Memoirs

Sitting at the JFK airport, hearing different languages and seeing all kinds of strange people. Hearing the announcer over speakerphone announcing the flight to a place I never heard in Ghana. Seeing a very long line with German passengers for a boarding line for a plane to Frankfurt Germany. Right at the next gate are more Europeans chatting, laughing and waiting for their flight to Amsterdam. For some reason my flight to Mpls will be at a gate that is among the gates of these international flights. On the overhead flights to destinations such as Prague and Moscow are announced and passengers called. I perceive all of this and think about next summer. Next summer, Alaa, I and my entire family will be going to Bosnia. I can see us already waiting for our international flight to take us across the ocean and ultimately to Sarajevo. We will be surrounded by other Bosnians and we will be so happy to be on vacation, to be together and to be going to see our family and friends and the country that we love so much. It will be Alaa’s first time in Bosnia, and first time to meet most of my family so we will both probably be a bit nervous and wondering how everything will go and what first impressions will be imprinted. We will be looking forward to an amazing vacation and the possibility to visit even Croatia or Turkey. If we were leaving from Chicago during the summer going to Amsterdam, we will be undoubtedly surrounded by other Bosnians, all going to the same ultimate destination. This reminds me of the story I vividly recall to this day. My family and I were going from Chicago to Bosnia many years ago. We were at the gate in Chicago waiting for a flight, and Emina who was just a toddler at that time, turned at one point to my mother and said: “Mom, there are people here who speak the same language as you!” We all burst out laughing at that comment. When I hear people speaking German or Bosnian there is just something that makes me attracted to their language, something is lit up in me and I remember my childhood and start to associate emotions with that language. That is something that I miss the most in English. English is my third language, after Bosnia and German respectively and it is also a language that I started learning when I was in my teens and when most of my childhood had already passed. It is also a foreign language that I was forced to learn with the assumption that it will be the last language forced upon me. As we always assumed that we will stay in the United States, and maybe because of that or maybe because of other reasons, I cannot associate warm, cozy memories and emotions to this language when I hear it. It is not that the language is ugly, it is just maybe because I was not raised here and have not grown up from an early age speaking this language. Or maybe it is just that I was born to be a European my entire life. As my thinking, perceptions and convictions lean more towards how a European would think and not so much how an American would think. I just can’t wait for summer 2011 where I will be surrounded by people that look similar to me and speak the same language. I can’t wait to show Alaa the place I grew up, where I went to school and where I used to play before the war when I was a child. I can’t wait to have ice-cream with him at a place that has been in Sarajevo for ages called “Egypt” and where I used to throw fits at my parents to get me the ice-cream even in the cold winters. There is no ice-cream that compares to that in Egypt, it is made different and there is only one flavor but that flavor cannot be compared to anything else in this world. It is the ice-cream I was searching since my childhood in other places and could not find even a small resemblance. No one knows what it is made of exactly since it is a secret recipe believed to be owned by a man who came from Albania. Thinking about all of this I start to board my plane this evening back home, to Minneapolis.