Dino Mirica: Moving Back to Bosnia

Like many diaspora, I’ve always thought about going back to my home country. Regardless of everything that I’d been through, my mind found a way of traveling back to my city. As it turned out, my family did, too.

We were one of the thousands that decided to move back to our beautiful city of Mostar.

Before we get into that, it’s probably important I mention that when I was four years old, we fled Bosnia for Connecticut. I grew up learning both Bosnian and English and often mixed the two languages when communicating with my family. I didn’t know how to read or write in Bosnian, but I managed to get by when it came to speaking it.

Feeling unfulfilled with the concept of the ‘American Dream,’ my parents decided to move back in 2007. They planned to start their own businesses and have my sister and I attend school there, the ultimate test of grasping the “Hercegovacki” mentality. My mom wasn’t as excited to move back as my dad was — he’d wanted to go back since 2004, when we finished building our house.

My dad was the type of person who would rather have food and drinks on the table than hundreds and thousands of dollars in his bank account. He didn’t care much for materialistic things, anyway.

When we first moved back, I was upset because I knew I had many friends and relatives that I’d most likely never see again. The first month was very busy for my family with the whole process of opening the restaurant. Eventually, everything went as planned and we were up and running. I believe it was the end of September when I started my first year in school and I was highly nervous because of the way I spoke.

Thankfully, I wasn’t the only one who felt a little out of place. I started sixth grade with a Serbian kid who became one of my best friends for the next four years. My dad knew many of the professors at my school and had told them to keep an eye out if I ever needed help with translating and taking notes. I even had a classmate named Alija who helped me with the transition. While I found that I fit in with most of the kids in my grade, like all schools, there were bullies.

I guess a lot of kids assumed that I was a “millionaire” because my family had decided to move back and start a business, or maybe it was because apparently me giving someone five marks meant ‘nothing to me.’ I never confronted any of the kids, but like most Bosnian cities, word spread quickly in Mostar and my parent’s ended up finding out from some classmates who typically visited the restaurant.

They all said that I should’ve spoken up, but with so much already going on — learning the language plus studying for exams, that was the last thing on my mind and I definitely didn’t want it to get blown out of proportion.

After that entire incident, everything was fine and I was not bullied anymore. I finished the year with good grades and by the time eighth grade rolled around, it felt like I’d lived there my entire life — as if the time we lived in Connecticut never even existed. I learned how to read and write in my mother tongue and made plenty of friends.

I am eternally grateful for everyone who helped me with the transition those first few years in Mostar. To this day, I still talk to every single person back home.

Mostar was always more than a home to me, and I see myself moving back. I never wanted to leave to begin with.

Unfortunately, during this time, living in Bosnia and Herzegovina wasn’t the best when it came to jobs. Business was only good during the summer time up until maybe mid-October when it started getting cold outside and most of the tourists had already left. I guess you could say my family’s business was a bit of an exception — people in Mostar took note of our good life and our success in moving back home.

I would say that around 2008, going into 2009, things started to fall apart. Business only went down, and my parents were starting to exchange the little money they had left from America. I don’t know too much detail about this, but I do know that a lot of money was invested in building our house in Mostar and the business, so it’s not like we had stacks of money to fall back on in case things went sour.

I even remember someone saying, “Sto bi ja njima otisao u restoran kad imaju pare a ovi sto su ovdje imaju restorane jedva kraj s krajem.” This translates to, “Why go to him? He and their money and the people who live here and have had businesses are hardly making anything.” When in reality, we became one of those hundred restaurant owners who were also struggling.

To make things worse, problematic people came and started damaging our restaurant to the point where all of our customers were being attacked by the biggest mafia in Mostar. People of all nationalities would come to our restaurant — they didn’t care who you were, as long as you were providing excellent customer service and good quality food.

As time passed, my mother started to lose her mind. She started to regret everything she’d worked hard for. Imagine working seven years of overnight’s only to come back to your homeland and have people destroy what you’d rebuilt. At the end of 2009, my father put the keys in the door to the restaurant and made the decision to shut down.

My parents isolated themselves from everyone, and at this point, we weren’t even able to afford to take a trip to Neum, which is about an hour away from my house.

When I started high school, I remember my parents barely had any money to give me to get lunch. I went from having everything in the world to not being able to buy my own lunch. Forget me, imagine how my parents felt. Imagine working so hard to rebuild the life that had been destroyed during the war only to have it taken from you another time. We made it through this tough time, and by the end of 2010, we packed up our bags and moved back to the United States to start our lives over again.

Life took me through many turns, but I am happy that I lived in Mostar. It was one of the best experiences of my life.

I grew up having everything and losing all these materialistic things we have today. It sounds confusing to many of you because we all came from having nothing but even in the United States, we can lose everything overnight. Think about it — you lose your job, you lose everything. In Mostar, we lost our income, but we still had food and water on the table and that’s all that mattered.

Close family, health, and happiness is what matters because you can’t take your house, car, money…etc. into the ground.

My mom ended up going to college and getting a degree in Medical Assisting with a thought about going for nursing. My father is a sub-contractor and has a truck like many others. They did all of this to make their lives much easier and not because of the money. They learned the hard way that money isn’t everything in the world. They always tell me, money comes and goes, but when your health is bad and you’re not happy with your life, then there is an issue.

To them, this is all still temporary though. I have a year to get my degree in International Management and my sister Almedina has about two more. Once we are done, they plan on moving back to Mostar. After college, I want to move to Germany because it’s closer to home and I’d be living the same life I am here.

Thank you for reading this part of my life and when you go and complain about not having anything, always remember, it’s better to have something than to have nothing at all. Be grateful.

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