Oral history interview with Meliha Talic Fejzic [Transcript and Audio]

Oral history interview by Tiffany Greene with Meliha Talic Fejzic. Topics include: Bosnia, War, Immigrating to the United States with her father and siblings, finding a community of Muslim women, Teaching Sunday school, Mosques, Serving as a community organizer, Interfaith Alliances, Family, Working to eliminating prejudice, Fostering relationships, and Cultural diversity.

Oral Histories of Utah Women from South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East A Better Days & Utah Muslim Civic League Collaboration Funded, in part, by Oral History Grant 21.01 from Utah Humanities and Utah Division of State History Interviewee(s): Meliha Talic Fejzic Interviewer(s): Tiffany Greene Date of Interview: 19 August 2022 Place of Interview: Hunter Library 4740 W. 4100 S., West Valley City, UT, 84120 Length of Interview: 1:13:10 Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this interview do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Utah Humanities, or Utah Division of State History. Meliha Fejzic is a devout member of the Muslim faith who was born in Bosnia and grew up on the banks of the Sana River. Meliha chose to leave her home and relocate to Utah with her father and siblings when she was a teenager after war broke out in her homeland. After being welcomed to Salt Lake by a group of Muslim women, Meliha started teaching Sunday school for young Muslim girls at both Kadeejah and Bosnian Mosques, where she continued teaching for 17 years. She also served as a community organizer and planner for the Bosnian Mosque in Salt Lake for many years, and has been involved in interfaith activities with other faith communities. She and her husband and two sons live in West Valley City. Meliha continues to work towards eliminating prejudice and fostering positive relationships between people who come from different backgrounds, cultures, and places. Tiffany Greene has lived in Utah her entire life and enjoys visiting new places, spending time outdoors, and studying the past. She graduated from the University of Utah with a Bachelor's Degree in Secondary Education with a History emphasis.Currently, she works as Education Director and Community Engagement Coordinator for Better Days, a Utah nonprofit dedicated to sharing the stories of Utah women. Tiffany Greene Can you state your name? Meliha Fejzic Meliha Talic Feljzic Tiffany Greene And your birth date? Meliha Fejzic January 1, 1977 1 Tiffany Greene [0:00:10] And your place of birth? Meliha Fejzic Bosnia, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Tiffany Greene What is today's date? Meliha Fejzic August 19, 2022 Tiffany Greene Do I have permission to record this interview today? Meliha Fejzic Yes. Tiffany Greene And where are we recording from? Meliha Fejzic Hunter Library in West Valley. Tiffany Greene To start with, I'd like to just talk about your life prior to coming to Utah. Tell me about your life growing up in Bosnia. Meliha Fejzic So I was born in Bosnia in a small town, it's called Sanski Most, and my family has lived there for probably like ten centuries back. My parents grew up in the same place on the same street, got married when they were right out of the high school, and had three of us. I have an identical twin sister, Maida, and my older brother. Everyone on our street, on our little place that we lived, were related to us. We all have the same last name. We're all family. And so I grew up in a very safe, nice environment. We, all the kids, are related to each other. So you'll play together. There's a big huge river that goes through my town and separates the town into two banks. So we would go swimming during the summer time altogether. And the parents never been with us, because there's always older kids to watch others. So you had to learn how to swim before you walked. [laughing] That's kind of a policy, you know, because it's so close to our homes. And then during the wintertime, we would go skiing, and you know, sledding and going through the forest. There's a lot of forest in Bosnia, lots of rivers, it was a really nice, beautiful place to grow up in. And I had a beautiful family. You know, my parents being from the same street, I had my both sides of the family, my grandparents from both sides, my uncles and aunts and their 2 children, and, you know, just really extended family living in that area. And so it was beautiful. It was really safe, very pretty. A very pretty place. Tiffany Greene [0:02:33] What was the name of the river that ran through? Meliha Fejzic Sana. So my town was formed during the Roman Empire, so it's very old. And the river Sana means, it's from the saunas, from the Latin word health. And so it was a place where Romans used to come for health retreats because it was so pretty and beautiful. And so then, after that time, it just developed and developed. And when I lived in the town, it was called city of flowers because it was so just green and just very pretty in nature. Very natural. We didn't have a lot of industry or anything like that. It was mostly farming lands, people lived off of the farms. We had a few companies that made tiles, or something like that. But it was mostly just farming land. People lived off the land. Kind of like Idaho, very similar. Tiffany Greene Your family did as well? Meliha Fejzic Yeah, my mom's side of the family, they lived off of the land. They had a big farm. And then my dad's side of the family, my grandpa was an orphan so he didn't have a lot of land that he inherited or anything. So they just had jobs and worked mostly. Both of my uncles and my and my dad, they all had career kind of jobs that they went to school for. Tiffany Greene Tell me about your schooling. Meliha Fejzic Schooling was fun. You know, we did grow up in a communist country. So it was very strict and very competitive. In school you were encouraged to be competitive with each other. And so we would always strive to be the best and you know, that was kind of the mentality of it. But it was fun. We had fun. And of course, I learned with all the kids from my street that were related to me, so we would walk to school together. School was very challenging, very different than here. There was a lot of memorization, so a lot of learning. Like early in the elementary school, you would start learning things like capital cities of around the world or historic events, you know, and stuff like that. So it was very competitive, very hard education. But it was really fun for us because we were in a place where we were safe and happy. But it was communist and there was no religious involvement in school. We didn't have like you couldn't go to seminary, or something like that. It was completely state oriented. Tiffany Greene All the way through, like graduating high school? 3 Meliha Fejzic [0:05:18] Yeah, I actually lived in Bosnia until I was 15. So I finished my first grade of high school in Bosnia, and then the war started. So, I went through the grade nine, through the ninth grade, and everything was just really fun. And I don't know, we, it's very different. I think we were different than kids nowadays, because we didn't have the internet and different things. So we spent a lot of time in libraries, we spent a lot of time reading, doing things that were more, that are kind of challenging, you know, in different way. But yeah, schooling was really fun. And I just remember it so much because we had a lot of friends so we would do a lot of stuff. School oriented competitions. I did dancing when I was younger. And so my mom would take us down to the dancing classes. We just, you know, normal childhood, you'd almost think like I grew up here, you know, there wasn't a lot of difference. When I talked to my American friends. My upbringing was pretty much very similar to people my age that lived here. Tiffany Greene What kind of roles did you take on in your family or in your broader community, what was expected of a young girl? Meliha Fejzic Because we were growing up in a place, so all my family's Muslim, all my mom and my dad's sides, so we grew up in a place where being a Muslim or that Islamic upbringing was a big part of our life. So we would