The Final Days

Saturday was our last day of programming, and we wrapped it up in epic style. We started in the morning by meeting with a group called Sarajevo Phoenix. This organization is composed of Bosnian women (Serbs, Muslims, and Croats) who have joined together to make beautiful stolls, communion table runners, Christmas ornaments, and other crafts. The Phoenix, of course, is the legendary bird who rises out of its own ashes to find new life. And while these women are from different faith traditions and ethnicities, their common ground is that they have all resurrected from the ashes of the war in Sarajevo, and in defiance of their circumstance, they choose to create something beautiful.

Each of the women in the group shared their personal stories with us, and the vast majority of them lost husbands, and some husbands and sons, during the Siege of Sarajevo. With no social security safety net and with 45% unemployment throughout the whole country, many of these women are dependent upon the earnings from their crafts for income.

Here I am with a few of the ladies.

Later that afternoon we got to spend some more time with a truly incredible man, Fra Ivo Markovic. "Fra" indicates that he is a Franciscan, or a Friar. He works and teaches at the Franciscan monastery in Sarajevo, and is a close friend and mentor of Amy Gopp, Executive Director of the Week of Compassion. Amy worked with Fra Ivo during her four years in Croatia and Bosnia in the mid-late nineties. She describes him as a prophet - a man who is extremely well learned and intelligent, but who refuses to cloister himself away from the world in the academy. Instead, he wakes up everyday with this guiding thought - "What are the people's needs?" He is a prolific writer (in English, German, and his native Bosnian), teaches at the Franciscan Seminary in Sarajevo, and was the founder of Pontanima, an interfaith choir founded in Sarajevo after the war in 1996.


Not such a good shot, but this is Fra Ivo in the middle with the white hair.

We spent the afternoon at another Franciscan monaster in the town of Fojnica. I was privileged to get to ride with Fra Ivo and Amy on the way out to the monastery. He is a man with a thousand stories. One that penetrated my heart was the story he told of visiting his home after the war. His hometown is in Zenica, a central Bosnian city with a good mix of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims. During the war, his family was run out of their home and had to flee to Croatia, where many displaced Catholic Croats were fleeing at the time.

After several months, he was able to make it up to Zenica to check on his family's home. But when he got there, he found that it wasn't empty. As was often the case, another family moved in and was squatting in his family's abandoned property. There was heavy Muslim v. Croat fighting in Zenica, and a family of displaced Muslims had found refuge in his old home.

He went to the door, fully dressed in his friar's habit, and knocked. The father of the house came to the door, and was immediately sceptical. It was clear that Ivo was a Catholic, and many Catholics (and many Franciscans, Ivo tells us) had fully consumed the nationalistic fervor of the time and preached violence and hate against their Muslim neighbors. And if anyone has the right to be angry, it's a man who finds his ancestral house, the home in which he was raised and to which his family still owns the rights, inhabited by squatters.

But the Muslim man's fears were soon assuaged. Fra Ivo told the man that he was just going around Zenica making sure people had everything they needed. He asked if everyone in the family was alright, and asked if there were any needs that he could meet for the family. He ended up getting them some water and blankets, spent some time visiting with the family and listening to their stories of being uprooted and finding a safehouse and refuge in this house. After a while, Fra Ivo blessed the family and conferred upon them his peace, and walk out the door of his own home, leaving it to its new residents.

And as he tells the story, he says that he felt a sense of peace knowing that the home that had given him sanctuary and refuge was still providing that same comfort and peace to a new family.

He's truly an incredible man. He ate lunch with us, met with us to discuss the process of reconciliation in Bosnia/Herzegovina as he sees it, and then we all had the chance to walk around the monastery grounds with Fra Ivo. He told us that sitting around a table is less conducive to good conversation that walking around and "disputing" with one another.

So we walked up an adjacent hill to an old Catholic graveyard. The scenery was incredible, and once we got on top of the mount, it was hard not to see the symbolism of 8 seminarians engaging with a wisened pastor and peacemaker on a mount as he gave a "sermon" of sorts.

Here is a view of the monastery from the graveyard where we heard the sermon on the mount.

I tried to get a little artistic with this one. And when I say "I" did, what I mean is that I found a way to make use of one of the many features on my camara that allow me to look like I know what I'm doing when it comes to photography. But think of the symbolism - this flower is native to Bosnia, and interestingly enough, growing forth out of a grave. And the same life and beauty that is accented in the monastery's church in the background, is springing forth from the grave of Bosnian Croats killed in World War II.


Back to Ivo. His sermon on the mount centered around the ways in which people (politicians, religious leaders, the media) use fear to manipulate people. He spoke of how nationalist elements in his country totally coopted the religious establishment, and began to use church leaders to stir up fear and hatred amongst the various ethnic groups. He remembers giving an interview in which he harshly criticized some of his fellow Franciscans who were accepting money from nationalist Croat groups to spread their message of fear throughout Bosnian-Croat Catholics. He noted one instance in which a Slovenian Catholic friend of his walked into a church, and as the priest began the mass, he greeted the congregation as "My Dear Croats". The Slovenians got up and left - if this priest was going to begin by drawing a line in the sand like that, he wanted nothing to do with such a church.

Fra Ivo articulated the belief that fear is the opposite of love. That is, hate is not the opposite of love, but fear is. And he says that fear is thus a deep and primal sin, and when fear is invoked, it is always used with the intent to manipulate a people. Fear reduces a person or people's consciousness, and Fra Ivo knows from experience what people do when they are in fear. Fear can be used to induce an existential hatred of the other, that neighbor or colleague who is somehow different than you, and can lead people to do horrendous, ungodly things to those "others". Fear forces individuals to draw lines in the sand to distinguish between people, and forces humans into looking at the world in very black and white terms. At heart, fear causes humans to not act like humans, and it causes us to treat other humans as if they were not human.

Thus, we as Christians are to work to erase this kind of fear from the world. We are to bring people together who have some fear of each other and help them to recognize their humanity and their own face in the other. We as Christians are to speak out and call out those politicians and religious leaders who use fear to manipulate whole populations, who instill fear in people to divide them, conquer them, and dominate them.

