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! :)

This post is for parents and teachers or anyone who has ever had to organize/manage large groups of kids.

Last week was the first week where we lead activities for kids who came to the centar. It was a bit of shock/nerve racking to go from planning things to actually having to do them.

Things were a bit rough the first few days. We ended up not having enough planned to fill two hours and needed to improvise a lot. We were also disorganized and had difficulties getting kids to follow the sign up sheets we had made. It is also difficult to lead activities when you cannot speak the same language as the children you are trying to lead. Luckily we have a bunch of teen volunteers who help us with translations, but for the first few days we had to figure out the best way to have them translate. Eventually we just decided to talk to the kids in English or broken Bosnian and have the teens translate after each thing we say.

We have organized each day of the week into a certain category. Monday is games and drama day. Tuesday is English lessons. Wednesday is dance and ukelele lessons. Thursday is craft day. Friday is sport day.
Granted we haven't stuck to this completely, but we do try and give the kids different activities each day. Last Tuesday was probably the most difficult, because we realized that we can't actually have the kids sit and listen while we try and teach them English, so instead we started to play games that use English words and have them try and learn by playing.

The picture above shows the craft that we did last Thursday. Because Thursday was the opening of the World Cup of Soccer/Football/Nogomet, we had the kids draw the flags of the different countries participating in the tournament. It ended up going really well, so we decided to post up their flags in the centar afterwards.

So far this week has gone more smoothly, we've had to adapt a few things because it has been really rainy, bu things have definitely been progressing better. We already have a better system in place and things will only get better from here! (hopefully!)

Everyday life in Bosnia!

Hello Everyone!

I thought I would give you a look into my everyday life with this blog.

Most mornings I wake up around 9. I usually wake up earlier but stay in be until 9 because I don't feel like getting up and I don't actually have to be anywhere until 11.

I never have breakfast alone and I rarely make it myself. Either my host mom makes eggs or sausages or some kind of bread or me and my host sister eat the bread she makes with cheese, meat, or tomatoes or even all three. We always have some kind of fresh bread in the morning!

I usually take my time in the mornings, so I'll take my time to eat and get ready before leaving for the centar at 11, because it is so close to my house and it doesn't take me more than a minute to get there.
On Monday mornings we have meetings with some of the centar's staff, they like to check in with us to make sure we are doing ok, not just in the centar, but in all kinds of things.

After meetings or if we don't have meetings, the four of us get together to plan activities for the kids. In the picture you can see the four of us with the posters we made that describe the activities we will have for the kids this summer. (left to right: Natasha, me, Magali, Élise)

To be honest we don`t always spend the time planning, but there hasn't been much of a rush to get anything done until now, because we start officially working with the kids next week! We've met a few of them already though and do our best to interact with the few that show up at the centar when school is still in session.

Around 1 we usually break for lunch, and take an hour because it is the most important meal of the day and we all usually sit down with whatever family members are home for lunch. Lunch consists of all kinds of different things, chicken, potatoes, burek, stuffed peppers, etc. My favorite so far is the stuffed peppers. But it is all usually really good. Sometimes we even make homemade pizza!
We head back to the centar around 2 for Bosnian lessons, not that my ability to speak the language has progressed much, but I know some words and my family gestures a lot so I can understand quite a bit. Lots of people also know at least a little bit of English.

Our lessons vary in length, but sometimes can last 2 hours, mostly because there is a lot of talking in between things. After lessons we mostly just do whatever we feel like, next week our schedule will change because we will work with the kids from 10-12 and 2-4. For now though, when lessons are done we are done for the day. It's kind of nice actually, we haven't had to rush into anything and for most things the pace of life is pretty slow which suits me well.

In the evenings, the four of us girls usually hang out, sometimes at one of our house's or my host sister and Natasha's host sister will join us. Sometimes we just hang out with our families, which often means I see Natasha because our host sisters' are good friends/we are neighbors. My host mom also loves to walk, so often we go on these long walks and I just marvel at the beauty of this country, it is so green and everything is hills and mountains.

We haven't done much volunteering so far, but I honestly think that's a good thing, because this has allowed us to really get familiar with the country and our host families and truly live out Intercordia's mission of "being with, not doing for". We have had so much time to be with people and build relationships with these people who are different from us and have gone through more that I can imagine, but we still can connect with one another even despite the language barrier.

