I didn't have school from 7th to 12th grade due to war. AMA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, thank you for doing this thread. Like a PP, I also visited Bosnia after the war and found the country to be beautiful and the people warm and welcoming.

What were the education levels of your parents? I would expect that that impacted the kind and amount of books in your home, yes?

Did your friends have a similar experience with a lot of reading? Where are they now in life?

How did your parents cope emotionally with the situation and what did they convey to you about it?

Neither one of my parents has a college degree but they are life long learners anyway. My mother is an avid reader and they have always valued education. I swapped books with neighbors. We also had to leave our home very suddenly to move to a different part of town that was not under Serb control. So I guess you would call that a displaced person, but it's essentially a refugee within your own country/city. We only took one set of clothes and no books, of course.

My closest circle of friends are all college graduates. My best friend growing up was a Fullbright scholar and she came to the US to finish her master's degree. She is now teaching economics back home. They are all doing well either at home or abroad.

My parents and grandparents went into survival mode. There was no time to feel sorry for ourselves. My mom now tells me that they never wanted to show us how scared and worried they actually were. What purpose would that have served?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Are you an exception? What happened to your classmates?

I don't think I'm the exception at all. Among those of us who had the drive and the ambition to go to college, we did. The rest of my generation who didn't want to go to college are doing other things now. But I do not think that any of us who wanted to continue our education was not able to due to missed time. What happens at home is extremely important too. Have your kids read A LOT. Talk about all sorts of subjects. Develop curiosity within them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for doing this AMA.

How does what we're going through now compare to what you remember of living through years of war? Both in terms of day to day life - but also how you feel and cope emotionally?

Are you surprised how much we all seem to be falling apart, even with our relative (and pretty robust) comfort here?

There are a very few similarities in my opinion. We still have food (the only food we had was given to us through humanitarian aid. I remember eating cookies from 1963). We have running water, we have electricity, we have internet, we are able to drive around freely and go take walks in the woods, we are able to communicate with your loved ones even though it may not be in person. No one is shooting at us constantly. I can't tell you how many times I was chased by a sniper. Things may not be comfortable right now, but they are far from being tragic. Of course, I'm not including the people who have lost their jobs and face evictions in this generalization. They are really struggling.

I cope by telling myself that this will be over one day and we will be able to go back to normal. You'll be surprised how fast we will forget this ever happened.

I cope by reciting every night (to myself) all of the things that are still going well in my life.

Thank you for your answer - and, just, holy sht. I have a friend who is also a refugee from Bosnia and I feel like such a soft marshmallow every time she tells me any detail about what her life was like then. Soft and weak, and grateful.

Don't feel soft and weak. It is what it is. I often feel like an alien among "normal" people (people who led normal lives), but that's a whole other thread lol.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The war started when I was in 7th grade. We had no distance learning since there was no internet in my country in the early 90s. We tried for a while to meet with teachers occasionally in pods in people's homes, but that stopped because it became too dangerous for us to move around. There was also no electricity or running water in the city almost the entire time.

Fast forward to today, I have a degree from an American University (3.9 GPA), have a stable job, a family.

I'm posting this not to lecture anyone or shame anyone, but to hopefully comfort some of you who are panicking about kids not going back to school in person this fall.

Feel free to ask me whatever you want.

Thank you for sharing this. One of my best friends missed school from 1st to 7th grade due to a civil war and is now a cardiologist. Another friend had no formal schooling before age 11 is now a resident at a top teaching hospital.

[Anonymous]

My husband’s aunt was homeschooled for highschool because of great societal difficulties. She went on to get a PhD in mathematics from a neighboring country (things had settled down) and to have a career in the US. She is now in her eighties, but can add up numbers in her head faster than a cash register (not that that has much to do with her field of mathematics).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The war started when I was in 7th grade. We had no distance learning since there was no internet in my country in the early 90s. We tried for a while to meet with teachers occasionally in pods in people's homes, but that stopped because it became too dangerous for us to move around. There was also no electricity or running water in the city almost the entire time.

Fast forward to today, I have a degree from an American University (3.9 GPA), have a stable job, a family.

I'm posting this not to lecture anyone or shame anyone, but to hopefully comfort some of you who are panicking about kids not going back to school in person this fall.

Feel free to ask me whatever you want.

Thank you for sharing this. One of my best friends missed school from 1st to 7th grade due to a civil war and is now a cardiologist. Another friend had no formal schooling before age 11 is now a resident at a top teaching hospital.

And that is exactly the point of me posting this. Our children will be ok. Things will go back to normal. This is not to say we won't have to deal with issues at the end of this, but it's not insurmountable.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for posting, OP, and putting things in perspective. I’m sorry for what you and your family went through. My SIL (husbands brothers wife) is Bosniak and was a child during the war. her family managed to leave Bosnia for Croatia and then left Croatia for the US so they were not in Bosnia during the war but she grew up as a refugee and I think has a lot of trauma from that (though she never talks about it.) I often feel ashamed of any times I’ve complained about aspects of my life that have been difficult because I realize it’s nothing compared to what she (or countless others around the world) went through.

