civil war in Bosnia began in 1992, when Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Swada and her family lived through the war and then fled to Holland, Netherlands in 1998, where they lived for 2 ½ years. After 2 ½ years the Netherlands government told them that they could no longer stay there because the war was over. The Netherlands government told them that they could either go back to Bosnia or they could help them move to another country. …show more content…
was the fact that everything was separated by race. She said that even in middle school she had to fill out forms that had a section for race. Swada explained how she didn’t feel like she fit in with the whites because she didn’t speak the “clear English”, and she didn’t feel as if she fit in with the blacks because she wasn’t black. Swada attended Dupont Middle School, and she said the students there would call the foreigners there the “ELL click” because all the foreigners hung out together because they didn’t feel like they were accepted anywhere else. She said, “I didn’t feel comfortable having to indicate which group I belonged to.” Swada explained that at home it was just a nationality, and that it was no big deal if there was a person from another country. Bosnia is not a very developed country, so they don’t have a lot of foreigners in their country. She said, “In the U.S. I could feel the tension of the separation, even at the age of 12 and 13.” At home, she felt like everyone was a human. She said, “we were judged by our character not by our