World Refugee Day brings plight of many to light

A mother and daughter sit on a couch in the Chattanooga Bridge Refugee Services office in this 2011 file photo. The duo, along with another child, were refugees from Darfur who were resettled in Chattanooga.

Sasa Hasanbegovic vividly remembers racing across the streets of Bosnia and Herzegovina as a child. The races were not the result of childhood antics: He was running for bread. For milk. For his life.

Hasanbegovic was just 3 years old when civil war broke out in what was then Yugoslavia in 1991. By 1995, he and his parents had escaped their home and the surrounding daily dangers of “sniper alleys” in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to stay in the house of a family friend on the coast in Croatia. Six months later, thanks to refugee sponsorship by family members already safe in the U.S. and the help of the Bridge Refugee Services program out of Knoxville, his family’s immigration papers processed and they arrived safely in Chattanooga – saved from the plight of more than 100,000 victims killed in the war.

“Surreal would be a perfect way of describing it,” said Hasanbegovic, now 29. “Even at the tender age of 7, your world is shifting. I left most of my family behind, at a time when I was just starting to understand the concept of family.”

Hasanbegovic and his family are just a few of the many refugees helped by Bridge Refugee Services, based in both Knoxville and Chattanooga, the latter of which his family ended up calling home.