[Anonymous]

I love this thread.

Op, immigrants like you are an asset to the country.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Are you an exception? What happened to your classmates?

I don't think I'm the exception at all. Among those of us who had the drive and the ambition to go to college, we did. The rest of my generation who didn't want to go to college are doing other things now. But I do not think that any of us who wanted to continue our education was not able to due to missed time. What happens at home is extremely important too. Have your kids read A LOT. Talk about all sorts of subjects. Develop curiosity within them.

Thanks so much for this post, OP.

I went to high school with a Bosnian refugee. She came over in 8th grade and didn't speak any English. By the time we graduated, she was #2 in our class (I was #1 and remember being like DAMN, she's giving me a run for my money for someone who didn't even speak the language a few years ago!!!). It's so impressive that you have come out of such a negative situation with such motivation and resiliency. Well done.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
My husband was a war refugee. He was brought to a foster home and sent to school in his new country after a year of missed education in his native land. His teacher thought he was cognitively deficient, when actually his cultural references were just too different.

He went on to get an MD and a PhD.

I moved a lot as a child to various countries because of my father’s job. There were no international schools in most of them, so I had to scramble to learn the language, and master different curriculae. Did you know math is taught VERY differently from country to country? That was my hardest challenge. I too became a scientist, but to this day I don’t really like math.

Trauma can look a lot like low IQ, ADHD, even autism. I have PTSD due to childhood sexual abuse. The abuse occurred during some very critical math development years. I was good at math before the abuse. It was my favorite subject. During the abuse, I learned virtually nothing. I had to learn basic math years later when my brain was not in crisis mode. I’ll never be a physicist, but I’m not stuck doing manual labor either.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thanks for posting, OP, and putting things in perspective. I’m sorry for what you and your family went through. My SIL (husbands brothers wife) is Bosniak and was a child during the war. her family managed to leave Bosnia for Croatia and then left Croatia for the US so they were not in Bosnia during the war but she grew up as a refugee and I think has a lot of trauma from that (though she never talks about it.) I often feel ashamed of any times I’ve complained about aspects of my life that have been difficult because I realize it’s nothing compared to what she (or countless others around the world) went through.

I don't normally talk about it either. I don't want to sound like I'm lecturing people and comparing hardships. This was meant to be a post to comfort people and let them know that it is possible to come out successful after much harder hardship than we are experiencing now.

I never minimize anyone's pain. We all go through struggles in life and it's pointless to compare the pain we might be feeling.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love this thread.

Op, immigrants like you are an asset to the country.

Thank you! I definitely know that I'm very lucky to have a life that I have now.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Thanks for posting, OP, and putting things in perspective. I’m sorry for what you and your family went through. My SIL (husbands brothers wife) is Bosniak and was a child during the war. her family managed to leave Bosnia for Croatia and then left Croatia for the US so they were not in Bosnia during the war but she grew up as a refugee and I think has a lot of trauma from that (though she never talks about it.) I often feel ashamed of any times I’ve complained about aspects of my life that have been difficult because I realize it’s nothing compared to what she (or countless others around the world) went through.

I don't normally talk about it either. I don't want to sound like I'm lecturing people and comparing hardships. This was meant to be a post to comfort people and let them know that it is possible to come out successful after much harder hardship than we are experiencing now.

I never minimize anyone's pain. We all go through struggles in life and it's pointless to compare the pain we might be feeling.

What do you think was the most important thing that kept you going/inspired to learn during the war?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
My husband was a war refugee. He was brought to a foster home and sent to school in his new country after a year of missed education in his native land. His teacher thought he was cognitively deficient, when actually his cultural references were just too different.

He went on to get an MD and a PhD.

I moved a lot as a child to various countries because of my father’s job. There were no international schools in most of them, so I had to scramble to learn the language, and master different curriculae. Did you know math is taught VERY differently from country to country? That was my hardest challenge. I too became a scientist, but to this day I don’t really like math.

Trauma can look a lot like low IQ, ADHD, even autism. I have PTSD due to childhood sexual abuse. The abuse occurred during some very critical math development years. I was good at math before the abuse. It was my favorite subject. During the abuse, I learned virtually nothing. I had to learn basic math years later when my brain was not in crisis mode. I’ll never be a physicist, but I’m not stuck doing manual labor either.

I 100% agree with everything you said. We wouldn't have learned much either-even if we had school.

[Anonymous]

My father had the same exact experience, except he never learned any English at all. He immigrated here as an adult with several kids. My mother only managed to finish ES. All due to wars.