I think that's all for now, hope everyone is well! :)

I will talk more about my personal experience afterwards, I just wanted to first mention what is currently happening in Bosnia and Serbia.
It's been raining a lot this week and in some areas it hasn't stopped even for a few minutes. Because Bosnia is home to many rivers, all this rain has caused serious flooding throughout the country. Homes have been destroyed, thousands of people have had to be evacuated, and most of them aren't exactly well off to begin with. The country has not experienced flooding this severe in over a hundred years and they certainly can't afford for things to get any worse. Here in GVU there is no flooding, so I have not been impacted it by it, but my thoughts and prayers are with those who have.

On a lighter note, I thought I would share a bit of my personal experience here. As I'm sure you all know by now, I am living with a host family. They have four children, 3 girls and a boy. I have not met the boy, Drago, who is 16 because he is away at school. The oldest daughter is 18, her name is Ivona and she has been really nice and friendly and we've quickly become friends. The second eldest daughter is Stjepana she is 17, she was here the first week that I was, but she had to go back to school which is near Mostar. The youngest is 14, her name is Daria. She has down syndrome, but she is full of life and love and always manages to put a smile on my face. My host parents are also very kind and welcoming. They have really started to become my second family.

We have not yet actually started volunteering in the Omladinski centar. We meet there every day and talk and meet new people, but there is no rush for us to actually start coordinating activities for the children mostly because they are still in school. The work done at the centar is really inspiring. It is a place where youth from different backgrounds can come together despite the divisions in the town. They also have activities for all sorts of social justice events throughout the year.

When I talk about divisions in the town, I literally mean that there is a road in this town that divides the Croatian/Catholic side from the Bosniak/Muslim side. And this road actually does divide people, because I live on the Croatian side of town, and I didn't go on the other side of town for the first week that I was here. It's kind of sad really, but it makes the work done at the centar all the more important.

I look forward to learning more about the centar and the country and being able to share that with all of you!! :)

I left for Bosnia last Monday not knowing what would await me here. I had a bit of an emotional goodbye with my parents at the airport, but was mostly ready for the experience. Or perhaps it is better to say that exactly what I was doing this summer hadn't hit me yet, and I'm still not sure that it has.
At the airport I met two of the girls who are doing this Intercordia experience with me, Magali and Elise. Our plane for Istanbul was delayed about an hour so we had some time to talk and get to know each other.
The plane was large and full, but it was a nighttime 9 hour flight, so I tried to sleep.
We arrived in Istanbul at about 4pm their time on May 6th. It was hard to get much of a sense of what the city looked like from the airport and I can't say I felt like I was in Turkey.
We wandered around the airport a bit trying to figure out where to go and eventually had to ask for help, the airport didn't seem that big, not compared to Toronto anyways.
We had to wait a bit for our flight to Sarajevo which was only about an hour and a half.
We landed in Sarajevo, and entered the country without so much as a word being exchanged between us and the custom officials.
Waiting for us at the airport was Natasha, another Intercordian, and Majda our contact her in Bosnia who speaks English really well and works at the center where we are all going to be volunteering.
She also had a driver with her who was going to take us to Gornji Vakuf-Uskoplje, the village where we are staying which is about a 2 hour drive from Sarajevo.
The first thing I noticed about Bosnia was the driving. People just kind of do whatever they want, and they like to go fast even though the roads are all winding.
The second thing I noticed was the country's beauty. It if beautiful here, everything is green, and you are surrounded by hills and mountains.
We made it to the town safe and sound, and one of my host sister's was waiting for me at the center where they dropped us off.
Her family was still awake when I arrived at her house (which is like 2 seconds away from the center) and they all greeted me warmly. Her mother even insisted on feeding me right away.
I feel extremely welcomed here and their home has really started to become mine as well.
I will write more later in more detail.
Just wanted to share a little bit first! :)

Today is the day!!!!

Today is the day that I leave for Bosnia. Later tonight I will board my flight to Istanbul, where I will eventually make a connection and fly to Sarajevo.

I'm not sure how I am feeling at this moment. The last few days have been a bit all over the place. There is certainly some excitement, as well as some nerves.

I said goodbye to my brother this morning, and will do the same with my parents later tonight. I will miss them, and other important events like my brother`s high school graduation and my mom's 50th birthday. But I am ready for this journey to begin.

Intercordia believes in being with people, not doing things for them, and this is what originally drew me to the organization. I am excited to meet new people this summer and hopefully create lasting relationships. I look forward to living with people different than me and learning about a culture different from mine.

And I look forward to being able to share this experience with all of you. I will try and write as often as I can.

I hope you all have a wonderful summer and I will see you in three months!! :)