It was March 29 1999. It was 4:00 pm and my mother was serving lunch. Suddenly we saw some families with their bags, and they were walking. We asked them were they were going, and they told us to get everything ready because the Serbian police were going door to door and telling them to leave their homes.
After hearing this my dad immediately got off the table and told us to get some food and our bags ready and wear our jackets. That’s when I really knew we were next. About 10 minutes passed and then we heard Serbian voices in our building. We grabbed our bags and left our house. Outside we saw all of our neighbors, who had also been kicked out. We didn’t know what to do, but then a policeman told us to go to the train station.
After walking for about 40 minutes we arrived to the station. There we saw people from all around the city of Prishtina. Everybody was sad to know that they had to leave the place they had lived in for their whole life.
The station was so crowded that when the first train came we couldn’t get near it. After about 2 hours another train came and we barely got into that one.
The ride was long and boring. The police would sometimes stop the train just to terrorize us. People were scared for their lives. Finally after a whole night of riding we arrived at the border of Macedonia.
The border was crowded with Kosovar people. There were babies, children, and even old people were surrounded by Serbian police on one side and Macedonia police on the other. We waited in the border for about 7 hours and we were lucky enough for some friends of my dad to come and pick us up.
In Macedonia we lived in a house. We were very lucky that we didn’t end up staying in a refugee camp. We stayed in Macedonia for about 2 months, until we were sponsored by my uncle to come to the United States.
When I arrived here in the United States I attended a summer program in Marymount College, where I met a lot of friends.
Now, I am attending Middle School 45, and I am in the seventh grade.