go to the mosque, we went to Sunday school, we did on Saturday and Sunday morning classes, we would have like two or three hours in the morning, then we would go to the Sunday school. We would learn how to do prayers and Quran and stuff like that. Then the rest of the community was pretty much, as I said, farming. So they would go like, "Oh, somebody needs help to do this, and farming land." So, we go help and stuff like that. So that was the roles, it was very involved with the community, because we were all family. It's kind of like growing up in, I don't know, maybe like Amish families or something like that, just because it was so connected. We were all related to each other. You know, as I said. We have, there was about five or six different last names of the families. But because they lived there for so long, we were related because they would intermarry. So we had family members that everyone just took roles of helping each other, whoever needed it. You know, cleaning the snow today, everyone goes to clean the snow. Or, I don't know, like picking up the corns, you know, everyone does that in a community. So we did that. And then that Islamic part where we were part of the religion. The religious part was really tricky in communism, too, because we were not forbidden to go. We went to mosque all the time. Like, I've never felt that we were not allowed to have religion in our lives. But we didn't talk about it. Like when you went to school, you didn't, there were other kids there who were not Muslim, because Bosnia is very diverse country. We have Greek, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and then Bosnian Muslims, you know. And then we had some Jewish people, Roman people, but we didn't talk about each others religions. Nobody, ever. And so religion was a very private matter you did at home with your family. And then when you went to school, you never shared that with your friends. Nobody knew that you were going to Sunday school. You would never have that conversation. But as far as the roles, they were like, whatever needed to be done in the community, if you were of age. If not, you just carry the 4 water for the workers or whatever, you know. So whatever age you are, because it's a farming land, so you did everything that was helpful. Tiffany Greene [0:09:41] What languages were spoken? Meliha Fejzic We speak Bosnian, that's the only language that is spoken. When I was growing up in school, it was called Serbo Croatian, but at home we refer to it as Bosnian. There's a lot of Turkish words in our language because we have been occupied by Turkey for 600 years. And so there's a lot of Turkish influence in our language, in some of the words that we say. I have some Turkish friends here in the United States, and I would say something and they're like, "How do you? Where did you learn that?" Well, we say it that way. And so there are some things like that. But yeah, Bosnia was just the one language that we spoke. Tiffany Greene And that was the language you learned in school? Meliha Fejzic That was the language we learned in school, there's a variation from accents, it's kind of like if you would go south to United States, or maybe up to Canada or someplace people speak English, but it might be a different dialect of the language. And so also in Bosnia, there's some dialect differences. But we spoke Bosnian and then in Sunday school, we would learn how to read Arabic, but we did not learn how to speak Arabic. You would learn to recite Arabic prayers that you need for the prayer, and then you would learn how to read the letters. But you did not learn the language. So not not, there's not a lot of Bosnian people that speak Arabic, unless that was the path of education. So they would go into the theological schools or something, and then continue that education, but not a lot of it. That's the majority of language, my major language, I should I should say, Tiffany Greene When you were growing up before the war, what were your plans or expectations for your life? Meliha Fejzic Well, I wanted to be a doctor my whole life. So, I went to elementary school and junior high. And in Bosnia, that's all connected, it's not separated. You go to school from first to eighth grade in the same elementary school. And then you transfer to high school in ninth grade, and finish it. In my ninth grade, I went to a school that was concentrating on chemistry and biology. That was my plan, I was going to finish that and then go to college or university for a doctor for medical school. But the war started, and my life changed a lot. But my life changed before the war a lot. My mom passed away when I was 12. My mom got cancer, and I was 12 years old. And she passed away. Then my sister and I, we took a role of the, you know, somebody who kept home. We were the ones who cleaned and cooked and pretty much did everything else that needed to be done around the house. And that took a lot of time. So we had a lot of times when, our 5 friends would just go to school and come home and their parents, their moms were waiting there for dinner and everything. We had to incorporate that with school. And that was good while we were in Bosnia, when we spoke our own language, where we had a support system, from our community, from our aunts and uncles. That was working okay. You know, because we would have, one of the aunts would say, "Oh, I'm gonna cook dinner tonight," or something, and bring it over. So we had a support system. But when the war broke, and we had to move away from our home, carrying the burden of everything, that was a little bit tough. Yeah. My life changed when my mom died a lot. Meliha Fejzic [0:13:29] And then the war started when I was 15. And that changed a lot too. My father was into the politics, and he was part of the parties that supported the independence of Bosnia and sovereignty of the country. At the beginning of the war, all of the men that were against the last regime, or the last political system, they wanted something new, a democratic way of, you know, change. They were all put in concentration camp by Serbians. And so my dad was in concentration camp for 500 days. My sister and I were alone. My brother was serving his military term, which was mandatory for boys in Yugoslavia, in Bosnia, and so my brother was doing that. And then the war broke, and he was able to come home, they released him from his duty. But then the war broke, and my dad sent me and my sister away from Bosnia and so we went to Slovenia, which is just on the northern part, towards the western part of the Europe. We have an aunt who lives there, my dad's sister, and we went to lived with them for two years. My dad was in concentration camp. My brother was back in Bosnia trying to not get caught and put in a concentration camp. He eventually left the country and joined us. Then when my dad was released, we all got together. And we told my dad, "We don't want to stay here. We don't want to go home." He was very devastated. Because for him, that was not something he wanted it to do. He wanted it to stay and help develop the country. And we were still in a war, it was just two years into the war, the war lasted for four years. But we didn't want to stay. We just said, "No, we want to go, we want to have a life, we just want to move away from here, we want to eventually have children and want to have families and we don't want them to live here." We decided to come here and he came with us. [laughing] He really did not want to be here. So, from the start his adjustment to here was never easy, because you have a brand new language, you know. We're young, my brother's 21, my sister and I are 18, you know, very young, ready for new adventures, new things for something new to do. He was not ready for that, he was in his 40's. He just wanted it to be in his own country, with his own siblings with his own family. Going from that, that I explained in the beginning, that connection, thousands and thousands of miles away where you don't know anyone, that was really hard for him. But after the concentration camp, he was really not healthy because they went through a great torture. First not having food, being beaten every day, you know, abused. He