7. A Game of Chess: Shpend, Arben and Sinan, Stantėrg, Kosova, 1997
Since I first met these young men in 1997, their lives have gone in three totally different directions. Shpend was married in 1998; he and his wife Antigona have two young daughters. He works for UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo) as a tri-lingual translator (Albanian, Serbo-Croatian and English). Arben, Shpend's next-door neighbor and father of two, robbed a bank at gunpoint in 2002 and is now in jail. Sinan and his family went to Bosnia as refugees during the war. Unable to return to Kosova because their home was in the Serbian part of Mitrovica, they lived in a refugee camp in Sarajevo for three years before they were finally allowed to immigrate to Canada in 2002.