There is no amount of education that can teach someone what war feels like. While our country experienced the worst act of terrorism on American soil over one month ago, countries around the world live with war outside their window every day, as many are right now in Afghanistan.

I have been taught to feel war not through the text books of history classes or from Tom Brokaw on the television, but from a girl who has lived in fear her whole life.

She is the strongest person I have ever known, yet I have never met her.

Bojana Gajski is a 22-year-old Serbian who lives in a town called Kikinda. She has been my pen pal overseas since I was 10 years old. At first it was fun to receive letters and compare our lives, but when war broke out heavily in her country, our friendship changed.

Letter after letter would describe the terror in her country – things I could never imagine. Her school would be shut down for lack of oil and power to heat and light the building. Her brother went off to war, never knowing if they would see each other again. And her friends began going off to fight.

After years of imagining this kind of terror through the eyes of someone my own age, I realized that I was living in a bubble. Imagining bloodshed on American soil is something no one has experienced since the Civil War. Yet there are tanks rolling down the street in Yugoslavia. As the years progressed and America became involved overseas in Bojana’s homeland, our friendship changed again. I was told on the television that we were helping her country establish peace, yet all she could see from Americans was the bombing of hospitals, bridges and the killing of innocent people.

I’m proud to be an American. Throughout my entire friendship with Bojana, all I wanted to do was bring her to America so that she could remember what peace was like.

But now America is at war. I turned to Bojana for answers, and this is what she told me:

“The only good thing from the wars was that I know very much about world politics. Too much. The years of war here taught me to love people even more and respect every moment of peace as much as I can. If you don’t open your eyes immediately, they will be shut forever. How stupid most of the Serbs were to believe Milosevic. When they opened their eyes it was too late. Our country was already destroyed.”

It is hard for me to open my eyes when there is little destruction to see in America. I can open my eyes to New York, but the war is not here. It is in the Middle East. And again I rest in the bubble of the American government that will be protected against terrorism.

I prayed for Bojana to know peace, yet now she prays for me in every letter she writes. How can one young woman be so strong in a life filled with destruction? Her faith in love and peace around the world has carried around the world and has touched my life in a way I will never forget.

All this from someone who I probably will never meet – unless the world can be at peace.

n Kristin Rojek is a senior English major and a guest columnist for The Daily Eastern News. Her e-mail address is [email protected]. Columns are the opinion of the author.