needed to recover from all of that, too. And so we kind of convinced him that that's what we wanted to do, so he reluctantly came with us here. So, we moved to Utah, he came here. I was 17, I turned 18 ten days after we got here. And life was really different. I did not speak any English, not even a word. I knew how to say thank you and goodbye from the movies. That was it, I did not speak any English. Previously, we were 6 taking foreign classes, foreign languages in school when we went to school, but my class was assigned German, so I took German. Not that you really learn to speak the language from the classes in school unless you have people to communicate with. So I did not speak any English. And that was really tough. It took me probably a good three or four years to be comfortable. I started speaking English three months after we got here because you have. You have to ask people how to get from point A to point B, you have to go to school and get assigned for the classes and stuff. But I really was not comfortable in having great conversations or anything. Probably the first three or four years, we would just stay within our Bosnian community. Because many of us moved here during the war time. Probably about seven or eight thousand Bosnians moved to Utah in the late 90's. And we just kind of stayed within our community. One person would get a job and then they would say, "Oh, you everyone who needs a job, my place is hiring." So, we would go look for a job there. Meliha Fejzic [0:18:49] When I moved here, I was supposed to go to 11th grade. And my dad was like, "No, you shouldn't. You already have all this schooling." So they put us as seniors here the last half of the year, which I think it was a great mistake. Because if I went through my 11th grade and 12th grade, it would have helped me learn better English. I was only a half a year here and I started college. And it was a mess. I just kept repeating my classes. I wanted to do the medical stuff, so I would take an anatomy class and I would not understand enough. I had to take anatomy class three times, and so I kind of got discouraged from it. I took a break from that. But you know, the adjustment to living here wasn't that hard because we had a lot of people help us when we came here. We had the organization the International Rescue Committee that had people who worked as kind of like, like case workers almost, I don't even know how to call them. They would come to our home and help us get signed up for classes in school or take us to the doctor's appointments. Even though they didn't speak our language, they were still able to help us navigate. And then there were a few people within our community that spoke good English, so they would translate for us, interpret at the doctors offices or someplace that we needed to go. So we had a lot of help. That was the easy part because we felt accepted. We would have people from the community, I remember, when we moved here, it was Christmas time. And people would like come to our house and bring us food. They brought us turkey, and we're like, "What are we supposed to do with turkey?" We had turkeys at home, we ate them too, I mean, we cooked them. But we were kind of like, "Okay, turkey, Okay, thank you." You know, it's kind of a random thing. For us it was also food that my grandma would cook for New Year's Eve or something like that. So we were kind of familiar with that. But we were surprised that is was the whole turkey. We loved to make bread, obviously. And so I remember when we moved here, my dad and my sister and I, we went to a grocery store to look for yeast, but we didn't know how to say yeast. So we had to go through the whole store. So we finally told the lady, "Bread. Big." And she's like, "I got you, I know what you want." She took us to the aisle that had soda, like the baking sodas and stuff like that. So we were able to pick the things that we needed. But, of course there's no internet and cell phones like now that you can put in and Google what you need. You had to be resourceful. The language barrier was probably the hardest for me. It's just languages 7 don't come easy to me. I struggled with that, I think, the most. That was something that took me a long time to overcome. Even now, I just have that accent, my kids laugh at me all the time. They'll point to stuff and say that's not how you say it. And I'm like, "Thank you." [chuckling] Meliha Fejzic [0:22:22] But I think the language was the biggest. And the community. When we moved here the Bosnian community was diverse, because you're no longer in your own street where everyone knows you, where you grow up. Yeah, they're in Bosnia, and they speak the same language, but we all came from different cities, from different backgrounds, a lot of us had, like my dad, had war wounds. My sister and I lived in a safe place during the war, our war was psychological, it was missing our parents, not having the parent, not knowing if you're going to be a 15 year old without a parent, you know. Because my dad was, there were days when we did not even know where he is, which concentration camp. They would like dissolve one concentration camp and release all the people because the Red Cross and United Nations would find out that it's there. And they would release the people and my dad would not be in that group. They would pick some of them and move on to different location. Until 500 days later, he got released. And then some of us, some of the people who moved here were Muslim, some people were not. So we had that kind of a thing between us where we were not comfortable with each other anymore, because of our religion, because that's what the war was all about. There was a lot of, even though we had that community it didn't feel like a community. It just felt more, like something that you just, "I just have to get this as my community now and I need to find and figure it out how this works." But it's not really what community is. I started college and my sister, we're twins, we started going to college, and I've always had a very big need for religion in my life. Religion was something that my sister didn't, we're identical twins, she did not care for it. She did not need it in her life. I was very, very attached to that part of my life. As a child, I've always wanted to go to the mosque, I would always go with my grandparents, I didn't care about other stuff as much as I did for that. I found big comfort in it. When we moved here, my dad had an aunt, and she didn't have her own children. So my dad was kinda like her kid. His parents died at that point and so he asked them, if they would move here with us, so that we have family, and we have that female figure in our life. Her name was Sophia, and she came here with her husband. They were pretty old, they were in their late 60's when they came here. But she was extremely religious. She was a very devout Muslim and I just clung to that, it was just what I needed. It was exactly what I was lacking at that point in my life, because I went from from age 12, when my mom passed away, until age of 17 when nothing in my life was stable. And even the religious part was tricky. Because you're growing up, you're that teenage years, when you're developing, you don't have the real guidance. My dad's there, then not there. You have other family members who are not really religious being part of your life. And so I lost that contact with religion and when she came here, when she moved here, that's exactly what I needed. I would take my Friday morning classes, and then I would go pick up the two of them. We would go to Jummah prayer for Friday prayer in the afternoon and I started developing relationships with other Muslims here in Utah. All of a sudden, I met these women who were from Pakistan, from India, from Egypt, from Iraq, Iran, all different countries, but they were Muslim. I would meet with them, go to their houses for these women meetings 8 when we would learn about different topics. And I started learning more about Islam. Before, in my Sunday school, we were always taught, "learn this surah, recite it, and come back next week and recite it in front of the Imam." That was it. Or, "Learn these letters in