Our group couldn't help but think about our own context in the United States. How ironic is it, that we, the most powerful nation in the world by any measure, seems also to be consumed with a divisive and dehumanizing fear of the other? If anyone should not fear, it is the United States who have every resource and power at their disposal. And yet too often we do - we allow politicians and religious extremists in our own country to rile up the caustic nationalistic sentiments deep in in our own psyches to control us and force us to see others as inherently dangerous and out to get us.

This sermon on the mount struck me deeply. Fra Ivo's words were certainly focused on the context of religion and politics in Bosnia, but his message to us as Christians to defiantly refuse to fear the other, and to choose to love the other in a way that might even seem dangerous to us is one that is universal. How else could a man approach the family who has invaded his own home, bless them, offer them his assistance, and even break bread with them, unless he really believed in a love that can conquer even the deepest fear.

The rest of the night was not so philosophical or deep. In fact, we closed out what was a really challenging and engaging day with some amazing food and fellowship with our new friend Ivo and his fellow Franciscans. We had some incredible grilled fish, as seen in this first picture.


And in this picture, I was trying to communicate my affection for this perfectly prepared piece of Bosnian cuisine.

And finally, I am so happy I was able to capture this event on camera. Fra Mirko, a friar at the Fojnica monastery, brought his youth group in to entertain us. This group of high school youth meet with Fra Mirko often to practice their instruments and learn the incredible old folklore songs of Bosnia Herzegovina.

They treated us to a variety of folk songs, and Pepi, Amy's dear friend, director of Pontanima choir, and a member of the Bosnian National Opera, treated us to an incredible show.

After several songs, I decided to put in a request. As many of you know, half of my ancestry is Jewish. My father's family is Jewish and hails from Eastern Europe, although it is considerably further North than where we were in Bosnia (they're actually from Minsk and Western Russia mostly). So I asked for them to play Hava Nagila - I figured that they had a pretty good corpus of Slavic tunes, so maybe they'd be able to come through and add a little Jewish flavor to our night.

And I was not disappointed! This band of bards, all Catholic, were happy to indulge me in my request. Enjoy!



And what a beautiful image. The words of Hava Nagila, translated into English are something like this:

Let's Rejoice, Let's Rejoice - Let's Rejoice and Be Happy
Let's Sing, Let's Sign - Let's Sing and Be Happy
Awake Brothers, Awake Brothers with a Happy Heart
Awake Brothers, Awake Brothers, With a Happy Heart

As I look back on Bosnia, now that I'm comfortably back in Baton Rouge, I am filled with a happy heart. I am blessed to have met an incredible group of Bosnians (Bosnian Croats, Bosnians Muslims, and Bosnian Serbs) who all have powerful personal stories and who all have found their own ways of working to bring their country back together. I am blessed to have witnessed both the good and the bad. I have walked across the graveyard in Srebrenica and have broken bread with amputee victims of landmines who have lived without their legs since the sixth grade. But I have have also witnessed the beauty of a culture that has survived despite a harrowing attempt to see it erased, wiped clean from the face of the Earth. I am blessed to have heard Pepi sing Bosnian folk songs in his proud, Slavic, baritone voice, the same voice that defiantly sang Mozart's Requiem in the rubble of the Old Library in Sarajevo after a nearly successful attempt to destroy all the oldest records of Bosnian history. I am blessed to have met people like Teo, Atif, and Nemanje (one Croat, one Muslim, and one Serb) who each in their own way have partnered with our churches, churches in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), who through Week of Compassion, have commited to walking with the people of Bosnia as they pick themselves back up, dust themselves off, and repair the breach that has ripped their land apart.

I leave Bosnia with a happy heart. I also leave Bosnia with a mind and heart full of disgust and pain for what has happened and for what fear and nationalism has wrought in the Balkans. But I can leave Bosnia with a happy heart, because when I was in Bosnia, I found a people who are dancing and singing. I discovered a resilient people who refuse to let that fear and hatred define them, a people who defiantly define themselves through food, music, humor, and a warmth that is unique, rare, and holy. I met people in Bosnia who have endured repressed religion under Communism, nationalistic religion under Milosevic and Tudjman, and yet who still love God, and can clearly see the face of God in each other.

In Bosnia, I found a people who are better than their leaders, who are better than the way we see them through the eyes of the media, and who are rejoicing, singing, and dancing on the ground that only 15 years ago, was flailing in the deepest abyss of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

And as these Catholic bards celebrated their own cultural tradition by performing their songs for us that night, they also sang Hava Nagila. In this land that has been framed by ethnic and inter-religious strife, this band of Friars and young Catholics are learning the songs of their Jewish neighbors, just as they learn those of their Orthodox and Muslim neighbors.

And that evening, in the basement of a remote Franciscan monastery in the Bosnian mountains, they welcomed us to sing along with them too.

I am reminded now of the profound words of the imam I met at the Sufi Mosque in Blagaj, Herzegovina in the middle of the trip:

"Our sheik's sheik, back in the 18th Century, told us that when someone comes to the threshold of your mosque, do not ask them about their faith. If they have a soul from God, offer them bread, pour them a cup of tea, and welcome them."

In these words, I commend to you, the spirit of Jesus, the Christ, present, working, and alive in Bosnia.

From the Smallest Seed...

We left Sarajevo early yesterday to make the 2 1/2 hour trip up to central Bosnia, to the city of Maglaj. Here we met with one of Week of Compassion's partner organization that does work on the ground in Maglaj, Merhamet. Merhamet is an Islamic organization that provides 7,000 people with a meal EACH DAY in Bosnia/Herzegovina. The site we went to in Maglaj served about 600 hot meals a day to the residents of the municipality with no regard to their ethnic or religious affiliations. Much like the Sufis at the Tekke we visited in Blagaj, they open their doors to anyone with a soul from God.


Speaking of someone with a soul from God, this first picture was taken with my little friend Sinajd (SIN-aeed). He is a 10 year old resident of Maglaj who was just kind of hanging around the soup kitchen we visited there. We exchanged some high fives and some fist bumps, and then I tried my best to use my limited Bosnian language skills to talk soccer with the little guy. Apparently his favorite player is Messi, but he loves his native Bosnia Herzegovina national team :) He proceeded to follow us around the rest of the morning.

