It's a long way to Connecticut for family from Kosovo

Published: 2003-11-05

HAMDEN, Conn. (CNS) -- It's a long way from Kosovo to Connecticut. But for Pran Gjeloshi, his wife and their four children the distance pales compared to the harrowing escape the family made from their homeland in 1998 when Serbian forces attacked their country. Today, thanks to the help of Hartford Auxiliary Bishop Peter A. Rosazza and members of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Hamden, family members are thriving and comfortably established as U.S. citizens. They first sought help from the parish in the fall of 1999, and after a legal process that took about three years they were granted political asylum by the U.S. government. But the story of their escape is still fresh in their minds. When Serbian soldiers took over their town of Peja, where only 2 percent to 4 percent of the population is Catholic, Gjeloshi, who is an ethnic Albanian, moved his family to the republic of Montenegro to wait for the war to end. But the end never came. "We were scared," Gjeloshi told The Catholic Transcript, newspaper of the Hartford Archdiocese. "It was a terrible time. We wanted to go back, but if I did I knew they were looking for people to fight. I couldn't do that. I had a family to take care of."

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