Arabic, and come back." We never learned about Islamic history and never learned about akhlaq, which is behavior of Muslims, or hadiths, or sunnah, a Prophet's way of life. We never learned about those things. That was considered something you should learn from your parents. Well, my parents were communist, like they grew up in a communist country. They didn't care about religion. I mean, they were religious. They believed in God, but they didn't observe anything. And so they didn't teach us that. My grandparents did, but that was minimum, you know, because you don't see your grandparents all the time. I would always go to my grandparents house because they prayed, and they had this religious life and I loved that. And so I started learning more about Islam and started finding my identity in that, and my way, how I wanted to live my life and what's important to me. Tiffany Greene [0:28:36] Did your auntie Sofia go with you? Meliha Fejzic Yeah. Oh, yeah. She and her husband, I would pick them up and take them. Jummah prayer is obligatory for a man. It's not for a woman, but my uncle wanted to go and my aunt, she's like, "Well, you might as well go because where else are we going to go to the mosque?" It was this tiny little Masjid, that was the only Masjid in Salt Lake. It's right on 700 East, it's a small little house that was turned into the Masjid Al-Noor. We would go there and, literally, they had probably a place like from that corner to here [gesturing to the corner of the room] for women. It was because men are obligated to come to this prayer and woman are not. And so we had this tiny little space, we would all cramp together. But I started meeting people and started finding myself. Finding that identity, that thing that I was missing in my life. Tiffany Greene Do you remember any of the names of these women that you're talking about? Meliha Fejzic Oh, yeah, I still meet some of them and know them. They were Sister Aliah, and Shahnaz and Sada and Eugenia. There were a bunch of them that I still know and have as my friends in Masjid. Later on, we build more Masjids in Salt Lake and so now we have 13 to 14 different places where you can go worship on Fridays or any other days. We have Bosnian Masjid now here, which I'm part of, and member of, and then we have big mosque, Khadija. We have the one up in the south part of the town. So we have bigger places, but those were the beginnings. After I met them and started like exploring this part of my life, in the meantime, I met my husband, and I got married, and I had my first kid. And he was about six months old. And I got a call from Sister Aliah, who was a principal for a girl's Sunday school. She called me and she asked, would I like to come and teach Sunday school? And I'm like, "You want me to teach Sunday school? I don't know anything. I'm not a good Muslim." [chuckling] I told myself I'm a 9 Muslim, but I'm not that great of a Muslim. And she's like, "No, you have a desire. I know you love this. And I know you'll do a good job, and you're going to learn a lot more with kids. So I think it's going to be a good place." And I would bring my kid in the car seat, his name is Omar, and I would put him down and I would have my little class of little girls. And we would sit there and I would teach them about Islam and prophets and stories about prophets and Islamic history and behavior and Hadith and things that I knew. And then I would learn, in the meantime, I completely forgot how to read Quran because I haven't been reading that regularly. I forgot the Arabic letters that I learned as a child. So I would start learning with them again. I spent 17 years in our community teaching Sunday school. Both of my kids went through Sunday school, and I did it as they went to and I taught in Khadija masjid and at the Bosnian masjid. There's a lot of kids that I helped teach, and maybe bring that religion, not just religion, but, because for me, it's not just religion, religion is lifestyle. It's the way how you treat others. You know, a lot of people sometimes when they talk about Islam, they'll say, "Oh, and the Quran tells you these bad things." I taught Sunday school for 17 years, I have never taught the kids that you need to go do this bad stuff. It was the good stuff that you teach them. You teach them how to be good human beings. How to do things good with others and how to show the good example through your religion and stuff like that. That was the biggest accomplishment of my life. It was something that I found myself enjoying, and just loving being with kids and helping them. They'll come randomly and say, "Oh, at my school, this happened. And this girl said this, or this person did this," and then we will discuss different things. So it was I was very loved and even now the students that I had would contact me reach out. I got invited to high school graduations, college graduations, marriages, you know everything because I've been part of their young life when they were learning these basic things about life and religion and God. That was something that I've done that I think I took that role in the community here. That's how I'm recognized probably by most of the Muslims here, would be as a Sunday school teacher, Tiffany Greene [0:33:59] How old were the students? Meliha Fejzic I taught girls. I would have classes, because you cannot go to Sunday school unless you're six, seven years old. You have to go to school, you have to be able to read, because there's no point of you coming in and learning completely different things if you cannot read in English. So, kids have to be six and then I would have classes, six to seven, six to eight, six to nine. Then I would have teenagers. I would have different classes, different years. Whatever the masjid needed me to do that certain year. I sometimes taught continually, like I would take the kids from age 10 and then I would stay with them until they were 16, you know, 17 years old. Are you okay? Tiffany Greene Yeah, I just was making sure we were still recording. Meliha Fejzic That was something that I took a role in. When Bosnian Masjid was formed, 10 Tiffany Greene [0:35:00] When was that? Meliha Fejzic So Bosnian masjid was formed in 2010, that's when we first opened the Bosnian Masjid. I joined them a little bit later, I was still teaching with Khadija and my kids were like, "We want to go to Bosnian masjid." Because they had friends there that they knew from Bosnian parties and stuff and community and soccer. They're like, "Our friends go to Bosnian Masjid, we want to go to Bosnian Masjid." So, I'm like, "Okay." I took them a couple of times and I met the Imam, kind of like a priest. I met the Imam and I told him, "If you ever need anyone, I would be willing to transfer." He said, "Yeah, we would need you." There was another sister, Leila, that helped me too and we taught school together for many years. We're really good friends, too. My boys loved and enjoyed it. We did competitions, we would go to different states and just kind of be within the Bosnian community. That was really fun. Then I slowly took a role of not just being a Sunday school teacher, but I was pretty much the PR firm for the Masjid. I would organize all the parties, all house openings for the Masjid when we would invite the community to come and meet the Bosnians and meet the Muslims that live in the town. People would come and we would have food, and the little segments of, we would sign up kids to do different things. I would organize that. I would help organize when we had different meetings, like during Ramadan, we would have Iftar dinners for the community and things like that. So I kind of took that role for a while. Then my kids stopped going to Sunday school, they were done, they aged out of it. And I kind of took a step back and said, [chuckling] "Okay, I kind of need some time on my own." So, I don't do Sunday school anymore. I still help with other stuff and I'm still part of that, but I just don't do Sunday school anymore. I miss it and occasionally I'm like, "Maybe I should go back.?" But I think, I don't know, I kind of like my little freedom now [laughing]. I do wish that I, as a child, or maybe like a young adult, that I did recognize how much I like teaching others, because I think I would have gone with that in a direction of maybe doing education or something. I did end up working for Intermountain and I actually teach classes I teach new employees. So I do education, that's my job. I train other new employees. So, I still went that direction but I just wish I had done more schooling and more in that sense. Tiffany Greene How often does Sunday School meet? Meliha Fejzic Every Sunday, except the summer, we take a break during the summer, just so the kids can enjoy the summer. They don't have to do that here. We didn't get that in Bosnia, we went during the summer too. [laughing] We did not get a break from Sunday school, you still had to go. During the wintertime, it was fun. In Bosnia when I was a child, there was no central heating or anything like that. So we would have wood burning stoves in our homes. That's how the masjid got warmed up too. We would have to bring the wood from home so the Imam could burn the fire, [chuckling] and then we stayed in Sunday school. But we enjoyed it. It was fun. It was all exciting. As a child you're excited to be with your friends and nothing matters, you do whatever it takes. 