Word: merima
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Inside a Tuzla sports hall being used to house the evacuees, Merima Sinanovic, a small 20-year-old woman, sits quietly. Her soft blue eyes are set in a face etched with pain and grief. After Serb nationalists sacked her hometown of Vlasenica early in the war, killing her parents, she and her three young brothers roamed the forests in search of food and shelter. "We learned to survive from the old people who had lived through the Second World War," she explains. "They told us how to cook tree buds into a kind of bread. They were surprised...
When word came of a possible evacuation, Merima and her brothers trekked through the snow to Srebrenica. "We slept on the street around fires for five days," she says, showing her blackened palms as proof. They managed to procure some food aid parachuted out of U.S. airplanes by rushing to the drop sites with thousands of other hungry refugees. But that soon ran out. "For the past three days we didn't eat anything. It was like we were in the forests again except we were in a town, in front of U.N. soldiers...
...first U.N. trucks finally lumbered into Srebrenica, Merima and her brothers slept close by to assure themselves a spot. Now safe in Tuzla, Merima studied a sandwich and an orange that have been plopped into her soot-stained hands by an aid worker, not quite sure whether to admire them or eat them. Her brothers puzzle over jars of British baby food. "We haven't seen such things in almost a whole year -- chocolate, oranges, real bread," says Merima. "We've been living in a different world. Before the war we wouldn't even think about bread...
| 1 |