Being a refugee was a big part of Alen and his family’s life once the war had broken out. Refugees purely by force and not by choice, they spent many years travelling from one camp to the next, carried by a proverbial wind, pushed by danger or a move decided upon by his father to further their cause or improve or salvage their ever diminishing standard of living. For the Jovic’s and indeed many of the tens of thousands of other refugees they shared their camps with (as well as the thousands more in camps spread across the whole of Yugoslavia at the time) this life in squalor was often also surrounded in fear and uncertainty, hope and despair, sadness and disgust as well as sickness and death. Seldom did they find happiness. And regularly were they surrounded by enemies and not friends – on the outside and the in.

Being a refugee

“At first, in the beginning, its weird. You feel as though you’re being set free of something. You don’t feel bad because at that moment you are saved from something worse.” To me, life as a refugee played a major part in shaping Alen’s psychology, not only because it consumed so much of his life during the war, but also because of the experiences, hardships, trials, tests, dramas and deeds he went through. I spoke to him about all of this extensively:

“Even though we’re forced to become the refugee, in the first moments, you were running into something better – because of what you were running from – the war itself – you just want to get out of the war. Then, later on, you start realising that that is the point of your life. There is no turning back…

no turning back”. The tone in Al’s voice changes, as though he regrets himself and his family being thrown into this dire situation. Sad, regretful, even though it simply wasn’t their choice.

“It took us a long time to grieve for everything we lost, because the entire time, you were struggling to survive, you had no time to sit down and cry “Oh my god! Oh my god!” – there was no point. Al pauses. “So the entire time we were refugees, we encountered danger upon danger, which made you think constantly: how where you going to get through?How could you make it? Its only after time do you acknowledge that fear, and it goes away.” “You relax and think about these things – the circumstances that you feel you can control – but the entire time you’re really thinking about survival, so you don’t think about loss. – its not that you don’t, you just know that there’s no point. That would only hold you back”.