239/365 The Bosnians

Other parishes had them. Fr. Bill didn't understand why we didn't have them. That's how the story was trickled down to me. Why didn't our school have Bosnians? There were 35,000 Bosnians in town. Why weren't they at our school?

"Aren't they Muslim?" the second grade teacher asked flatly. True, they were, but our school was also full of Buddhists.

"Don't they live in other neighborhoods?" the eighth grade teacher asked. Also true. They were south and west of our neighborhood. The immigrants and refugees we lived by were from southeast Asia and from Africa at that point. Bosnians, like most immigrants, were settling together, just like the Italians on the Hill or the Irish in Dogtown (although as a descendant of St. Louis Irish who were too poor to move to Dogtown, this assumption grates on my nerves). The Bosnians were at other churches if they were at any Catholic churches at all. We weren't in their neighborhood and not on their radar.

But the issue was pushed. I won't say by whom because I'm not certain, but suddenly we had a Bosnian family enrolling. Yanko and Talaitha Avdo showed up on a Monday in October. They had 5 children in tow and Talaitha was very pregnant. Ben, the translator, had a grim look on his face as he helped them with enrollment forms. Three children would be attending, on full scholarship, starting that moment. Drina was in my class, a room with four girls and 9 boys. I was happy to have another girl, but worried because I already had a new girl, Minh Thu, who spoke no English. Another ESL student in a school where the ESL teacher was a waste of space was not going to go well for me, or for her.

Still, I took Drina upstairs and, through gesture and simple words, was able to get her to a desk and find some basic supplies for her, mostly pencils and some blank paper. I gave her a math textbook, which was my focus subject.

She sat quietly staring out the window during homeroom, and then I tried my best to explain that classes were going to switch. It was so much easier with Vietnamese students. Even though Minh Thu spoke almost no English and understood only a bit more, Cuong sitting next to her could at least get her to the right page in the book. Drina, I feared, was going to be lost.

Oh how lost.