Dzevad, our guide, was giving him a hard time about his nails being dirty. That might seem a littl harsh, but people here are very direct. Amy says that they will comment that you seem to be carrying a little extra weight since the last time they saw you, and Dzevad has said that he doesn't think twice about telling a men he needs to reapply some deoderant (which, truthfully, has been an issue with some of the guys we've met). So Dzevad teases him about this and said, "Why doesn't your mother take car of those dirty nails" He went on to say he had no mother, and that his father didn't do that kind of stuff.

So he runs errands for the soup kitchen and gets dirty in the process. Even a 10 year old without a mother, a boy who lives in poverty in a war town country, finds a way to serve and to be useful to God.

We learned from Atif, the director of the Merhamet branch in Maglaj, that with the help of the Week of Compassion, they have been able to construct 12 greenhouses in a nearby rural vilages in which they can produce many of the vegetables and wheat that they use in the soup kitchens. He went on and on about these soup kitchens, and was obviously very proud of the progress they've made, especially in the last year, to become self sufficient and to reduce their costs as they feed the poor in Maglaj. So we loaded back up in the van and took a road trip to see these greenhouses.



What we saw was unbelievable. In two years, 12 greenhouses had been constructed with beans, peppers, tomatoes, and beets. But the story of how this got started is realy incredible...

1.) Disciples of Christ church members who happen to be farmers committ to tithe their crops to the Week of Compassion. That's it - they harvest their crop and donate 10% to Week of Compassion. Amy said that WoC gave $24,000 worth of grants to incentivize the project and to make matching grants.

2.) Week of Compassion gives it to the Foods Resource Bank, and international non-government organization. As more and more food is given to the Week of Compassion Account, the Foods Resource Bank increases the "credit" we have with them. After a two year campaign, WoC raised $262,000 worth of credit with FRB.

3.) So for you accountants out there, the brass tax is this: WoC makes a $24,000 investment and leverage their total up to $262,000. Find me another investment that can bring those kinds of returns! What an incredible illustration for God's ability to use small seeds to develop immense plants.

4.) That $262,000 has been divided up between WoC projects in Latin America, and this particular project in Bosnia. So WoC chose to spend $50,000 to give to Church World Service, who in turn used it to fund Merhamet in Bosnia. And with that $50,000, seven of these twelve greenhouses were built (with help from other donors as well).

5.) Now, Merhamet has taken the first steps to growing its own food that it, then in turn, gives to its local soup kitchens. In just a few short steps, our tithing in the United States gets compounded by over 500% and goes directly to people in need, feeding the "least of these" in Bosnia.

It's beautiful to be at that end of the process. We see Week of Compassion come every year and we see their collections throughout the year, but getting to see how little donations can be given into God's hands to be compounded several times over and then go to do God's work in this world is realy amazing. And Week of Compassion allows for us to play a part in that.

I got a little taste of the action too - here I am munching down on a tasty green pepper, freshly picked from the greenhouse 2 minutes early. Not even Whole Foods can get that organic!


On the road to the greenhouses, we noticed some Bosnian Army personnell working to demine an elderly woman's home. Yellow and white tape marking old mine fields from the war are spotted all along the road in Bosnia / Herzegovina even today. We stopped for a while to talk to these brave men who are working to make their land safe, literally, again. When asked why they chose this profession, they said - "It pays well, and there are just no other jobs." When we asked what "good pay" is, they said about 40 Euro a day, or about $60/day.


We've been told that unemployment in Bosnia is at about 45%, and Dzevad thinks the real number is closer to 60%. In Canton 10, where we visited on Tuesday, we saw statistics showing 92% unemployment. And the root cause, we are told, is that all the factories were simply destroyed. A people that had 100% employment before 1992 now see 1 in every 2 people who are willing to work without work. And these men risk their lives every day for $60.


We had dinner that evening with Atif, the director of Merhamet in Maglaj. We ate at a restaurant on the River Bosnia, from which the rest of the country gets its name. After ordering, we were presented with a performance from one of the dance troupes that Merhamet sponsors and teaches. The youth were between 14-21 years old, and performed two dances - one was the Croatian national dance, and the other was a Muslim dance.



After dinner, Atif gave an impassioned speech (translated by Amy) about how important it is for us as religious leaders to build these connections internationally. He was immensely grateful for the Week of Compassion, and it's approach to development. He said that many people and organizations came to him and said, "Here's a lot of money, and this is what we want you to do with it." But with WoC it was a different ball game. The Disciples came in and asked "What are your needs?" Once that was determined, we sought out our own resources (the farmers, donors, and those crop-tithes) and did everything we could to meet the needs expressed by Atif. He was immensely grateful for this! And he was so happy to show us his land and culture, and begged us to carry on the story of his organization and the good work they're doing in Bosnia back to our home churches, so this relationship can continue, and the gifts given to God can continue to multiply, and bear much fruit.

Hope 87 and the Sarajevo Tunnel

Back in the capital city of Sarajevo, our group continued our tour of the humanitarian organizations in Bosnia Herzegovina (BiH) with whom Week of Compassion works. We woke up a little earlier in the morning to get to Hope 87, an Austrian organization that works with landmine victims and amputees to 1.) get them the medical attention they need, 2.) offer them every opportunity for physical therapy, and 3.) work as the intermediary between amputees and employers to help them find meaningful and sustaining work.

Week of Compassion has been funding this organization since we began working in BiH in the mid-late nineties. One item in particular that we funded was this automatic wood engraver. It uses a laser to burn a sketch into a piece of wood, and the employees at Hope 87 can use it to make keychains, plaques, and other items that they can then, in turn, sell for a living. Amy says that she has often ordered large loads of their products for General Assembly or Week of Compassion events.

Here is our group checking out the automatic wood engraver. Samir is giving us the tour - I'll say more about him later.

A couple things were really striking about this organization. First, I was really impressed to know that they started working in Sarajevo in 1992. That is the year the whole conflict started, and Sarajevo literally blew up. So when the whole world was running away from Sarajevo - as embassies were being cleared out and many fled to safer ground, this organization ran INTO Sarajevo to be a healing and loving presence for the victims of landmine attacks. I can't think of a better Christian witness that putting one's own life and well-being at risk to help save another's life.

