Hamill isn't the only American worried about her fate. Since February millions of National Public Radio listeners have been tracking Adona's experiences through a series of reports Hamill has written for NPR's Morning Edition. His description of their first shy pleasantries, increasingly warm teenage chat and her accounts of the desperation of life in a war zone helped make an abstract horror seem terribly real. "It was the first human face anyone had put on the crisis," says NPR spokesman Michael Abrahams. "The fact they were kids only made it more powerful."
Lately, of course, Adona's situation has become increasingly perilous. She recently told Hamill that she was huddled with her parents and 9-year-old brother in their small apartment—for security reasons, he's not saying where—wondering if their best chance was to join the exodus from Kosovo or stay hidden from Serbian soldiers reported to be massacring the family's fellow Albanians. "I cannot describe you the fear," Adona wrote before the electricity was cut off and her computer went dark for the last time. (She has since spoken to her American friend by phone.) The last time Hamill heard from Adona, her bags were packed and her family was considering splitting up. Words she had written earlier rang especially true just then: "You don't know how lucky you are to have a normal life."
Hamill's connection to the Yugoslav war zone began with his church's youth group in December, when a peace worker returning from Kosovo brought a list of e-mail addresses of teens in the besieged region. Hamill tapped out a note to the girl at the address he had been given, and soon she wrote back. Writing in English (Adona also speaks Albanian, Spanish and Serbian), it took a while for the two to develop a rapport. "The first few letters were kind of formal," says Hamill. "Then she opened up." Soon she was calling him by his nickname, Finney, and discussing favorite rock bands such as the Rolling Stones and R.E.M. "You don't know how I'm longing to go to a party," she wrote.
But those moments of youthful bonding soon gave way to anguished exchanges about the situation in Kosovo as peace talks deadlocked and ethnic Albanians prepared for the worst. "I don't even know how many people get killed anymore," she wrote: "I really don't want to end up raped.... I wish nobody in the world, in the whole universe, would have to go through what we are."
Moved by his friend's yearning for the life he had taken for granted, Hamill, an aspiring journalist, incorporated her letters into a story he prepared for Youth Radio, a journalism program in Berkeley. "The first time Finney read it aloud [with another student reading Adona's words], we almost broke into tears," says Jacinda Abcarian, a fellow Youth Radio reporter. The students and instructors edited the tape and sent it to NPR, and when it aired on Feb. 5 it prompted a blizzard of phone calls and e-mails, including a care package of CDs from the members of R.E.M.
Hamill, who attends Berkeley High School and divides his time between his divorced parents—Michael, a supervisor for the Safeway supermarket company, and Elizabeth, a horticulturist—is gratified by the attention his story has received on NBC's Today show and elsewhere. Yet he prefers to focus on the opportunities his stories have created for Adona, including a scholarship to a prep school in Los Angeles. "My biggest hope is that I can bring her to the U.S.," he says. "She deserves to go to a school where her potential will be realized."
But as the violence in the Balkans intensifies, Adona's prospects seem all the more precarious. "I am trying to keep my head, somehow, at a distance from this catastrophe," she wrote to Finney in one of her last e-mails. Now that her phone goes unanswered, he passes his days not knowing whether—or for how long—his friend will be spared.
Peter Ames Carlin
Penelope Rowlands in Berkeley
- Contributors:
- Penelope Rowlands.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
