Last thoughts

I have one week left here in Bosnia. It's hard to believe that my experience here is so close to the end.
Yesterday was our last day at the centar with all the kids. We played games and had water balloons and watermelon for them as a last little treat.
It was sad to say goodbye to the kids. Many of them had come to the centar almost everyday that we had activities for them.
One girl even took the time to write us all a little goodbye message in English. It was really sweet.
People here always joke about marrying us off or us finding Bosnian boyfriends. Even at one of our last meetings with the centar staff they asked us if we had fallen in love. I thought it was a funny question, but then I realized that I had fallen in love. I have fallen in love with Bosnia and its people. It is such a beautiful country, so green and mountainous and full of beautiful blue rivers. The people here have been extremely welcoming and they always seem to put my needs before their own.
Leaving Bosnia will be hard. It is not something I look forward to. Part of me really does not want to leave. I have built lasting relationships here and even have my own Bosnian family. But I know I will be back one day. I do no know when, but I will have to come back to this place that has taken a piece of my heart.
I have so much to share with everyone, these blogposts have barely even grazed the surface of my experience here. It will take time to share everything and at times it may be difficult for me to truly explain my experience here properly, but I look forward to doing it. And I hope that when I do share everything with you, it will inspire you to come to this wonderful country and get the chance to fall in love with it too.

See you all soon!!! :)

More Volunteers!

This week our volunteering has taken on a bit of a different look.

The Omladinski centar has project partners in many different parts of the world and this week a group of Americans is here to lead activities for the kids.

It's actually really cool because the leader of the Americans, Craig, has been coming to Gornji-Vakuf Uskoplje since 1996, so he knew many of the teens that we work with now when they were small.

It has also been nice not having to organize activities for the kids and get a chance to interact with them more one on one instead of trying to get them to do something. It's also interesting to see how the younger kids are more familiar with us than the Americans so they still come up to us and ask us what we are doing next even though we don't know.

Because there are more Americans than us they do different activities than we do, they also brought lots of supplies with them, so we have done lots of crafts with the kids which is nice because we mostly do games with them.

This week was also cool because yesterday a group of American youth came to visit the centar. They are part of a program that discusses different world issues and talks about how media can help raise awareness. When they came to visit, we got a chance to present what the four of us were doing in Bosnia, so it was nice to be able to share that experience with other people (you can see this in the picture above). Although, most of the Americans were more interested in the teens and what they did at the centar and what it was like to grow up in a divided town, which is completely understandable since they are here to learn about Bosnia.

Anyways the Americans are here for the rest of the week and have lots of stuff planned which is nice, they will also be here on Monday which means that the four of us will have less than three weeks of activities left to plan for the kids. Time has been flying by! I wish it would go by slower, but I am grateful for every day that I have spent here and every day that I have left! :)