The other moment that got to me was when we spoke with one of the employees, Samir. He is a young man maybe in his early thirties, and suffered a terrible injury during the fighting in Sarajevo. Samir walked with a strange gait, and even though he had long jeans on that covered up his prosthetic leg, it was clear from his movement that he was an amputee. He said he was 17 at the time. Seventeen years old. He had volunteered for the Bosnian Army when he realized that the Serbs had surrounded his hometown and were crashing shells down on his neighborhood daily. One day, a Serb shell landed nearby him, and killed many around him. He was immediately taken to an Army Barracks Hospital, and he said that two times in the next 24 hours, he was pronounced dead.

Since he was a minor, he needed permission to get the amputation that he obviously needed. The problem was that his mother was stuck in Sarajevo and was unreachable at the time. His father was out on the front lines, and he couldn't be contacted either. So this brave, seventeen year old boy was forced to make this decision on his own, and sign his own leg away.

What a terrible ordeal for a seventeen year old to have to go through, and what a terrible decision to have to make. With his parents far away, the whole onus and weight of this fell on him.

As I heard Samir tell this story, my mind was totally drawn to that age - 17. I thought of the youth/young adults at our church. I thought of the Denham Boys who just graduated high school last year and moved into adulthood at 18. I thought about how invincible you feel at 17, and how your primary concerns usually revolve around appearing attractive to the opposite sex. I was overcome with just how completely depressing it must have been to know that a part of you was literally going to be missing for the rest of your life. Samir even said he was an athlete before the war at his high school, and one of the hardest realizations he had to come to was that he could not go out and play soccer like he always had. No one should have to deal with this, but especially not seventeen year olds.

Despite the tragic event, Samir has become quite successful and is a story of pure hope. He became involved with Hope 87 as a beneficiary. He went through all the PT necessary, they had a prosthesis (sp?) prepared for him, and they gave him training in information technology and videographic production. Then, after working for a few years, he has come back to Hope 87 to manage their IT department and help give back to the organization that helped give him his life back. He held his head high as he showed us around the office space, and he proudly gave us a plaque that he made on the automatic wood engraver thanking the Week of Compassion for all that we have done for this organization that means the world to him.

I came to Bonsia to hear stories of hope from people who have suffered unimaginably, and Samir's story is exactly that. He has taken the hand life has dealt him, and he has defied all the suffering and all the legitimate reasons to fall into depression, and instead, he stands tall and proudly serves other amputees.

Later that afternoon we went to the Sarajevo Tunnel. This was a tunnel, 800 meters long that was used by the Bosnian Army to supply the city with food, ammunition, medical supplies, etc during the Siege of Sarajevo from 1992-1995.

The tunnel led into the city from the Southeast corner, near the airport. It was the only lifeline the city had for 4 years. Amazingly, the Bosnian Army was able to keep the Serbs from claiming the strip of land around the airport and the tunnel.

This gives you some idea as to how cramped up this space was. This is Dzevad in front of me, and he's about 5'11" or so. Imagine men carrying 100 lbs of supplies and walking through this wet, mucky tunnel for somewhere between 45 minutes to 2 hours.

In the museum next door, they showed us some of the war time food packets. If you look closely here, you'll see a small bottle of Tobasco Sauce on the right side of the box. Much like us in Louisiana, the Bosnians found a way to keep the flavor flowing even during war time.

We visited the Old Jewish Cemetary, which is representative of the large Jewish population this city once boasted. During the Spanish Inquisition, many Spanish Jews (Sephardim) fled the Catholic Church and landed in Bosnia, where they were welcomed with open arms. Unfortunately, only about 200 Jews remain in the city - many left or were killed during WWII. But this cemetary stands as a reminder of the strong Jewish footprint on this city, and it also speaks to the level of tolerance for which Sarajevo stands.


So enough heady stuff. What else is the group doing while we're here? Well, we are definitely getting a lovely taste of Bosnian cuisine. Last night we all met up with Pepi, Amy's good friend and the director of the choir Pontanima (an interfaith choir here in Sarajevo). Here, we had our first taste of a local delicacy, roasted lamb. Here is our lamb a 'roasting on the spit!

I tried to start up a little conversation with the lamb roaster himself, who knew a little English. He said it takes about 2 and a half hours to cook one of these guys, and when I asked about spices or herbs used in the process, he said in a stern, Slavic way - "no spice, just lamb."

So maybe we could work on the spices back in Baton Rouge, but the roasting style, they have down pat :)

In the middle of our meal, a couple older gentlemen came by our table with accoustic, nylon stringed guitars and began singing Bosnian folk songs. It just so happens that Pepi, the choir director, also sings with the Bosnian National Opera! So with a little coaxing, Amy got him to join the guitarists and sang some incredibly beautiful melodies, including "My Sarajevo".


So I don't want to give the impression that everything we do is sorrowful and full of weeping. We see lots of things that are tough to stomach, but there are more stories of hope and perserverance than I could have imagined. And when we're not touring the humanitarian projects, we find time to have delicious meals, stop for our infinite coffee breaks, and just enjoy the beautiful landscape and company of Bosnia and it's resilient and spirit-filled people.

Three Days in Herzegovina

We've just returned to Sarajevo from three days of travel through the southern province of the country, Herzegovina. Compared to Bosnia, Herzegovina is dryer and hotter, and it's really only about 3 hours away. So even for a small country, Bosnia / Herzegovina has a surprising number of landscapes and climates within its borders.

The destination was the ancient city of Mostar, apparently founded in 892. This is the largest town in Herzegovina and is known for its Old Bridge - in fact, Mostar means Old Bridge in Bosnian. But on the way there, we stopped at a small Serbian Orthodox Church in a small, rural village.



This church has roots in this village since at least the early 1800s, but during the war, the Croats and Bosnian Muslims destroyed the church and all the ethnic Serbs in the community were run out of town. Many went back to Belgrade, but many others were sent to Serb strongholds in Bosnia in cities like Srebrenica or Banja Luka.

If you'll remember in my last post, Srebrenica was in Eastern Bosnia and was a site where Bosnian Muslims were being forced out of their homes to fill them with displaced Serbs from other parts of the country. Now here it is the total opposite situatoin. So population displacement affected both sides severely. In this Bosnian War in the early nineties, the lines never seemed to be very clear cut.

