Hello all! I had a fairly good, incredibly interesting day today!
I slept in, made some scrambled eggs with cheese and herbs, watched a bit of Ellen, danced around listening to the radio while I brushed my teeth - typical morning. What made it interesting was afterwards.

Here's some background info: I'm in university. It's exam time. Life's crazy and stressful, especially when you're memorizing page after page of notes ALL ALONE; so I made plans to study with this girl in my English class (let's call her M) whom I've recently begun talking to (we live near eachother, and take one of the same buses to class). I think I briefly mentioned her in my last entry, but now I'll get into detail: she's Albanian from Kosovo, survived genocide, and came to Canada when she was twelve.

Also, on a less serious note, she is oh so extremely beautiful. Like take your breath away beautiful. All her features are perfectly extraordinary. She's got these big, expressive brown eyes framed by super long eyelashes. She has perfectly shaped eyebrows and a clear, beautifully pale complexion that contrasts magnificently with her dark eyes, eyebrows, eyelashes, not to mention her chocolaty brown hair that falls to her shoulders in cascades of ringletty curls. She does happen to be short, but her body is so petite and curvy it makes up for the lack of height.

But I'm getting sidetracked by my saphic tendencies. What I want to get to are the stories of the civil war she told me about.

From what I understood from what she told me, when she was 11 (she's 19, my age now) there was a civil war in Kosovo. Serbians were killing Albanians. Not just bang bang a bullet thru your head and you're gone. The Serbian police would rape women and girls before killing them (even the nuns were told to take birth control pills!), and children were forced to watch their parents being killed in horrible ways, such as being burned alive, before being killed and/or raped themselves.

As a little girl she would read about this in the newspapers and watch it on the news. She dreaded the day the Albanians would come to her neighbourhood; some of her cousins had been able to leave to Canada, but she and the rest of her immediate family could not because they didn't have enough money. Still, they all kept their suitcases packed, knowing they might have to flee at any given moment.

The day it happened started out ordinarily enough. Her mom was in the kitchen baking bread. Her dad was somewhere else in the house. She was in the backyard playing with her friends. brothers, and sisters - the front yard was off limits;too dangerous.

A neighbour came running with a warning. The Albanians were in a neighbourhood near by, heading their way! Clothes were layerd, suitcases grabbed, baking left, and they ran, leaving their home, their pets, everything they knew for an unknown future, for their only plan was to run.

Not everybody left. Her grandfather, who had survived world war 2, had lived in the house most of his life, and he was old, tired. He decided if he was going to die, he was going to die and that was that. Not able to bear leaving their father behind, two of her uncles stayed too.

The incredible thing is her grandpa and uncles all survived even though the Serbians did come soon afterwards and pillaged the whole neighbourhood. The thing about civil war is, you are connected to 'the enemy' unlike in other wars. The enemy is your former school teacher, teamate, friend. Such was the case with M's family and the leader of the Serbian police force that came into the neighbourhood. M's mother had grown up next to this man, and they had been close friends as children. When he came into the house and saw the father of his former childhood friend, he said "nobody touches this family!"

Others wouldn't have done this. And what are the chances that out of all the possible Serbians and all the possible neighbourhoods, this Serbian leader came to the neighbourhood of his childhood friend? It's part of the reason M passionately believes in God.

But back to M: she and her family managed to catch a bus and eventually landed in a refugee camp before being able to go to Canada. M says the bus ride was one of the scariest times because Serbians would regularly stop the bus and kill people. Everytime the bus would stop she would think "this is it. I'm dead." Luckily, she didn't see anyone getting killed because the bus was so crowded she couldn't see much at all. And the bus driver was Serbian, which gave him barganing power.

The refugee camp angered her, because even after all they had been through, the women still got into catty fights about gossip and whose turn it was to wash the dishes. Some people even used the extra bread they were given as pillows, to make themselves more comfortable. How disrespectful, she thought. I think what this goes to show is people are people, no matter what happens to them. The poor man is no more holy than the rich man. They just live thru different experiences.

But people also posess immersurable reserves of strength! Imagine living thru all that! And she was one of the lucky ones! Some children had to put one foot in front of the other, keep on eating, keep on breathing after watching as all their family members were raped, tortured and killed. The spirit has no limits. Limits belong to flesh and bone.

Of course, I've heard about things like this happening - newspapers, radio, tv. However, it's so different to actually hear it from someone who's lived through it. There is nothing about her that proclaims "I've lived through genocide" just like no one can tell who's been kicked out of her home for being gay, who's lived through abuse, who's just met his soul mate, who landed the great new job, who finally worked up the courage to speak to a crush. I don't necessarily think this makes us lonely, because realizing how we all are, in a way, closed books to other people, and how we all go through both difficult and ecstatic times, allows us to empathize.

Amazing story.

And yes, we did also manage to get A TON of studying done. I'm gonna ace this final. yah!