For some people, taking transit is a choice; for others, it's a necessity. For Diana Mirkovic, transit provided the lifeline for making a fresh start some 5,800 miles from her home. Diana came to the Portland area in February 1996 with only her daughter, a few belongings and the desperation to put years of horror behind them.
Four years prior, Diana, then age 32, was organizing fashion shows, going shopping at the mall, enjoying time with her friends and her parents and watching her daughter grow into a teenager. On April 5, 1992 – with a flash of gunfire, mortars and rocket-launched bombs – life changed.
Diana was living in Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia and Herzegovina, when Serbian forces surrounded the city and launched a massive assault. The Siege of Sarajevo, as it became called, was the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare. It turned Diana’s homeland into ruins.
The people of Sarajevo lived under a constant bombardment of gun- and shellfire. Virtually all the buildings in city were damaged or destroyed. Diana and her family had some shelter, but no electricity, no water and no food. A year into the onslaught, NATO forces were finally able to airlift in food. The supplies had to be dropped from the sky; it was too dangerous to land. The rations, Diana says, saved them. Before then, she and her family, including 12-year-old daughter Maya, had been forced to eat grass just to survive.
Despite the hardships and the months Diana spent in a concentration camp, the hardest moment of the war came when she watched a sniper gun down her daughter Maya. "The bullet stopped just a few millimeters next to her heart," Diana recalls. "It was a miracle she survived." Doctors removed the bullet, but since hospitals – a main target of the bombers – had mostly been destroyed, there was no room for Maya to stay. So Diana took her home every night and then back to the facility ever day to have Maya’s bandages changed and the wound checked.
The Bosnian war ended on Feb. 29, 1996, but there wasn’t much left of Sarajevo. Diana and her daughter said goodbye to Diana’s parents, who choose to stay behind, and with help from a United Nations relocation program, set off for a new life. They ended up in Portland.
What a culture shock, Diana remembers. Maya, then a sophomore in high school, spoke some English, but not Diana. Through the program that brought them here, Diana took courses in English and received training on how to survive in her new home. The instructions included how to look for a job and how to use public transit to get around.
She wouldn’t have been able to make it here without public transportation, says Diana. They rented an apartment in Beaverton and she relied on the TriMet bus system to get everywhere – especially while working two jobs at once.
Diana wanted more for herself and her daughter, so she went to the Western Business College. For a year, she went to school during the day and worked nights at a bank – the bus her only transportation.
Now, she has a job she loves as a translator at Epiq Systems. The company has an incentive program and provides its employees with a free transit pass, something Diana definitely appreciates. She gets on the bus just steps from her apartment, and has a short walk from the bus stop to her work.
"Public transportation is great," says Diana. "You can go everywhere." For those new to the area or just starting to use transit, the TriMet system is easy to learn and convenient, according to Diana. "The frequency of the buses and trains going into downtown is good."
Diana’s life today is a world away from the Siege of Sarajevo in which about 10,000 people died and another 56,000 – including her daughter Maya – were injured. They still live together and both work at Epiq Systems. They are just now financially able to buy a car. Still, Diana says, she’ll mostly be using TriMet to get around town, and she’ll keep commuting by bus. "It’s just easier," she says. After all, she’s had her fill of hard.