At the age of nine, with her mother and sister, she went to Algeria to attend a French boarding school. Upon returning home to Sarajevo, she began secondary education by enrolling at First Sarajevo Gymnasium. In 1972, for the final year of secondary school, she received a scholarship provided by American Field Service and moved to San Rafael, California where she lived with a host American family for about a year. In 2013, looking back on her first experience in the United States as a 16-year-old in the early 1970s, she said: