Ejla Salih: The Mother is the True Warrior

“Life is as it should be, not too fast. Life is slow and gives you time to think.” Ejla Salih reflects on surviving a war, her architecture journey, and how motherhood changed her view on her childhood.

Born in a country that does not exist anymore, Ejla Salihamidzic is a Bosnian architect who started working for a few companies until she started her own with her friend in 2010. She then decided to leave the company in her friend’s hands and move to Kuwait to start fresh, she was initially lost and felt out of place until she decided to adapt and enjoy it until it got better as the days went by. “I found myself when I came to Kuwait.” The move did not only affect her work life, but also her personal life, she gets emotional at the memory of the immediate love and acceptance she received from her in laws and how they introduced her to the culture.  

An important event that shaped her life from a young age is the Bosnian War which she experienced for four years since she was 13years old, her father left to fight leaving Ejla, her mother, and her older sister alone in their apartment. She describes this as being a prisoner in her own home, yet she still counts herself lucky as she did not suffer the same fate as other women and made it out alive with her family.  She recalls that at the time of the war she was not as afraid as one would be in that situation and that was thanks to her mother, which is one of the main driving forces of this conversation. A realization that only came to her after she became a mother herself is that she did not comprehend the difficulty of the war until later in life is because her mother tried her best to put on a brave face and shield her daughters from the reality of the situation. It was the aftermath of this war that made her enter the world of architecture, reasoning being that she wanted to recover the years she lost during the war.

A significant work that defines her career is the statue of the female warrior that resides in Sarajevo Friendship Park in Bosnia. The idea behind the project was to dedicate something to the people lost in the war and to choose a heroic figure to represent them. Ejla initially declines as there was no singular figure she could think of, until she thought about it longer and it hit her, The Mother. Her statement behind it was, in time of war the mother is put in the hardest position, she sends her husband and sons to go fight while trying to stay strong for her daughters. This project celebrates the mother and declares her as the true warrior not only in war, but in life.

As an important theme for Lei Wa Lakom and its purpose is female empowerment, it was naturally a topic of conversation in this episode. Her goal is to empower women the only way she knows how and that is through her work. She discusses the fact that in such field, there is as much competition between women as there is empowerment, but competition does not last long because as women in a male dominated world, they learn how to collaborate and eventually get along professionally.

The thread that truly holds this interview together is motherhood, “Without mother there is no life.” Ejla states that her greatest inspiration will always be her own mother, she looks back at times of her life, like during the war, where her mother put her and her sister’s well-being first and protected them from what was happening outside their four walls. She is overcome with emotion at the recognition of her mother’s sacrifices that she did not realize were such until she became a mother herself. This realization also affects her relationship with the statue she had previously worked on, as she finally saw herself in that piece. She leaves us with a final message to her daughter, encouraging her to believe in herself, build a relationship with God and make sure she is in control of her own life.

When walking away from this episode, viewers willcarry a feeling of hope and resilience, and be will be inspired to shape their own life.

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