New start in a strange land

A Bosnian family, who came to America two months ago, send their sons to public school.

By SARAH SCHWEITZER

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 10, 2000

TAMPA -- The family of four bounds out the door of a freshly painted, sparsely furnished apartment just before 8 a.m.

They are headed several blocks north, where a yellow bus will arrive to ferry the two children to a brick building with a foreign sounding name.

The stocky, baritone-voiced father captures every step of the action -- the readustment of the adidas backpacks, the boys' nervous smiles -- with a video camera. The mother, her auburn hair windblown and her face flushed from the steamy August heat, glances anxiously at the boys she is handing over to an unknown system.

Two months after Lufthansa Airlines delivered the Bosnian family to Florida with little more than suitcases and memories of a homeland that no longer was safe to call home, the family is taking its biggest step yet toward joining American society.

The boys are going to public school.

Memorial Middle School, just south of Hillsborough High School in Tampa, seems at once an exhilarating and scary proposition. The boys know a little English, but not enough to speak fluently. Would they be able to communicate? Would the school be as violent as the news reports they had heard about American schools? Would the students treat teachers with disrespect? Would the quality of education be less than the boys had enjoyed in Germany, where the family had fled at the start of the Bosnian war in 1992?

The Dokic boys, 11-year-old Danijel and 13-year-old Dejan, are among roughly 16,000 non-English-speaking students enrolled in Hillsborough public schools this year. The overwhelming majority are Spanish speakers.

But there are others who speak Dutch, Burmese, Swahili, Hindi, Portuguese and like the Dokic boys, Serbo-Croatian. For these children, there is little hope of hearing their native tongue in school. Classes for non-English speakers are taught in Spanish and English.

Sitting in class day in and day out, hearing English and suffering social isolation if they don't speak, children pick up English. Without fail, teachers and administrators say, children like the Dokic brothers babble about soccer and GameBoy in English by Christmas.

But on this day, the Dokic brothers speak little English. While their comprehension is quite good, having taken several years of English classes, the boys struggle to cobble phrases together. They are embarrassed when their tongues fumble over words and collapse in a mishmash of sounds.

Danijel chooses a seat in the back of a sixth-grade classroom, one devoted to non-native English speakers. He is not shy; he wants to be an actor someday. But reticence grips him.

His teacher, Albert D'Angelo, a young, energetic, native New Yorker with Italian roots, wastes little time drawing out his students. He asks them to stand and recite their names and birthplaces.

A litany of countries tumbles out. Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico, Vietnam, Kosovo and Bosnia. The largest contingent: Bosnians, with five students.

For Danijel, the strength of the Bosnian numbers is a relief. At last, common ground. But D'Angelo is quick to move against language-based cliques.

Experience tells D'Angelo that it's also vital to counter rivalry and ethnic tensions among the nationalities.

Quickly, he adds, "Do we have any Serbs in this class?"

To his relief, there is silence.

For Danijel and Dejan the war fought between Muslim, Serbs and Croats was a distant conflict that took no immediate family and wrought no scars for them beyond dislocation at a young age.

In 1992, with war raging around their hometown of Tuzla, the Dokics fled to Germany. Their mother was a Muslim and their father a Christian. A peaceful existence for a mixed couple was not possible. The family left behind a home, friends, relatives.

In Marburg, Germany, the family made a new life. They landed an apartment ringed by forest and good jobs. But the government required that they apply for visas every six months and when the war in Bosnia ended, the visas dried up. The Dokic family had no choice but to move.

Florida, with its sun and sea, beckoned.

On June 21, the family arrived in Tampa. With the help of Bosnian friends in the area, the Dokics rented an apartment, secured a car and bought furniture. Jobs, though, did not come. And so for two months, the family lived in a kind of Bosnian enclave until Wednesday's start of school drew the boys away and into the American world.

By 5 p.m., Adisa Dokic, 36, is nervous. Bus number 3114 is more than an hour late. Mladen Dokic, 41, is outside in the rain, standing lookout with video camera in hand.

At last, footsteps on the stairs and a tired, wet pair of boys trudge inside. Their parents query: Was it everything they had hoped? Had they been right to worry?

With a smile, the boys explain.

The students are not disrespectful. There is order in the classroom. The students are not packed like sardines in classrooms too small. Friendships appear on the horizon.

"The teachers are more comfortable with the kids than in Germany," Dejan said. "They make it fun; they talk to the kids."

It is all much better than they had imagined, the two boys chime.

"The first day is always the hardest day," Adisa Dokic says with relief. "If there were no problems today, then everything will be fine from here on."

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