Dervisa Colakovic eagerly greets customers with a warm smile, red-hued cheeks and charmingly broken English. She smiles often and laughs easily, despite surviving a war and the loss of a child.
“I respect this company,” said Colakovic, who was hired two months ago at Goodwill Industries’ Fisher’s Landing location. “I love it here.”
She says she does the best she can to help customers find tea pots and crock pots, high heels and tennis shoes. “If I understand, I help everyone,” she said.
Colakovic, 54, is a reflection of the employees who staff Goodwill stores — disadvantaged adults who otherwise struggle to find work for reasons that range from physical and mental disabilities to a lack of education.
Two-thirds of Goodwill’s work force has “barriers to employment,” said Dale Emanuel, a Goodwill spokeswoman.
“We have so many shoppers and donors who don’t know who they help when giving to us,” Emanuel explained in an e-mail.
Unwitting shoppers, Emanuel said, are lending a hand to men and women like Colakovic, who “sparkles,” according to supervisors and co-workers alike. Few of the nonprofit giant’s employees, though, are exactly like Colakovic, whose sunny disposition conceals memories of a war that pushed her from her home.
Under the cover of night, tucked in large groups as bombs rained down on Sarajevo, Colakovic and her family fled their home in 1992 at the outset of the Bosnian war.
She lost cousins and an aunt, and saw strangers snared by explosions. She spent four years worried for her husband’s safety after he was forced into the army.
When she saw helicopters touch ground, their cabs filled with dead bodies, she feared her husband, Osman, would be among them. A Muslim, she thanks God he wasn’t.
After five years spent living with relatives and hosting strangers in whatever strange place they happened to find lodging, Dervisa and Osman Colakovic escaped with their four children to the United States.
Upon their arrival, they lived off food stamps and welfare.
When Colakovic says, “I love it here,” the “here” means not only Goodwill, a company she refers to as “like family,” but also her adopted home of Vancouver.
As the family settled in their new home, in 2000, a tragedy, shockingly, nearer than war, struck the Colakovics. Fatima Colakovic, 17, died in a rollover accident nine miles south of Chehalis.
Dervisa’s blue eyes glistened slightly as she spoke of her daughter. The loss is still painful.
“A mom always needs to be ready for everything,” Colakovic said. “I’m strong.”
Strong indeed.
She said she is fortunate to have escaped a war that claimed more than 8,000 lives over one three-day stretch, and to have found a job that allows her to provide for her husband and youngest daughter, Nerma, 24.
In Bosnian culture, she explained, girls live at home until they are married. “I don’t want her to have to pay for an apartment,” Colakovic said. “I help her.”
Prior to Goodwill, Colakovic worked unsteady, late-night hours as a hotel housekeeper. She was thankful for the job, but says she is happy to have one now that affords greater interaction with her co-workers.
Her eldest daughter, Amela Johnson, 32, manages the Goodwill on Fourth Plain Boulevard. Colakovic said it was at Johnson’s encouragement that she landed at Goodwill.
The Colakovics celebrated Thanksgiving over a mixture of traditional Thanksgiving fare and Bosnian favorites.
“I think God gives to me,” Colakovic said. “I believe.”