We stopped at this church because Week of Compassion, the Disciples of Christ outreach and development wing, has helped walk with them on their way back into normalcy. Normally, Week of Compassion tries to work with minority populations since they are the ones with the least social/economic resources in a conflict area. So while the Serbs are normally thought to be the aggressors in this conflict, in this particular situation and in much of Herzegovina, it was the Serbs who were getting the short end of the stick and being forced to relocate across the country.

So as this church tries to restart after total devastation and begin the process of helping the Serbs who used to live in the area return home, Week of Compassion has donated money to them. With the money raised by Week of Compassion from us in normal, everyday Disciples of Christ churches, this church has been able to rebuild, construct a new fellowship hall, build a playground for the youth, and now they're working on building a soccer field for the local youth to enjoy. They are now back up to about 100 in worship, but of the 2,000 Serb homes originally in this area before the war, only some 300 have returned. So there is much work left to be done!

They new we were coming, so they arranged for all the children of the church to come out and perform a local Bosnian dance called the Kola. It was absolutely adorable!
The women's group in the church prepared us an excellent meal and we had time to sit the with priest, Njeman, and discuss his church's long road to recovery. He was very engaging, and very enthusiastic to THANK all of us in local churches back in the U.S. who have shown his people the love of Christ and helped them to return to their ancestral place of worship.

There's so much to say and so many little stories that I'm afraid my short time here with the computer won't allow me to tell them all. But that is fine, as I know I'll be able to share much more when I return home. But let it suffice to say that this visit with Njeman and his little church in the northern suburb/villages of Mostar was a really moving experience for me as a young minister - he and I seemed to have a lot in common with him (even down to our stories of how we were called to ministry).

Here is Njeman speaking to us in his church with Amy translating amongst us.

We proceeded on to spend the afternoon at a Serbian Monastery with a certain monk, Lazar, whom if he had not taken a strict vow of celibacy, most of the women on the trip would have been happy to move to Bosnia for him. But he was immensely hospitable to all of us, and we spent several hours eating and visiting with him. His monastery was built in the 16th century, but had been destroyed several times by Croatians. He told one poignant story in which 8 monks were killed by Croatians in WW II. They found their bones in a nearby cave, and the remaining monks buried them and built a memorial. Then in the 1960s, another conflict began and a Croatian shell exploded on the memorial of the 8 martyrs killed in WWII, so Lazar said that the monks were "twice martyred".

They've since picked up the pieces and built a new memorial for the twice martyred monks inside the monastery, hopefully where they may now rest in peace.

That evening we had an absolutley incredible experience that I'm not even sure I have digested yet, but I will tell you the bare bones of it at least here. We traveled to our hotel, which is in the city of Blagaj. Here in Blagaj is a Tekke, or a Sufi house of prayer. In Islam, there are Sunnis and Shias, and the Sufis exist outside of those "denominations" and are the most mystical sect of Islam.

Dzevad, our guide (and a Muslim himself) brought us to this house of prayer that evening and asked the members if we could come up to the second floor of the Tekke and watch as they prayed. After a little haggling and discussion, they decided to invite us in!

This is the outside of the Tekke. It is set back under an overhanging cliff - Hard to see in the picture though.

What an incredible experience. The women were asked to "cover up", as you can see in the picture, and we all went up the stairs to a small room filled with about ten men sitting in a circle.



They went through about an hours work of prayers, some of which I was able to discern with my very basic Arabic knowledge. But it was just beautiful beyond words. In Sufi tradition, you pray by continually repeating God's name over and over or by repeating phrases from the Quran over and over, until some type of mystical state is reached. The rhythm started very slowly and then began to build and pick up speed, and when the imam was ready he would ratchet the prayer up a notch and chant the phrase in a higher pitch (kind of like a Key Change - or at least it had that affect). We were all in awe of this experience, and Dzevad said that if we thought it was amazing with only 10 Sufis, we should experience the same prayers where there hundreds of Sufis gathered. The experience, he says, is unforgettable. I know this one was, even with only 10.

Afterwards we had time to meet with the Sufis for tea. Dzevad and I joined the men and the women went into a separate room with the women Sufis. The people were incredibly hospitable and engaging. Many were fluent in English and one even spent some time in the U.S. But the most amazing encounter was this - the imam and I were discussing this sect of Islam, and he told me this story -

"Our sheik's sheik, back in the 18th century, said that if someone comes to the threshold of your Tekke, a visitor, do not ask them about their faith. If you see that they have a soul from God, give them bread and tea, and invite them in."

I responded, "You definitely have done this for me tonight." And he shrugged his shoulders and said, "That's what we do."

What an encounter - I am still processing it all, but it was really powerful to be there and hear him tell me these things.

OK, so I have to go eat breakfast, but I have uploaded more photos, so I will go into lightning mode to describe the next two days :)

We spent most of the next day in Mostar, a beautiful old city. This is the famous bridge, which was built 500 years ago, but destroyed in the war. We watched a documentary on how the village reclaimed the stones from the river and recently rebuilt the bridge to its original splendor.


This is me cheesing it up from the top of the tallest minaret in Mostar. You can see the bridge in the background. A minaret is the tall tower from which the Muslim call to prayer is offered. Amazing view isn't it!

Fast foward to Tuesday. We traveled to Canton 10, the poorest section of Bosnia, to check out the Week of Compassion Partners in Bosansko Grahovo. We paired off into 2 and visited local beneficiaries of the money we Disciples send to the region. I have so much to say about it, but I will just say here that it was really amazing to see the end result of Week of Compassion's work. This first image was taken at Boro and Brankas house. They are Bosnian Serbs, run out of their land during the war by invading Croatians, and WoC has helped them to not only return to their home, but through Church World Service, WoC has given them small loans with very low interest to help buy new cattle, sheep, and to even dig a well.

This is Diane Faires, a recent grad from Vanderbilt Divinity School, walking with Boro and two representatives from the local non-government organization with whom we partner.


And this is me staring into a brand spanking new Milk Freezer! This is another real-life blessing that Week of Compassion has been able to provide the villages surrounding Bosansko Grahovo. By creating a milk cooperative, the villagers are able to send all their cows milk to this container and freeze it within 24 hours of its production. Then, by pooling it all together, they can sell it on the European market and create an income for their families.

