Chapter 1: Difficult Beginnings

                I was born on January 16, 1986 in Mostar, former Yugoslavia (today Bosnia and Herzegovina). The birth took place about two months early, due to the fact that the umbilical cord was around my neck. I spent the beginning of my life in an incubator and received a life-saving blood transfusion. Physically, I never developed like a normal young child and could only crawl on the floor. However, as a result of my excellent mental development and the lack of disability specialists in  the immediate surrounding area, it took about two years until my parents were able to find out the reason for my physical problems. When we went to a clinic in Zagreb (now the capital of Croatia), the doctors easily diagnosed me with cerebral palsy. They  made dire predictions about my future physical abilities, telling my parents that the best they could hope for me ever doing with a pencil was to draw circles on the top left-hand corner of a piece of paper. Nevertheless, they also said that there seemed to be no damage to my cognitive functions.

                            My parents were by no means discouraged by the negative prognosis and tried everything from physical therapy at home to Chinese acupuncture in the current Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. The treatment was quite painful and it did not help me to learn how to walk, but it did nevertheless seem to have cured a breathing problem I had at the time. The trips to the big city were always exciting and full of promise. When we returned home in the evening, I would watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which my parents would prerecord on VCR. (Yugoslavia had always been open to Western culture, unlike the other Eastern Bloc nations.) We owned (and still own) a small, basic house in Mostar, where my paternal grandmother lives today.

I went to a regular kindergarten, where my great-aunt worked. I can still vaguely remember that in those days, public buildings still had portraits of Tito, the former leader of the Yugoslav communist regime. He was still regarded as someone who had united the ethnically and religiously diverse nation that was about to tear itself apart. The kindergarten, I believe, had one seemingly giant room, where all the children gathered, particularly on special occasions. I would crawl there, if no one was available to carry me.

 I learned to speak at a very early age and also had a good memory. One day, my great- aunt read us a fairy tale, before realizing that the book had the final pages missing. She did not know the ending of the story, and neither did the other kids, but to everyone’s amazement, I did and I happily told them the ending.

                I was exposed to different countries, their cultures, and to a degree, even foreign languages early on. It was not just the Chinese acupuncture in Sarajevo. My mother was an interpreter for German and English. My maternal grandfather had been a Yugoslav diplomat in Frankfurt, Germany while she was growing up. Furthermore, my father had relatives living in Switzerland, whom we visited from time to time when I was little. Nonetheless, it was a complete coincidence, not directly related to any of these things, that would begin to instill a sense of global citizenship in me and more importantly change my life and that of my immediate family forever. It began with a newspaper article that the sister of one of my mother’s best friends found. It reported on the Peto Institute in Budapest, Hungary, which provided empowering therapy for disabled children from all over the world. At a time when my parents were looking for new opportunities for me and when the political tension in Yugoslavia was intensifying, it was exactly what we needed.