Word: valbona
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Thursday, April 29, of last year, a rainy day in Kosovo, should really have been the last of Besim Kadriu's life. That morning, in the Albanian sector of the town of Mitrovica, Serb paramilitaries torched the house the 21-year-old economics student shared with his pregnant wife Valbona. Watching the inferno from a distance, Kadriu was confident Valbona had escaped but was unsure where she had fled. He set off on foot for the village of Zaza, a few miles away, on a hunch she would be there with her two brothers. She wasn't, but a large...
...probably a good tactic. So grotesque were his injuries that when he finally judged it safe to return to Zaza, he went unrecognized. People scurried from him in horror until he produced a photo he happened to have in the back pocket of his jeans. It showed him and Valbona smiling for the camera a few months before, at Christmas 1998, days after they had married...
...photo in his wallet as a lucky charm, for while some people would opt for death rather than disfigurement, he considers himself a fortunate man. For one thing, a couple of centimeters farther back and that Serb bullet would have hit his brain. For another, he was reunited with Valbona and survived for three months in the care of relatives. He was still avoiding mirrors when the Kosovo Force peacekeepers arrived. But luckiest of all--and thanks to the efforts of an American doctor and a British military medic with a bag full of electronic gizmos and an Internet connection...
...successful operation left Kadriu looking something like himself again, albeit with a pale flap across his face. For the moment, living in an apartment block in Manchester occupied entirely by Kosovar refugees, Kadriu seems a happy man. Valbona tends their new baby and has a support network of other young ethnic Albanian women around...
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