11 Meliha Fejzic [0:39:07] I'm really glad that we ended up in Utah because it's accepting of other religions and any other differences. I felt accepted. LDS church has this interfaith program that we participated with and I just loved it. I loved that involvement and that understanding. People were compassionate when we first moved here to help us, as I said, from bringing food, asking us if we need anything, helping us in any other segment that we needed. I remember we met this lady one time, I completely forgot her name because it's been like twenty years, almost 30 now since I've been here, I moved here in '94. So it's almost 30 years. We met this lady, Sharon, her name is Sharon. I remember she would come to our house, pick us up on random days when she had time off, and we were not in school and then she would take us to Gardner's Village and just take us for lunch, take us just to walk around with her. She had daughters. Just randomly, she's like, "You girls need to go outside and do things." You know, ƒ, [laughing] you just get that here, nowhere else. It's just that understanding of what young people should have and do. She would just always take us out and do things with us randomly, we barely knew her. But she had kids that were our age, girls, and we would all go together. It helped me and my sister to learn language, too, because we had to speak English with them. So we were able to communicate that way. The first years were tough but I think we had a lot of support. I'm pretty sure not all the refugees do. Some probably find it harder. We were lucky that my dad was an electrician so he got a job here that paid well, right away. Because he had his trade that he was able to do, we were able to buy a house within a couple of years living here. My aunt and her husband were here, so we had our little place that was nice and looked like our home in Bosnia. My dad built, it had a big huge garage in the back, that was never used for a garage, because he created it for a hangout place for us. So, we had our own hangout place where our friends could come over and we could just be there. We had a dog, it was just like a nice, you know, little surrounding place that we felt comfortable with. We were able to build some good relationships with people that moved here as well from Bosnia, and I still have connections with those families. They have grown up kids, grandchildren now, and we see each other regularly. That was good. You know, that was a tough thing, my life was tough. There were a lot of things that were hard. The war was hard. It was really hard to lose everything. To lose your family, to lose your home, to lose your country, your identity, you don't know who you are, and what's going on. To rebuild all of that, to move to a completely different place, to have children that you are raising, and you are not sure how to because you have these two identities within the home. We speak Bosnian. My husband has elderly parents who only speak Bosnia and live here. So we have that Bosnian culture in the house, but they live an American life. When you have that, how do you make all of that on a healthy level, so it meets at a good spot and it's not dividing anything so that they are getting the best possible childhood and adulthood? That was hard balancing all that. My oldest son had cancer when I was 30 years old and I lost my mom to cancer. So, that was tough, like, "Oh, there's another thing." But because I had my religion, and because I had that faith and that belief that I have something else that is taking care of me. I don't have to carry all this burden on my own. I think that helped me carry through all of that. Carry me through and help me stay normal [chuckles] and sane in some situations. 12 Meliha Fejzic [0:44:25] I do want to tell you a story. It's kind of like a testimony for me. My son was really sick. He had cancer. He had stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma, my oldest one. Women from my community, my Islamic community, not my Bosnian community, they wanted to do a prayer night for him. We got together at the house of Massoud family who lives here in town. Dr. Massoud and his wife, Aziza, and they invited us and said, "We want to do a prayer for your son." We went there and they were all ladies. I knew all of them from the mosque. I walked in and there was one of the sisters, her name is Noor, she asked me, she said, "Meliha, what is the prognosis? What's going on?" I told her, I said, "Well, 95% of this gets treated and cured. It's stage four." She looked at me and she said, "We can take care of 5% tonight." She brought her mom with her and her mom did this prayer, we call it Ashallel. It's a very basic prayer, all of us know how to pray this. It's one of those prayers you learn first in Sunday school. I sat there for a moment, and I never tell this story without crying so pretty soon I'm gonna cry, but she started doing this prayer, and I had this feeling within myself that I'm going to be okay and it's going to be all right. It's going to be okay. But I couldn't stop crying and they all started crying, because they thought that I was crying from being sad. And I'm like, "No, I am crying because I'm so happy because I feel that I have this power behind me, and it's going to be okay. He's gonna take care of this, I just have to do what I need to do." My faith in God has always been that strong. I just always was able to, at some point, say, "Okay, what's my job, I'm gonna do my job. It's my job to pray, I'm gonna pray. It's my job to take you to the hospital every day, I take you to the hospital all day. It is my job to cook every day, I'm going to cook every day. It's my job to go to school, and just do the best and wait for my dad to return from a concentration camp, I'm going to do that." I was just always able to rely on that power behind me that it's going to carry me through. At that point, when that happened to Omar and I just had this feeling, "That's it. That's what I need to do. And I'm good." Ever since then, it's always been, I don't dwell on things in life, I don't worry about stuff. Islam is like that, you know, Islam means submission, it means to submit to something to the point that you just trust it so much that you don't worry. I just found that night when the ladies, you know, when she was praying, I felt that my submission was completed, I was done. I completely put this in the hands of what needs to happen and I'm gonna be okay. Luckily, I mean, I was fortunate that he was healed and we didn't have to look a different way or go a different way. But no matter what happened, I would have been okay. Because I just had that faith that I am here for that reason. I did my best and that's all I needed to do. I just wanted to share that story because it is something that made my life what it is today. Tiffany Greene It's beautiful. I love that part of that story is just this group of women gathering together. Meliha Fejzic Yes, it carried me through. And it would not be fair if I