Now fast forward to the city of Rama and Schit. We spent the night and the next day (Wednesdsay) at the Franciscan Monastery in Rama, which might actually be the closest thing to paradise I have ever seen. Check out this view!

If you stare really hard, you can see my fellow seminarians' shadows in the foreground. And if you stare really really hard, you can see the monaster that we stayed at. It is the big church building right in the middle of the lake! Absolutely incredible!!

We spent time at this site because with all the action and crazy traveling around Bosnia / Herzegovina, Amy and Dzevad planned this time at the monastery as time for us to do some contemplation, prayer, reading, and simply time to just "Be still and know that God is God" as Pslam 46 says. It was lovely, and much needed!


This cross was on the grounds of the monastery, and the sky that evening was breathtaking.

Wednesday morning was overcast, but this view (from the monastery island and, more exactly, from my room's window) would require a lot more than a little clouds to take away its splendor!

I feel I've just given you a skeleton of the experience in this one. There were three days to cover and just not much time to write. But at least now you know that I'm alive and well, and that we are all having an incredible experience seeing how our local Disciples churches in the U.S. are impacting those who have suffered so much in Bosnia and Herzegovina. More to come!

Srebrenica

Everyone knows the names Treblinka, Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald. But Srebrenica does not always make our mental list of the most notorious concentration camp / death camps in recent history. Granted, the number of people cycled through the Nazi camps in the 1940s far exceeds that of Srebrenica. But we learned yesterday that in a matter of about 2 days (July 11-July 13 1995) approximately 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and children were systematically killed by the invading Serbs of the Yugoslav National Army.

Srebrenica is about a 2.5 hour drive from where we're staying in Sarajevo. Our guide, Dzevad, contracted a driver from Herzegovina, Mujo, to take us through the beautiful, mountainous countryside of Bosnia to our destination. I wanted to stop and get some pictures of the landscape to give everyone an idea of what it looks like here, but never found a good spot to stop. The road was a 2-lane highway the whole way, and there was hardly any shoulder to stop off for a a photo op. But the scenery is gorgeous. It almost looks like a fairy tale - tall, green hills with occasional protrusions of rocky crags surround lush, verdent plains. The whole of Bosnia is covered with thick forests, and the landscape kind of reminds me of Eastern Tennessee. But the hills and valleys are spotted with small farm houses and tiny villages. It's not uncommon to see locals walking along the non-existant shoulders of the road, and it's also not too uncommon to find a hefty beef cow partially blocking the road as he munches down some tasty grasses.

While the map I had said we never left Bosnia proper, the signs we came accross made random declaration that we were now entering the "Republika Srpska" (Republic of Serbia). Amy told us that Mladic, one of the perpetrators of the genocide at Srebrenica, was believed to be still hiding in the hill country East of Sarajevo, directly through which we drove. Dzevad pointed out several villages that flew the Serbian blue, white, and red flag, and whose street signs were written in Cyrillic alphabet, as opposed to our Roman alphabet.

"Some of these vilages are full of chetniks", Dzevad told us. Chetniks is a name for the hyper-nationalist Serbs who, in 1992-1995, volunteered to join the Yugoslav National Army to help operate the network of concentration camps set up around the country to deal with the "Muslim Problem".

We arrived at Srebrenica after nearly losing all of our lunches on the byzantine, winding roads that crept their way through the hills of Eastern Bosnia. Again, determining whether you are in Serb or Bosnian territory is not ever an easy tasks, but even in this territory which was captured and repopulated by the Serbs in 1995, a Bosnian flag waved at the entrance to the site to mark whose ground this Memorial site was.


There were rows and rows of Muslim graves lining the property.



The killing actually did not happen at this site, per se. This site marks where the Dutch United Nations Peacekeeper's base was. This was designated as a "Safe Zone" under U.N. protection. So as the Serbs drove into Eastern Bosnia, people from all the surrounding villages poured into Srebrenica to seek refuge and sanctuary from the Dutch. The Peacekeepers base was an old battery factory, and even with the extensive fencing they put up, the site could only hold 5,000 Bosnians. As more and more people fled to the "Safe Zone", it became clear that the Dutch could not keep everyone there, so they began to turn refugees away. People fled to the hills to try to escape the invading Serb armies. As the Serbs closed their neusse on the Dutch stronghold, the U.N. Peacekeepers, supposedly the ones in charge, fled. Thus, the left 5,000 Bosnians there in the old battery factory - these people, as a part of their seeking protection from the Dutch, were forced to give up their weapons. So the Serbs walked into the place to find 5,000 hungry, unarmed, and completely exhausted Bosnians.

This is a shot of the battery factory in which the Dutch held their temporary "Safe Zone", and the field in which the majority of the refugees were kept.

This is the cold, eery interior of the factory where the Bosnian refugees were held by the Dutch, and then relinquished to the Serbs.

Those who fled were usually killed by Serb shelling and sniper fire. But the vast number of people were loaded into buses and shipped to various elementary schools and factories in the immediate area. Here is where the attrocities took place. In one school we drove by, it is believed that between 1,000-2,000 Bosnian Muslims were systematically lined up, shot in the back of the head, and the bodies were run through "machines" to cover up what had just happened. The remains were originally buried in one mass grave, but then as the Serbs began to feel international pressure around these camps, they began to move the remains from one mass grave to another. Some bodies have been found with a handful of body parts at one site, and another handful at another.



Srebrenica marks the site of the original mass grave discovered by the international community. We are still discovering new mass graves, and the process of identifying all the bodies and bringing closure to local Bosnian Muslim families continues to this day, 14 years after this genocide occured. The rule is that a family must have found at least 70% of a body before it can be buried at the Memorial Site. Until then, the pieces are kept in an "unknown persons" grave near the site.

Our tour guide told us that she gives tours at the site because her father was one of the victims of this camp. She spoke about the terror of knowing that her father was being taken away by the Serbs to an almost certain death. She told us about the pain of not knowing where her father's remains were, and that she was hoping that this year, on July 11 (the anniversary date of the massacres) that she would be brought news of new findings that would allow a grave to be erected for her father.



