After spending several weeks in North Macedonia, Shala’s family moved to Finland. They passed through refugee centres before settling in Joensuu, a small city.
There, Shala and his sister worked as volunteer interpreters translating from Albanian and English for Doctors Without Borders and for other refugees who needed medical assistance. Within three months, he enrolled in a Finnish high school, but he had to start from the beginning because his Kosovo education was not recognised.
“I didn’t speak Finnish at all,” he says. “I survived with English and three dictionaries.”
He chose subjects like mathematics and physics to avoid language barriers and slowly learned Finnish. Later, the family moved closer to Helsinki, where he completed secondary school and enrolled in business college in English language, specialising in business administration and marketing with a focus on event management.
This opened doors to work at Nordea Bank and later at Slush, one of Europe’s largest technology conferences. He also ran a small marketing and branding company on the side.
Still, technology remained his central passion. He later completed a university degree in business administration and ICT, becoming a specialist in digital solutions, from web platforms and mobile applications to cloud systems. He spent 12 years working for Finland’s national postal service, Posti, as a developer.
Most recently, he completed a master’s degree at Arizona State University in machine learning and big data analysis.
He now speaks six languages: Albanian, Serbian, English, Finnish, Swedish and, he says, some Russian.
“I love coding, but I also love meeting people,” he says. “I’m not a back-office person. I like solving problems for users.”
Integration into Finnish society was not always easy. In his first school, he was one of only two foreign students.
“There were moments when we didn’t feel welcome,” he says. “My best friend was from Angola. Sometimes people were racist to him.”
He remembers one winter incident when a driver nearly ran over his friend at a road crossing. His friend was holding a phone which he dropped while trying to escape the car, and the driver deliberately drove over the phone.
“He just smiled and said, ‘This is Finland,’” Shala says.
Giving back through technology