Fatmire is a 22 year old young lady from Kosova that World Vision has mentored to become a world level peace activist. As I have shared already on this blog (HERE and HERE), I had the privilege to visit her twice in her village home south of Mitrovica, Kosova, and I greatly admire her passion for peace and reconciliation.
Here is her story as told my CNN:
Fatmire Feka glanced at the skies over her Kosovo village. Storm clouds darkened the horizon, and rain started to fall.
“I felt as if God was crying tears of pain,” Feka says. “God was crying because he knew what was about to happen.”
It was a chilly Tuesday morning on April 20, 1999, and Feka was on the run. Village guards had warned her family that Serbian paramilitary units were rounding up Albanian Muslims for execution. She ran out of her home with her family and fled to a nearby forest to hide.
As the 11-year-old Feka headed to the forest, she could hear bombs exploding and rifle shots crackle behind her. What happened next would leave Feka with nightmares that remain to this day. She would lose her older brother, Sami, and her older sister, Sadete. Both are still missing. Read on…
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In another article, on lessons that Afghanistan can learn from other contects, CNN says:
Those individuals that preach this message, however, can discover that their harshest critics are members of their own community, says Fatmire Feka, an Albanian Muslim from Kosovo, a former region in Serbia that declared its independence in 2008.
Feka says her family was attacked by Serbians during the war in Kosovo. She says she lost her older brother and sister to Serbian paramilitary forces. But she decided to become a peace activist and bring together Muslim and Serbian youth who wanted a better future.
Some Muslims, though, couldn’t let go of the past, Feka says.
Her former Muslim neighbors asked her why she wanted to bring back people who had killed their family and friends. Feka says her mother slapped her in anger one day when she heard that her daughter had led a peace march.
“When you start to work for peace in an area where people have died and are still grieving, it’s difficult,” Feka says. “Everyone perceived me as being deviant.”
Persona 