Similar to the Vietnam Memorial, a stone memorial was raised with the names of all those who died in the camp.


I knew that our tour guide's story was only one of 7,000 stories that could be told about this place. But her words describing her personal account of this horror were just so powerful. One of our group asked her how she was able to come to work every day in a place that is symbolic of so much hurt and pain for her personally. She responded by saying that it was very hard, but that she wanted to have these stories of her family and all the families heard by people from all over the world. She spoke of how she wanted those responsibile to be brought to justice. When we asked what that looked like, she said that it didn't just mean bringing the generals and the "big shots" to trial in The Hague. She said that even though Radavan Karadzic has been taken into custody of the international court (he is one of the Bosnian Serb leaders accused of war crimes), he gets to live a relatively good life in peace and comfort in The Hague. She contrasted his conditions with the weeks that she and her family spent in the "Safe Zone" in 1995, with no water, to electricity, 5000 people crammed into an old battery factory, and an entire army of people trying to kill you. She said she would like those responsible to feel what she and her family went through - of losing a father and not even knowing where his remains had been left.

Then her story took a different turn. She said that she didn't even think that trying the generals and bringing them to justice was enough. She said that these generals were not even the ones directly carrying out these attrocities, but it was the Serb army and the Serb irregulars recruited from Bosnian Serb territory who carried out these dark plans with gusto. She spoke about how hard it is to continue to live in the Srebrenica area knowing that the men who killed her father and many of her friends could still be living next door, or accross the street. She wants these peole to be brought to justice as well, so as to bring some sort of closure to this ordeal.

These remarks struck me. How could anyone blame her for wanting justice to be served and for her and her family's suffering to be brought to a close. I certainly don't blame her. But I wondered, then, what does justice look like here? If these symbolic acts of justice (bringing the big shots to trial in International Court) is not justice, how do we respond? It made me wonder if justice could ever be done here in Srebrenica, if the international community could ever hold every perpetrator accountable for their deeds, or if a real peace could ever last with all this unresolved anxiety and hate between the Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs.

Everyone of us left Srebrenica in a somber mood. But we went on to have lunch/dinner at a local restaurant in the town next of Srebrenica proper. The waitstaff was outstanding and very friendly with us. They brought out three courses - a chicken soup with TONS of parsely, a platter filled with roasted pork, potatoes, grilled chicken in spices, stuffed peppers, and a variety of vegetables, and then closed out the meal with a smattering of different baklavas. One which he called "The Rose" was easily my favorite.

During the meal, Dzevad leaned over to me and said - "You see, this is life. An hour ago we were all crying, and now we have good food in front of us and everyone is laughing and happy again. Life has to be like this, we have to keep them all in balance. If we are unhappy all the time, there is a problem. Or if we are happy all the time, there is a problem."

I couldn't have said it better myself.

On the way back, we stopped at one of the many "healing water springs" speckled around Bosnia. The water coming out of this spring was definitely orange in color and a little suspect. But Dzevad and our driver Mujo immediately ran up to it and began splashing it directly in their eyes. They said that it gives you "double vision", which after a little questioning on my part, I deduced to mean "double accurate vision". I chose not to splash it in my eyes, but I did throw a little on my face, and proceeded to smell like metal the rest of the evening.

This land keeps striking me as a kind of fairy tale place. There are enchanted springs, mystical little villages, bucolic beauty at every corner, and friendly townsfolk everywhere we go. It is truly an incredible land.

The next few days we are heading into Herzegovina, which is the southern province of Bosnia/Herzegovina. We will be traveling to Mostar and Ramah, and I don't think that they will have wireless or internet of any variety down there. So I may not be able to post for a few days, but I will write stuff down and continue taking lots of pictures, so I can blog it all down when I get back.

I hope all is well back home! Thanks for reading!

Sarajevo: A City of Contrasts

Now that we have arrived and slept off the first night of jet lag, we spent our first full day in Bosnia Herzegovina by pounding pavement through the city. As I was a little anxious, I got up a little early and had time to trek into the city center and get a quick glimpse of the city before breakfast. A river runs through the city from East to West, and as I said in an earlier post, the city is almost entirely surrounded by a tall ridge of hills that make Sarajevo something of a pit. But it also provides for some absolutely breathtaking views, as you can see below!



After breakfast, which in Bosnia consists of cold cuts, deep fried rolls that remind me beignets, scrambled eggs with cheese, and some super rich coffee that gives CCs Dark Roast a run for its money, we walked less than a mile into the old Turkish quarter of the city to meet our local guide, Dzevad.

The city of Sarajevo has been under several different occupying empires, and each has left its imprint on the city. Bosnia was a Roman province under Diocletian, then an Ottoman Turkish province for 500 years in the Middle Ages, and from about 1870-1917 it was under Austro-Hungarian rule. The two main quarters in the city center are the Turkish and the Austro-Hungarian, and you can literally feel the difference as the old cobblestones in the Eastern Turkish quarter quickly turn to smooth paved stones when it comes to the Austro-Hungarian sector.

This image is taken in the Turkish quarter. You can see the minarets of one of the mosques standing in the background. And it gives you a good idea of the way the hills surround the city.

We visited several museums in the morning. The most interesting of which was an old Ottoman Turk's house which has been entirely restored to look just as it did in the 1700's. The guy who owned this place was undoubtedly rich, as his home was enormous. He had at least 5 different rooms in which to greet guests. These rooms were elaborately decorated and surrounded by lush cushions on which the guests would sit and discuss the day's news.



Interestingly, every room had a bathroom, and each included its own heater. Another interesting observation was this pot which was supposedly used to make Turkish dishes, but looked an awful lot like it could be found at some local Cajun houses in Louisiana stirring up a heaping pot of jambalaya. Maybe the infamous Boudreaux and Thibodeaux found their way to Sarajevo and shared their culinary expertise with the Turks too :)


We visited a whole host of religious sites on this first day. Sarajevo is a true melting pot of religions. During the late Roman period, Christianity made its way to this hilly land, and in the middle ages, it schismed into Catholic and Orthodox traditions. Sarajevo has major churches from both traditions. And during the Ottoman period, Islam was introduced to the region, and many Bosnians, in fact the majority of Bosnians today, are Muslim. Besides these, the Jewish faith has its roots in the region that can be traced back to the 1500s when they were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition and sought safe haven here in Bosnia.