do not mention this, and this is where I'll really cry, so. It was the women in my family. I have a twin sister, and I have four sisters- in-law. My husband has four sisters. And I have a mother in law that God sent my way. They would cook for us. They took care of my one year old who I had, my younger son was a year and a half old. I never had to take him with me to primary care ever. I just took Omar and I just 13 concentrated on that. They took care of everything else. Everything else that needed to be done at home, they were doing it. One of them would go grocery shopping, the other one would cook for us, the other one would take him to whatever doctor appointments or stuff that he had because he was a year and a half so there was a lot of stuff going on for him. I just had that. That's why I think there's something that I did good in my life to somebody that have sent my husband's family and him into my life. Something that I have done, that's why I think I've done something good, or had a good angel out there watching for me or something. Somebody sent them my way because it is the family that I've never had. It's the family that I, I have family, but we were so broken because of losing my mom at such a young age, and then my dad being in the concentration camp being on his own, raising us moving to a different continent, different lifestyle, everything, he just did not have time to provide us with the right emotional or development that we needed. So when I married into my husband's family, they provided that. They provided the way of, "Hey, this is how you live, these are the things that we do together as a family, these are the things that you do for each other." I was very grateful that I had that too. They were a big part of my life and development and learning. My husband's family's not religious, they are Muslim, but they don't do anything religious. So, I had to be the one who incorporated that in their life. Slowly. But they do things that are, you know, comfortable for them. But I did have to kinda incorporate that in our life. We brought each other different things. Tiffany Greene [0:48:33] Yeah, that's so beautiful. Meliha Fejzic My twin sister, Tiffany Greene Does she still live here? Meliha Fejzic Yeah, she lives here. She lives in Kearns and I live in West Valley. All of this that I said, my story, was shared with her. So, whatever I went through, from the childhood to the happy memories, through losing the parent, my dad's concentration camp, us living without my dad without a parent, moving here, learning how to live here. All of that was shared with her. It was an I think that made it easy too. Because we had each other, so we didn't feel like we didn't have a mom, because we could be that to each other. We didn't feel like we didn't have a parent, because we were that for each other. After all my life struggles, at one point in life, I decided it was a good thing to go to see a therapist. And it was the best thing I've ever did for myself. And now, I think everyone should go to the therapist one time in their 30's, late 30's. When you are ready to accept yourself and accept what you need to work on. The therapist told me, "If I could put you and your sister into one person you'd be normal." [laughing] Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's why you need each other, to balance. She's a really big part of my life. Tiffany Greene [0:52:54] Is your brother still here? 14 Meliha Fejzic Yeah, my brother lives here. My sister lives here. Tiffany Greene Is your father still alive? Meliha Fejzic No. My dad passed away three years ago. That was a tough thing for us to lose him because he was a really, really, my dad was an amazing person. He just had this understanding of life. He never got upset at anyone, at anything. He just had this policy in life that stupid people get upset. And you just need to deal with stuff. If something doesn't work with somebody move away, or work on it. So, he treated everything in life that way. He never got upset, never. You could not do anything wrong as a child, as a person. He just always had an understanding for you or for anyone. And he was very, very respected and loved to people that knew him here, people that know him. He eventually, when he retired, after he retired, he moved back home immediately. He actually just waited for all of us to sort out, get married, get situated and he was gone. He was just like, "I'm going back home. There's a lot of stuff I want to do." He did and he went back and he worked for organization that took care of the people that were in concentration camp, the survivors. He worked for them, worked in their humanitarian side, and you know, so that was what he spent his retirement doing. Tiffany Greene Have you traveled back to Bosnia lots of time then? Meliha Fejzic Almost every two or three years, yeah. My kids go more often nowadays because they work in they save their own money so we don't have to pay for it anymore [laughing]. They will go almost every summer or go visit, Tiffany Greene And they just stay with your family in that same town? Meliha Fejzic Well, my brother has a home there. It's our family home. So, my brother would go as well and his family, and then they would stay with him. Or they would stay, my husband and I are from two different cities, so they'll stay at my husband's place. Or sometimes they'll go to my aunt, the one that I lived with in Slovenia. So they'll go there, too, because she lives on the sea on Adriatic Sea. They'll go there, too. They probably go more often than we do. But we do still, my husband and I are finally, you know, we're at the point where kids are grown up, and they do their own thing and so now we can travel on our own. We don't always have to take somebody with us. Or we can go do like, "Oh, this couple of weeks, we should go or something." My husband's a truck driver, so he works for himself. He could take time off whenever he wants to. So, if the time is allowing or money, we would go home. We still love to. 15 Tiffany Greene [0:55:56] Does your town that you grew up in look the same now? Or is it completely changed? Meliha Fejzic Bosnia changed overall. Now it's different in Bosnia. It's separated by religion, pretty much. So you have parts of Bosnia, it's called Bosnian Herzegovinian Federation, and that's the part where you would find mostly Muslims living, you have Muslims and Greek and Roman Catholics. Then the other part of the country is called the Republic of Srpska, and that is where Serbian people live, or Greek Orthodox. We've kind of divided ourselves, and maybe that's the way that we need to figure out how to live that way. But they haven't figured it out for the 30 years since the war. We're still in a status quo, nothing changes. When I go back home, now, it's very Muslim, because my town is very Muslim now. So it's easy for us Muslims, but it's not diverse, you know, you don't get that diversity. When you live here, and you learn how to live with everyone, that's kind of tough to accept that the place where you come from, is not like that, they still haven't figured out how to do it. So, that's kind of hard. My husband is from a part that belongs to the Republic, Serbian Republic. So, that part is kind of tough. When we go back home, I don't feel safe always, because you have that war memories and stuff. They've rebuilt there, my husband's family, they have a farm, so we have a lot of land there. They're just, everything's just sitting because you don't know how to deal with everything. But we go, you know, my in laws go every year, clean it up, keep it up so it's livable. But it's tough, it's tough to go to Bosnia. It's beautiful. It's still beautiful. It's just like, I don't know, a beautiful part of the earth. Nature is so pretty people are so nice everywhere you go. But it's just that they cannot figure out how to function as a country and that's kind of tough. But everywhere we go, it's always fun. The kids always say that they don't notice the difference between the cities. I think it's more our mental state that we worry about stuff because we live through that betrayal. But I think kids are like, "We don't notice anything." And that's good, because