Bio

I was born in Ljubija, Bosnia as the youngest of five children. As a child, I always liked to sing, and I sang in the school choir. But at the age of 13, I got diabetes, and that completely changed the rest of my life. My childhood was no longer as it used to be. I finished electro-technical school and four years later I started working as a technician at a telephone central office. Those 4 years between the school and the job, I played basketball for a local basketball team. In 1992 the war in Bosnia began, and at the same time my health worsened, because I could not always get the medication for diabetes, and the fact that I had to spend some time in a war camp didn’t make things any better. The International Red Cross watched over the camp, but they would come only about once or twice a week, bringing some food. Few weeks later they closed the camp, so I moved to my sister's apartment. After a couple of months I finally left Bosnia with some humanitarian convoys when one of my sisters had to pay the local Red Cross to help me to get out and take me along with her family out of Bosnia. That was the only way for me to avoid death, because my health was getting worse very fast. My kidneys were in a very bad condition and so was my eyesight. When I came to Slovenia, where my other 2 sisters live, the doctors found out that my right lung was infected by tuberculosis. The medication I was taking to treat tuberculosis made my kidneys stop functioning, so I had to start with dialysis. The kidney failure caused that my body collected about 30 liters of extra fluid, and I also got blind. I was only 26 at that time. Then UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) decided to send me to Denmark, because I could not get proper treatment in hospitals in Slovenia. I came to Denmark in October 1993, and I was in a critical medical condition, when the doctors did not give me too many chances to survive. Then my father suddenly died on January 3, 1994 in Bosnia at the age of 65, which was the worst news at the worst moment. Even though I felt deep sadness and anger, this was the point when I decided to keep on living and fight for it. Little by little, my health improved and to a surprise of all I got better. In February of 1996 I moved to my own apartment in Copenhagen. Love for music never left me. In the Refugee Camp in Denmark, where I lived for a little more than 2 years, was the place where I got an opportunity to learn how to play the guitar. I started writing songs based on my life experience, which affected me over time. Having my music helped me to get through the hardest periods of my life and with lyrics I wrote I was able to express all the feelings and thoughts that piled up inside me during all those years. In 1999 I decided to make a CD, and with help from my friends, and also some financial help from Danish Refugee Council and Institute for Blind People in Copenhagen, but mostly with my own money, I made that happen. The CD ended just as a demo, but I was very happy because I made my dream come true. There were also a couple of articles about me in the newspapers and magazines, and I also performed on Danish national TV channel (TV2), where I sang one of the songs from that CD. Since then I have developed my song writing skills and singing very much. I wrote many songs later on, and recorded a few of them in a studio. I was one of two singers who represented Danish Blind Society at a music festival in Stockholm in June 2005, where I sang my song "Dans med mig" (Dance with me) written in Danish especially for that occasion. I met a lot of blind and partially blind artists from North Europe (Scandinavia) at the festival, which was a great and new experience for me. http://www.myspace.com/ivicab