“This area is very similar to where I come from”

Born in Foca (now Bosnia-Herzegovina) in 1953, Ferid Softic left for Serbia at the age of 15, in the town of Bor, which mines copper near the Romanian border. There he studied to be a mining technician (copper, gold, silver, etc.) and led a life divided between work and leisure. “I often travelled by train, I played the guitar and played football, I was searching for myself a little bit…”, recalls the septuagenarian who became French in 2004.

“It’s very hard to arrive alone with a suitcase without knowing the language”

Ferid left Serbia at the age of 40 and moved to Saint-Claude at the end of 1994 because his uncle and aunt had been living there for about a year. For two months, he stayed in Avignonnets and remembers: “At first it was hard to arrive with only a suitcase and without speaking the language, fortunately I had family and there were also two doctors there. of Yugoslav origin, doctors Basic and Maksimovic. »

“I looked for work through OFRA (French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons) in Paris and finally joined my sister in Alsace. I remember meeting a journalist who was looking for refugees from Bosnia after a film was broadcast. We became friends and she put us up with my sister Velida,” he says with emotion.

From interim to permanent contract

The Alsace region where Peugeot was based employed many ex-Yugoslavs at the time, and Ferid Softic was a temporary worker there for a week. He then worked in building renovation, twelve hours a day, on the German border. “I earned 55,000 francs for three months!” recalls Ferid Softic. He bought a car in Germany in 1997 and eventually left Alsace for the Jura. He is grateful to Nuri Basic and his wife who helped him find a job in the Jura, first in public works and then at Smoby, where he stayed from 1998 to 2009. That year, he became unemployed and decided to look for work quickly. Not liking to sit around doing nothing, he quickly found a job with the Saint-Michel-le-Haut Association, where he ended his career at the exact age of 63 years and 3 months!

“I love the Jura, its landscapes, its climate, its cheeses… and it’s a lot like my region! », Says the retiree who lives peaceful days with his partner, met during a barbecue in Bouchoux.