Oral history interview with Fatime Gashi

Interview: 10 minutes 30 seconds

Fatime Gashi was born in 1996 in Skopje, Macedonia. Her mother is Macedonian and her father is Kosovan. Fatime’s father was forced to join the Serbian Army but he was later rescued and freed by the Croatian army. When he was released, he moved to Macedonia for safety where he met his wife, Fatime’s mother. The family lived in a refugee camp in Macedonia and at two and a half years old Fatime was evacuated with her family to Manchester. Fatime lost her ability to speak Albanian when she moved to England but she regained her first language by regularly visiting Kosovo each year in the summer.

Fatime is now a Salford University student and she’s studying Biomedicine. She hopes that she might one day become a doctor or she may do a PhD and become a university lecturer. She says she wants to help people in the future.

In this interview Fatime was born in Macedonia but her father originally came from Kosovo. She describes her mother’s pregnancy in a Macedonian refugee camp and coming to live in Manchester with her ethnic Albanian parents.