we don't want him to notice. But it's tough for me and my husband because we're like, "We just wish it's more, more just, i don't know, interacting more with parts of the country. But yeah, my town looks very different. It's very built now. More buildings, more people. A lot of people from Bosnia now live all around the world. You know, we have a lot of people that moved to Germany to Austria during the war time, because they were expelled from their homes, and they were not allowed to return for a while. So after the war stopped, people started coming back but not to live there. But they would come there for vacations and then still go live in Austria or Germany or Italy. Which is so close, you drive in four or five hours from Italy to Bosnia. So, people would live there and work but they would come home and rebuild. So, it looks really nice and everything is fixed and the buildings are better and we don't have a lot of old or ruined stuff. But every single mosque that existed in my county where I'm from was ruined, was destroyed. And so every single one of them had to be rebuilt. But we have two Greek Orthodox churches and multiple Roman Catholic churches that haven't been touched. Nobody ruined those or did anything. Indeed, when the territory was freed, the soldiers were ordered, not even to go in there, the Bosnian military soldiers. They were told to, "You cannot even go on the ground. Don't even think about ruining something." Because people sometimes 16 get revenge and stuff. It's not that people don't want the people to return back, it's more just everyone feels scared of everyone. It's just mental stage. Sorry, I’m probably taking your time. Tiffany Greene [1:00:52] It's good. If you have time, I have one more question for you. We're talking about global relations and things like this. Growing up when the country was communist, talk to me a little bit, if you want to, about the breakup of the Soviet Union and all of that. Because you were pretty young. Meliha Fejzic Yeah, I was pretty young and so the only thing that I remember back then, is that probably between my age of 13 to 15, before the war, we started having this awakening in the Muslim communities. My grandparents, were still Muslim, and they were doing everything that Muslims should be doing. But my parents and their generation, because they were growing up in that communism, my parents were born in early 50's, so right after the war, '51 and '52. The country in 1946, after the war broke, turned communist country so they were raised in that, going through school, going through everything. They just accepted that and live that kind of a life of the religion is not important. And so generations of the people were brought up that way. Then what happened is that we had this awakening, all of a sudden, this switch in a country when everyone was like, that's not right. We're not happy. We should be free for talking. But the war that we had, was not religious war. It didn't start as a religious war. It started as a political system. We had communism, and it was called centralization. So every money, every penny that you make in a country would go into one bank account. And that was in Belgrade, Serbia. Then they will decide how much money they're going to give to each Republic. For, you know, intrafra, Tiffany Greene Infrastructure. Meliha Fejzic Yes, I can never say that word in English, probably not in Bosnian, too. Things like schooling, or schools in education, or military or anything else would go from that fund. So, Croatia is a tourist place. They make lots of money. They have great tourism, plus, they have the stretch of the land that is very fertile and could grow anything. And that's where my husband is from, part of Bosnia goes through that one stretch where you can grow, anything will grow. It's just flat land, perfect for farming. Well, Bosnia has that too, plus we have the mining, great mining. Then we would make all that money, Slovenia, and Macedonia, all them, and then we would give it to Belgrade. Then we would go travelling to Belgrade or to Serbian cities, and their kids in school would have the tennis courts, swimming pools. In Bosnia, we did not, we had barely school building. Or in Croatia, in little villages or small cities, you did not develop. But they were developing their state and military. And so that's what the problem was. The state of Bosnia or the politicians from Bosnia and Croatia and Slovenia, Macedonia, they all said, "We don't like this. We want to keep our own money. We want to keep the money that we make in Utah in Utah." That's what the problem was. And then we can still be the same country. We just want to control the funds. 17 Everything comes down to the money always, and then that's where the problem. Then they decided, "Okay, we're going to make this religion war. So that we can make people kill each other. Because for money, we're not going to kill each other." But when you put God in that mixture, and the way how people go crazy and stupid, and so that's when everything exploded. But it really started at is that political system. Because my dad was always into politics and all this, so I remember the conversations because my dad would have friends over and they would talk about this, and discussions. Then he was involved in the political, he would go to the different meetings, he would come home and be all upset about it. Meliha Fejzic [1:05:40] But I think that Muslims in general have a, and I hate to say this, but we do have a victim mentality, because of the Palestine. And we will always have it until that's sorted out. Because we always feel that we are not being treated like other people. They always feel that. You have the war in Ukraine, and everyone's talking about the white people being killed and you're like, "But people in Bosnia were killed. Nobody paid attention because we were Muslim." Or in Syria for years now, or in Palestine. People don't care about that issue or they just don't care to address it. And so we have that mentality of victims, sometimes within ourselves, because it is something that we are growing and dealing with. That's kind of tough too. When you go that way, you're like, "Oh, that's too much to think about. Too much to take upon ourselves." But yeah, growing in communism, growing up, it wasn't hard or bad, because we didn't know anything. It was, you know, children, we go to school, we do things we just remember. I just remember that we never talked religion. Nobody ever told us, it was not something that parents would tell us, "Hey, when you go to school, don't tell anyone that you went to Sunday school." That was not addressed. It was just the fact that we knew that. We just knew that. We would just go to Sunday school in our little community, we did this and this, but then we would go to school, and it would be completely different conversations. I remember one time we had this big thing at our mosque. Us kids were involved, because we were doing, it was kind of like Bar Mitzvah, something similar to that. We would complete a segment of our education in Sunday school, and we would have this event at the mosque. We invited some friends from school. They were Muslim kids, too, but they were from different part of the town. But we told them if you want to come it's at masjid. They showed up in miniskirts and short sleeve shirt and we kind of looked at them like, "We're going to the masjid?" That's how people were, they were just not raised, not everyone. Especially if they lived in a town, they were not raised to know anything about it. The villages were a little bit more, because the rural area have a little bit more freedom to go to the mosque and do the education and stuff. But yeah, it was an interesting upbringing. Tiffany Greene Well, thank you so much for sharing this. Meliha Fejzic I hope this is good enough. I don't know, I don't have a great story to tell. Tiffany Greene [1:08:43] It's a great story. It's wonderful, and I'm so thankful that you would share it. 18 Meliha Fejzic I think it's a story of life. The story of things get tough, things get bad. Life can be bad, but it can also be beautiful. My point, my whole thing revolves around God and my religion