The Drive To Thrive

Armir Harris came to the U.S. as a political refugee, but under the wing of his uncle, who immigrated two years later, he acquired the tools to shape his own American dream. Harris is the founder of Shofur, an Atlanta-based platform that books buses for events and tracks their location in real time.

- Sheila Marikar

MY EARLIEST MEMORIES are of Albania. It is a beautiful country, but in the 1990s, civil war broke out. In the turmoil before the war, I couldn’t fully comprehend what was going on, but I felt my family’s fear, and I saw violence everywhere. For eight or nine months, we didn’t leave the house. We didn’t go to school. In 1996, my mother fled to the U.S. with me and my sister, seeking political asylum.

WE ARRIVED IN ST. LOUIS with $2,000 in our pockets. We went from one homeless shelter to another, sometimes sleeping in a park or an Amtrak station. My mom got under-the-table jobs cleaning restaurants, and my sister and I would sleep on the seats while she worked. Although we were homeless and times were tough, we had each other. We were happy. My uncle joined us two years later, and we all moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. He drove a taxi, and by the time I was 15, he had started a limousine and party-bus service. He couldn’t get a loan or afford employees, so my mom and I pitched in. We’d clean the vehicles, and I’d help him with accounting, dispatching, and taking reservations. Once I got my driver’s license, I would fuel up the vehicles and get them ready for the drivers. I taught myself HTML and built him a website.