After graduating from high school, I attended Rochester Institute of Technology where I studied Journalism and Photojournalism and played soccer. I loved my time in Rochester, not for the weather, which was really cold, but because of the doors it opened for me. One of them led me to Kosovo, first in 2016, and then again in the fall of last year.
About Kosovo:
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, making it one of the youngest countries in the world, but to really understand the country, you need to know about the region, too. Let's go back to the 1990s, when the country of Yugoslavia dominated southeast Europe. Go ahead and find the region on a map... as a hint, it's most of the landmass just north of Greece!
In 1963, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia emerged as a country, made up of member states, including Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Macedonia, all of which are now independent countries.
The easiest way for us to think about this situation in the context of the U.S. It would be as if New England was its own country, and all of the states that make up New England were still states with their own functioning state governments, state lines, and unique identities, just joined together under the greater country of New England.
For nearly 30 years, things in Yugoslavia were going well. People were living in harmony. In the early 1990s, all of that began to shift, when Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic took power and began his push for a "Greater Serbia" and trouble began. Think World War II, but on a regional scale.
