After "The Storm": Girls from the Future

"Toto don't be afraid, the storm has passed."

And thirty years later, I remember this sentence from "The Wizard of Oz" that I said in the theater in Ruma. That town was the first stop on my family's refugee journey after the "Storms" had to leave Krajina.

The first years spent in Ruma were not easy for me. The kids at school could be very cruel - they called me a refugee with nothing more than once. I was small and I was ashamed.

Your own truth

The "Storm" is celebrated today as both persecution and liberation, a day for mourning and a day for celebration. Now that I am no longer that little Maya in Ruma who has nothing, I know the value of my own truth.

And my truth is that the war changed the future I would have had if I had stayed in my town, in Petrinja. My parents lost their home and the life they lived in the country where they were born, and I lost my room. I was sad as a child.

My truth is that my family did not want war. I never hated anyone - my parents raised me that way. My dad is from Banija, and my mom is from Kordun.

People from the future

After Ruma, my family moved to Novi Sad. There I became a graduate journalist of the first generation of Journalism students at the Faculty of Philosophy and made lifelong friends. Even though it's a "welcome", I've never felt that way. I was a person, not an index number - Maya instead of an exiled person.

At the age of twenty-one, I started working on television and it has remained that way until today. I live in Belgrade and after a quarter of a century of living as a tenant, I have my own room again.

Thanks to television, I met many people from Belgrade, Zagreb and Sarajevo. Joint gatherings and celebrations of company anniversaries brought into my life people from the future that did not exist - friends from Zagreb.

The Girl From The Other Side

That's how I made a friend who is from Dalmatia. I don't know how many nights during all these years we each recounted our own story about "The Storm". Their ending was always the same. We were both sad girls. Like me, she was crying because she is not in her room. The only difference is that she went back to her room and I didn't.

We grew up on the same stories and movies. Before the war, we watched the series "Girl from the Future" every day - when she put a rifle on her head, the heroine could lift and move objects. Both of us risked being late for school because of that series.

She met me as the first girl from the "other side" who left three decades ago. We have been together for ten years, because the war took twenty years from us. Although we can't lift objects when we put on the zip, we can be "Girls from the Future".

The storm has passed.

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