Escaping a Nightmare, Living a Dream

For those of you who don't know me, the one sport I absolutely adore is basketball. How much you ask? Permit me to reminisce...

When I got married nearly five years ago, I left behind at my childhood home an old basketball "court" consisting of very thin grass and many areas that were worn completely down to the dirt. The goal post was a reject wooden phone pole, and over the years I went through two basketball goals. At time sap would leach from that old pole so you'd have to shoot with caution. If you bounced the ball up against that stream of sap....ugghh!

Playing basketball was also my motivation for keeping the yard neat and clean...you can't bounce a basketball in thick grass, and you really don't want to bounce it in a pile of dog crap. My dad would tell me stories of how as a kid, he would play at night by the light of the moon. My guess is that the moon doesn't shine as bright in Raleigh, NC as it does where he grew up. I tried that once, but bouncing the ball off my face wasn't all that fun. During those years I think I made hundreds of game winning shots for the UNC Tar Heels, the GRACE Eagles, and the WF-R Cougars. I can't even count the number of times I would come in from playing so long that the first layer of skin on my finger tips would be nearly gone.

My competition consisted of my dad, my younger sister, but most of the time, since he was always in the backyard, an agile, energetic black lab named Antawn (in honor of UNC's Antawn Jamison). He was quite the formidable opponent. That dog could play some tight man-to-man..err..dog-to-man defense. He helped me greatly improve my ball handling skills because to this day, he is the only defender that could run through my legs for a steal. He was admittedly a ball hog though...he'd snag a rebound and then proceed to chew on the ball. My guess is that he liked the taste of leather, but I didn't relish having to roll the ball around in the dirt to get his slobber off it, much less have to endure those teeth and paws as I wrestled the ball away from him. As I would dribble and shoot I could feel the bite marks he left all over the ball... *sheds a tear for "da Big Woo Woo" (as my dad called him).*

Anyway...I could go on, but I'd rather let this great story explain the title of my post. Enjoy. And oh yeah...GO HEELS!

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Tevide Emerllahu shook her 8-year-old son awake at 2 a.m.

The hiding began.

She and her two sons fled their village, running in the middle of the night deep into the woods of Kosovo.

It was May 1999, during the heart of the Kosovo war, and the Yugoslavian army was coming. The Emerllahus, an ethnic Albanian family, had no choice but to hide.

“I was 8 years old and running,” Elhad Emerllahu said. “I was 8 years old and thinking we're going to die.”

Emerllahu, now 18, is a junior basketball player at Clark High School.

He spends his days on the court with his friends, listening to hip-hop and text-messaging his girlfriend.

Just 10 years ago, he was spending more than a month in the woods, hiding with his family during the Kosovo conflict.

His journey to America included a 25-mile walk to a refugee camp at the Kosovo-Macedonia border, followed by “three long bus rides, a long train ride and a long plane ride” before his family arrived in San Antonio.

With nothing.

The full story that is well worth the read can be found here.