Word: dani
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...moved from village to village in southern Kosovo before taking a train to the Macedonian border, and then an all-night bus to Senokos. When he brought me to his family's tent, his mother showed me one of the few keepsakes she'd managed to grab before fleeing: Dani's seventh-grade class photo. Her son, she told me proudly, was a star student...
...Dani's father had been forced to stay behind to care for his own bed-ridden father. Rumors swirled in the camp about NATO bombs falling on Ferizaj and Serbian troops rounding up all of its men. When he finally spoke of his father, Dani turned away as he started to cry. I tried to comfort him, but we both realized the best course was to get back to visiting the tents - and the hardships - of others. When it was time to leave the camp for the final time, I told Dani to keep studying English, and I promised...
Back in Rome, I received a letter from Dani saying, "I like to see you agin in the kamp." But after the war ended and refugees began returning home, a letter I mailed to him in Ferizaj came back undelivered. Just a month later, though, I would find out in the most unlikely way that Dani was indeed back home - and doing just fine. On Nov. 23, 1999, I stumbled upon this passage in an Associated Press article about President Bill Clinton's one-day visit to celebrate victory in Kosovo: "An eighth-grader, Ramadan Ilazi, introduced Clinton, making...
...months later, I got an e-mail from Dani: "Now I vil tell you my life," he wrote. He'd returned to Ferizaj and was selling cigarettes to U.S. troops, who soon realized, as I had, that he'd make a great unofficial translator. It was thanks to his army friends - and his good grades in school - that Dani was picked to introduce Clinton in the President's only speech to the Kosovar people. But Dani's e-mail also revealed the best news of all: his father had survived the war, he wrote, "So my life was lucky...
...years since then, though my attention and that of the world at large shifted away from his would-be nation's struggles, I never forgot Dani. A photo that I'd snapped of him holding his class picture in the tent in Macedonia still hung above my desk. In October, as the question of Kosovo's destiny became more and more acute, I tracked Dani down again, eager to know what had become of him and his homeland at this watershed moment in history. Stepping through the sliding glass doors at Pristina airport, I spotted that same giant smile...