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Life in a new world
Tea Avdic likes Utica, but she’d like it better if there were more things to do. Life here is occasionally boring, says Avdic, an eighth-grader at John F. Kennedy Middle School. It wasn’t so in Serbia, where she lived before arriving in the United States in 1998 as a refugee. She is half Bosnian and half Serbian. “I like it more over there,” she says. “Over there, kids are outside 24/7.” She says she’s adapting well. Learning English and making new friends have come easily. And she’s staying active, practicing karate at the Dragon club on Bleecker Street. She has a black belt in the sport and is national champion for her age group in a style of karate known as kumite, she says. She also competed in the AAU Junior Olympic Games and traveled with the national team to Japan. But it wasn’t until two years ago, on the day terrorists took down the World Trade Center, that she really felt connected to America. From a television in Serbia, where she was visiting, she watched news coverage of the attacks. Tears filled her eyes. “How are we gonna go home?” she recalls asking her mother. “How are we gonna get back?” It was then when she realized: She lives in both places.
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