What is so interesting about this place is that within the old Turkish quarter, you can find churches, synagogues, and mosques within earshot of each other. In fact, we experienced that first hand. At midday, when the Muslims were issuing their prayer call for their meeting at the main mosque for jamah prayers, the Serb Orthodox church was ringing its own church bells too. This image below shows one of the minarets from the central mosque and the tower of the main Serb Orthodox Church (whose roots can be traced, perhaps, back to the 5th century!). You can tell from this picture that the two buildings are literally right across the street from each other.


For lunch we stopped for a large meal at a local restaurant. Lunch is the main meal of the day here in Bosnia, and we definitely put some food away. At our guide Dzevad's suggestions, the non-vegetarians in the group ordered a meal consisting of little grilled sausages, served with a thick slab of pita bread and a large helping of butter. You pile the sausages into the pita bread procket and cover it with the butter, lettuce, tomato, and onions. After that carbo-loading feast, we walked down the street to a "kavana", or cafe, for a double shot of Bosnian espresso to keep our jet-lagged selfs moving for the rest of the afternoon.

The most powerful part of the day came in the late afternoon. We walked West through the Austro-Hungarian quarter and watched the city grow more and more modern. While the Austrians were definitely oppressing the Bosnians, they definitely did a lot to modernize the city and introduced their own distinctly Habsburg style on the city. The road down which we walked was known as Sniper Alley during the Seige of Sarajevo from 1992-1995. This refers to the time when the Serbs surrounded Sarajevo by placing artillery all along the ridge of hills that enclose the city and subjecting the citizens of Sarajevo to constant bombardment. Standing along that street, you could look North, South, East, and West, and see the tall, green hills in direct view. It's beautiful to see today, but I kept imagining how menacing those hills must have looked to Sarajevans as they saw them illuminated with bursts of gunfire and shelling on a daily basis for four and a half years.

We came to a spot in the road that had obviously been damaged and was stained with a hard, red wax. This was our first encounter with a Sarajevo Rose. As shells came hurdling into downtown Sarajevo during the siege, the damage was immense. Holes were left in the streets and in the buildings, leaving lasting reminders of what exactly was going on at the time. One day early in the war, on Sniper's Alley, a group of Sarajevans were standing in a U.N. breadline waiting to receive their daily rations. The Serbs cut out all means of communication and supply lines with the outside world, so these breadlines were the locals only hope at keeping alive. On this particular day, a shot rang out from one of the artillery cannons in the hills East of town and landed only a few feet from the breadlines, killing all of them instantly. As one eyewitness described it, one minute there were 25 human beings standing in a breadline, the next moment, there was only a greasy stain left on the pavement.


This image above is of the spot left from that shell. You'll notice the hard red wax in the shot. Sarajevans began marking the spots in their fair city in which innocents had been killed by Serb shells. This was the first of its kind, but the city eventually became littered with these symbols of the Sarajevan's suffering.

I'd read about this incident in several books, but actually being on the very ground where this tragedy happened was truly moving. I could look to the East and see the hills where the fire must have come from. I could see the alleyway into which the line proceeded on that day. And I thought, at that moment, about what it must have looked like to eyewitnesses - 25 human beings on moment, a greasy stain the next.

And then I thought about what that same incident must have looked like to the Serb soldiers, far off in the hills to the East. They probably only saw it through the small hole of their binoculars or maybe a sniper site. There's no way they could have heard the gory sounds of the event that they just caused. Nor could they probably make out the faces of those 25 human beings on the ground - and they surely did not know their individual stories, their families, or anything else that made them human beings. All they could see, as I imagined it, was tiny bodies, far in the distance, like ants marching in line collecting food, or maybe like a video game in which indiscriminate killing and maiming has no real world consequences. But from their perspective, they could have no way of knowing the devastation and total disregard for human life that they had just executed.

And all that separated those two perspectives was a couple miles.

As we walked further to the West, we arrived at a memorial site for all the children who were killed during the Bosnian war in Sarajevo. All in all, 1,000 children were killed in Sarajevo alone, and 15,000 were killed in the whole of Bosnia. The monument, Dzevad told us, symbolized two forms, a mother and her child, separated by the violence done to them.



We ended the day on a much more positive note at St. Anthony's Catholic Church for mass. This church was our Week of Compassion leader, Amy Gopp's, church while she was in Sarajevo during and after the war. During her time here, Amy started a choir composed of individuals from several main ethnic groups - Bosnian Serbs (Orthodox Christians), Bosnian Muslims, and Bosnian Croats (Catholics). And the purpose of this choir was to bring people together and to have them sing the various songs from each other's tradition. So, for example, one the night that we worshipped there, the choir sang songs from the Catholic tradition, but there were Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims singing these songs. Amy's intent in creating this group was this - that by teaching these individuals the songs of each other's traditions, they could begin to understand the "other" a little better, and hopefully through that new understanding, these various ethnic groups, who had been at war for 4-5 years, could begin to reconcile with one another.

I don't know yet how well the reconiciliation is going, but I know that the music was incredible and just knowing the story behind the choir made the moment very powerful. Below is the church - St. Anthony's Catholic Church.


Our closing worship last night was led by Rev. Diane Faires, a recently ordained minister from Vanderbilt Divinity School. She focused on Exodus 3:1 - the story of Moses, the burning bush, and Moses' recognition that he was standing on God's holy ground. As I thought about the ground upon which I walked, I thought about the contrasts and paradox present here. I remembered that at one of the museums, we learned that the original plan for Sarajevo was to be a place of refuge for the poor, that there would be Ottoman soup kitchens and lodges for those who could not provide their own, and that residential space would be created for travelling scholars and religious leaders. The very foundation of this city seemed to have "the least of these", about whom Jesus spoke, in mind. But this is also the city where over 1,000 children were killed in a four year period from shelling and sniper fire. This is a city whose gorgeous mountains surrounding it provide for outstanding views, but those same hills were the literal face of the enemy and the Achilles Heel of the city.

So it is clear to me that there is much that is paradoxical about this place. It is a city and region of contrasts, both a beautiful place, and one that has seen complete and utter devastation.