and my faith. Some other people may have something else that is their, you know, center, or core or whatever. It was tough, some things, but I hope that my choice to come here to this country and to have my kids in a place that never is gonna have a war, that that was a good decision. That's what I hope for. Because I think we're kind of going crazy lately and so I am just hoping that my kids never have to lose what we lost in that war. Never. I hope that no one ever, ever has to lose. But that's not the case. There's always wars and stupidities and conflicts. But that's my wish that we have a place where we just learn how to accept that how I pray to God has nothing to do with you. Nothing to do with you. Or how you choose to pray to God, or not pray to God and be an atheist, has nothing to do with the person next to you. Nothing. It's the choice. It's circumstance. I was born in Bosnia in a small place where everyone was Muslim. And I was born a Muslim. You grew up in Utah, where everyone is LDS so your family is LDS. Or you grew up in Vietnam where everyone is Buddhist, or Hindu or whatever and you end up that. That's what the whole thing is. Just accept it and learn how to accept others. And I think people will not do that until they start seeking knowledge and going to the places that are not comfortable. So come to the mosque, come to the synagogue, go to the temple, go to someplace that you have never been to, go talk to people that are LDS, go talk to people that are Muslim, go talk to people that are Hindu. I have been to every single religious entity in Salt Lake with interfaith, because I wanted to learn. And I wanted to be able to accept people and wanted to be able to not have judgments, and just not have prejudice about anything. Just to be accepting that we are all, at the end, we all believe the same way, we all hurt the same way. I just wish people would accept that and we can move through that. But that's another story. That's my life wish, that before I die that I could see some evolution in human race. [laughing] That maybe we would grow to just be more accepting. And I really think it's all education. It's all knowledge. It's just education, really just education. Just go learn about something that you don't know about. Tiffany Greene And talk to people that are different from you. Meliha Fejzic Yeah. And instead of saying, "Go back to your home," I've heard that a lot of times, I wish that those people would come and ask me or someone else why can I not go home. Or the people that are moving here from Kenya, Somalia or Mexico, you know, don't judge because you really don't know what people are going through and why they're here. Thank you so much. Sorry I took a lot of your time. Tiffany Greene Do not be sorry. You need to go and I'm just so glad that we were able to have this time today. I hope your son has a great time. 19 Oral Histories of Utah Women from South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East A Better Days & Utah Muslim Civic League Collaboration Funded, in part, by Oral History Grant 21.01 from Utah Humanities and Utah Division of State History Project Overview In a state that proudly honors the heritage of its European settler forebearers with a holiday every July, it is important for all who call Utah home to be able to have a history that can be documented and celebrated, if not on the state-wide scale of Pioneer Day, at least in the state archives and in their own communities. Compiling a historical record that is centered on Utah women from Middle Eastern/South Asian countries is unique and unprecedented. It is also vital and time sensitive. This project is a necessary step in ensuring that the voices and stories of Middle Eastern/South Asianwomen are recorded, archived, and shared before we are no longer able to ask these women for their stories. The COVID 19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the reality of losing loved ones and valuable community members whose stories and historical knowledge cannot be replaced once they pass on. As a result, there is an urgency to document the stories of the older generations who have either first hand knowledge experience with or second hand knowledge of the first families to move to Utah from Middle Eastern/South Asian communities across the globe. Additionally, as 2021 marked the twenty year anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, it is important and necessary to amplify voices that can provide accurate information about and portrayal of Utah’s Middle Eastern/South Asian communities and to ensure that this information is available for the public to engage with. Of particular interest and importance, this project records, perhaps for the first time, the unique and nuanced personal experiences of Middle Eastern/South Asian women who call Utah home and contribute to the strength of our local communities. The scope of this project will provide valuable insight into the lives of Middle Eastern/South Asian women and give voice to their experiences, thus counteracting widespread misinformation and misrepresentation of what these women value and how their communities value them. The framework for interview questions revolves around 3 main topics: life prior to coming to Utah, life in the first years after moving to Utah, and life after establishing a community for themselves here. Better Days, in partnership with Utah Muslim Civic League received funding from Utah Humanities Oral History Grant program to conduct interviews with 10 women of Middle Eastern and/or South Asian descent who currently live in Utah. The purpose of these interviews is two fold: first, to share stories of Middle Eastern/South Asian women who live in Utah, and second, to uncover the history of the first generations of Middle Eastern/South Asian women to come to Utah. The interviews were conducted over a 14 month period, between August 2021 and October 2022. Isra Habib, student fellow at Utah Muslim Civic League, coordinated primary interviews with potential candidates to explain the project and share interview questions. If the potential candidate wished to participate further, she also arranged for a secondary interview, the audio 1 and transcription of which are included in this collection. Members of the Better Days team conducted the interviews, Isra being present for most of them. One of the interviewees was not from a Middle Eastern or South Asian background, she grew up in Bosnia, but was able to speak to the community of Muslim women in Utah when she arrived here in the 1990s. Two women have lived in Utah their entire lives, but married into families of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. The other seven women came to the United States/Utah from the following countries: Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia and Pakistan. Upon completion of the project, a community event was held to share content from the interviews with a larger audience. Luna Banuri and several staff/volunteers from the Utah Muslim Civic League created visual/audio aids for the event. Luna also served as moderator for a panel discussion with a few of the interviewees: Lily Alavi, Shehnaz Ali and Meliha Fezjic, with Shehnaz Kudiya attending in the audience but not participating in the panel. The event was held on November 1, 2022 at the Draper City Library. Approximately 85 people attended. 2 OH 21.1 Project Participants Project Managers Luna Banuri – Executive Director, Utah Muslim Civic League Tiffany Greene – Education Director/Community Engagement Coordinator, Better Days Isra Habib – Student Fellow, Utah Muslim Civic League Interviewers: Rebekah Clark–Historical Director, Better Days Tiffany Greene–Education Director/Community Engagement Coordinator,Better Days Isra Habib–Student Fellow, Utah Muslim Civic League Katherine Kitterman–Executive Director, Better Days Interviewees: Lily Alavi Shehnaz Ali Meliha Fezjic Wan Ismail Maysa Kergaye Sandra Kergaye Shehnaz Kudiya Makay (last name withheld) Niloufar (last name withheld) Lauri Patel Lana Qader Transcription/Formatting Grace Chipman–intern, Better Days Margaret Kitterman–volunteer, Better Days Tiffany Greene – Better Days Toni Pilcher–intern, Better Days 3