President Mary Rogren introduced the speaker, Russian-born Bosnian, now American citizen and author Sanja Kulenovic. When the Bosnian War broke out. Sanja had spent a year (1983-84) as an AFS high school exchange student in Pasadena, and in the 1990s, she and her husband became refugees while on their honeymoon in the U.S. In Sanja's presentation she spoke of how her parents and family lived somewhat isolated from the world in Sarajevo. Over 1,425 days the couple established a new life in the U.S. while trying to re-connect with family and friends. Sanja's experiences went into her book The Siege of Sarajevo: One Family's Story of Separation, Struggle and Strength.

Sanja spoke of Sarajevo's capital city, Bosnia, as a place of tolerance, where religious and ethnic groups had once lived in harmony, and of letters she had that were written to her by friends and family during the siege. Reading over them years later, she said, "I discovered I had a job to do," as she told her own daughters, feeling that her experience gave her something to teach them.  So she organized the letters and had them translated, integrating them into her own life and into the book, along with the voices of the people of Sarajevo.
She described her book as a book about war, about suffering and degradation, but she hastened to add  that it is also a book about life under siege, and "how people created life out of unimaginable misery." People were getting killed, she said, but there were also concerts, comedy shows, schools continuing in basements, opera rehearsals, even birthday celebrations and a beauty pageant. War diet had its advantages too, she noted wryly -- such as, it wasn't very high in cholesterol.

She recalled her father with his newspaper, translating the stories into the local language. Away from the basement, she said, life could quickly be over, so she began instead to think in terms of long-term projects. "Something to live for, and fight for, is always there," she said. "You just have to find it."