Getting to Sarajevo

It has been an arduous journey to Sarajevo. Our team of 8 seminarians and Amy Gopp Executive Director of the Week of Compassion, finallee made it into Sarajevo tonight at about nine oćlock local time (seven hours ahead of Baton Rouge). Our flight out of D.C. was delayed so long that we missed our connecting flight in Munich. The next flight was not for another 7 hours, so we made use of the day by making a little excursion to the altstadt (old city) of Munich.

Here we are as a whole group in the central city square, Marienplatz.

We kept things holy, however, and made the rounds to a couple old medieval churches in Munich. The first was Frauenkirche, a church that was built in the 15th centurj, destrojed in WWII, and rebuilt to its original splendor. The second was the Theaterkirche, a baroque church further north from Marienplatz.

This image is taken from inside Frauenkirche, and shows the central crucifix which must have been at least 20 feet tall.

We concluded our short 3 hour excursion to Munich, and made it back to the airport in time to catch our belated flight to our destination, Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia.

By this time, the whole group is whooped. We have all been in travel mode for approximately 30 hours, and none of us slept much on the transatlantic flight. But landing in a new place is all you need to get the blood flowing again. As soon as we hit the ground, the action picked up. We met Dzevad, Amys friend and our guide for our time here, and he quickly greeted all the women with a double kiss on either cheek. He made it a point not to offer me the traditional Bosnian greeting, much to the amusement of the rest of my all female cohort.

From there we rushed out to find two taxis awaiting us. Dzevad spent a few intense minutes haggling the price with the cabbies, and then we got underway when the real fun began. Now I know we all complain about the way folks drive in Baton Rouge, but this taxi ride was like nothing Ive ever experienced! We flew through the windy, mountain roads in the outskirts of Sarajevo in the Mercedez E class cab. The entire time, Amy was speaking in fluent Bosnian with the driver. She translated to us non Bosnian speakers in the back and we asked questions back and forth. He spoke fervently about his experience in the Bosnian Army during the war in 1992 to 1995. He spoke with much emotion as he described how his native Sarajevo was cleaved into two pieces, a Serbian side and a Bosnian muslim side. Just as he was describing this division, he kept making reference to the beautiful ring of hills that surround Sarajevo, which exists in a kind of hole, as he calls it. These hills were perfect hiding places for Serb army cannons as they rained shells down on Bosnia during the seige.

He described the arduous process of walking his daughter and son to school during these days, days in which he said it was not atypical to bear witness to 10 of your fellow Bosnians killed as they walked the streets in search for water by snipers or grenadiers. He spoke of how his army friends had to sneak supplies, food, horses, cows, and all other kinds of things into Sarajevo by tunnel through these mountain crags just to have food to live on and to keep the residents of his hometown alive.

After this intense monologue, we reached the top of one of those hills surrounding the city. We were facing to the West, and we could just catch the last moments of the sunset as we gazed simultaneously on the Western half of the city of Sarajevo. It was set into the side of an opposing hill, and it was nearly fully illuminated by street lights, and for the first time since arriving, I was able to see the full grandeur and size of this city. At that moment, the cab driver, full of pride in his hometown said '' Ovo je moj Sarajevu'' (this is my Sarajevo).

I can tell already that this is a beautiful place. Even in the throws of darkness in the late Balkan dusk, one can tell this is a special and unique place. But it is a cleaved place. It is a city that, much like Belfast, Berlin, or Jerusalem, is divided down the middle. It is a city where a cab driver can only call half the city his own. The division endures as a lasting physical scar on a place that is much to beautiful to be defaced with such man made boundaries.

I was overcome with a ton of thoughts during this 20 minute cab ride. I was depressed to discover the real physicality of this division, but I continued to ask the driver about his interaction with Serbs who lived on the other side of the city. ''Do you interact with Serbs on a daily basis, even despite the division?'' He replied that he did. He said that he will occasionally get hired out to bring people home to the other side of the city. He said that he tried to act with the utmost professionalism and simply play it cool, even though he knows that there is plenty of tension to go around. He concluded by saying, ''I served in the Army, but I never did anything that I am ashamed of. I never raped, or killed, or tortured, or did anything to deserve any retribution from them. And anyway, we are a forgiving people. We are just trying to move on.''

All this from a cab driver in 20 minutes.

I am tired and exhausted, but I am also brimming with excitement. These kinds of interactions are ones that stick with you. For a moment, this man who has endured so much, walking his children through the streets lined with snipers, watching his buddies blown up with grenades on a daily basis, living through the cleaving of his home town. And yet, he finds himself today looking to forgive and to move on to a new, peaceful future, and one in which Sarajevo need not endure its ugly divisive scar.