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.

Before the Trip

I've been telling people about this upcoming trip to Bosnia/Herzegovina with the Week of Compassion for months, and usually the first response is something to the effect of "Why on Earth are you going to Bosnia? / Why on Earth would you want to go to Bosnia?" It's not the tourist capital of Europe, and the name "Bosnia" usually gets tied in our minds to other, more sinister words like "genocide", "ethnic cleansing", and "civil war." So who in their right mind wants to take 12 days to up and go to a place so synonymous with such evil things?

First, let me explain a little about where and what Bosnia is. Bosnia exists, as it is today, is a sovereign nation that was a part of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia literally means "land of the South Slavs", and so the country itself was a conglomeration of several Slavic peoples. Once the Iron Curtain began to fall, these individual nations began to declare their independence from the Yugoslav government. First the Slovenes formed Slovenia, then the Croats formed Croatia, and they were followed by the Macedonians and then the people of Bosnia & Herzegovina. Other nations that used to be part of Yugoslavia are Montenegro, Kosovo, and Serbia.

To see how the whole of Yugoslavia dissolved into its current form, click here.

Obviously there are books written about this dissolution of Yugoslavia, but here is briefly how I understand these events. The Serbs had, by far, the strongest military of the former Yugoslav nations. And during the eighties and early nineties, the Serbs were more or less in charge and thus had the most to lose by these nations breaking off and declaring their independence. So when Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia started to declare independence in 1991-1992, the Serbs made use of their superior military to hold the old conglomeration together.

Soon, however, it was apparent that this was not going to work. Slovenia was recognized by many Western nations and Croatia and Bosnia were soon thereafter. At this point, the Serbs tried to cut their losses, and ensure that when all was said and done, that they had a big piece of territory to call "Serbia." The point was to expand "Serbia" to include all the land where Serbs lived. They were concerned that pockets of ethnic-Serbs would get caught on the wrong side of the border as these new nations were carving up the old Yugoslavia. They believed that Serb minorities in these new nations like Croatia and Bosnia would be oppressed and abused under these newly forming governments.

Thus, the Serbs, under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic, began to use their military superiority to not only expand the boundaries of "Greater Serbia", but also to "cleanse" cities and territories in Bosnia of non-Serbs in order to ensure a Serb majority in their new country. This is why we, even today, connect words like "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" to Bosnia.

The scale of the killing in Bosnia / Herzegovina was not on that of the Holocaust 50 years earlier, but the stories and personal accounts that have survived sound shockingly reminiscent of the Nazi concentration camps. Individuals were terrorized, killed en masse, and subjected to brutal forms of torture - all at the hands of people who may have once lived next door to them.

So this, oddly enough, leads us to why we seminarians are going to Bosnia. In response to these atrocities and catastrophic violence, nation states hemmed and hawed and shrugged their shoulders at the problem. Even on the doorsteps of the West, on the continent of Europe no less, the powers-that-be, yet again, allowed ethnic cleansing and genocide to occur right in their backyard.

But it has been the church who has stepped up to the plate and done perhaps the best humanitarian and reconciliation work in this region since the wars in the 1990s. Church World Service (CWS), a partner organization of the Week of Compassion, has been doing the hard work of trying to reconcile neighbors and bring true peace to a region so starved of it as is Bosnia/Herzegovina. And we, as seminarians and future pastors in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) are heading to Bosnia to observe this work first hand; to speak directly with the people of faith working on the ground in this blighted land to pick of the pieces; to listen to the stories of the people of Bosnia who have suffered greatly, but who have persevered through that suffering and serve as beacons of hope to the rest of us in the world .

This will no doubt be an incredible trip. It is a blessing that the Week of Compassion continues to send seminarians to Bosnia to hear these stories of hope, and that we seminarians bring those stories back to our communities and share them. That is what I hope to do with this blog - not necessarily just chronicle the events and the sights of the trip, but to communicate the ways in which I experience God working in this land and through the people of Bosnia.

I look forward to your comments and feedback!