Sanija is twenty

Sanija is twenty, and dating an Austrian doing his civil service in the Osijek Center for Peace for a year in stead of army duty. She is a musician. Violin, Piano, sings (loves opera), and plays all manor of tamborica in an orchestra in Osijek.
She lives for music.
Has a degree for teaching from Italy that Croatia will not accept and so she must repeat three years of university. This is not uncommon.
She has an energy that is hard to believe.
One night after a rehearsal while walking through the city, she told me she does not sleep.
"What, ever?"
"Not much".
A few nights a week she dozes for a couple/few hours.
"Why?"
"I don't know."
She says she practices and listens to music in those times.
The music makes her cry.
It is the only time she does cry.
She goes on to tell me about her time during the siege on Osijek when most of her family left.
Her grandfather would not go and she stayed with him in the city.
She said it wasn't so bad.
Well, but they did put a gun to her head and pull the trigger.
Empty chamber, but she could never be sure.
This was only now and then, not so bad. Others had worse.
So she doesn't sleep much and finds some release in beautiful music.
Twenty years old.
She could only have been ten or eleven or so at the time.

Milka is a ball of joy

Smiles and twinkles in her eyes, and a dedication to the people she loves and the ideals she feels. We met my first day at Peace Camp. I was working with a cycle, (harder than it looks), with Baice a villager with no English, clearing some area for a future camp fire. Branka arrives with Milka all aglow to help us with the task at hand. With in a couple of days of camp we are fast friends, by the end of camp I am family.
One hand patting her heart, "Milkas home", hand now on my heat "Peter's home. You Eat... kluc, (key)... Go out... Feel free! Peter's home".
She and her son live in Pozega. Milka loves Pozega.
"Why" I ask her.
"It is beautiful, I'm born here, I like it." she says with a smile.
She lives in an apartment.
A high rise with out distinction. One among many. You know the ones I mean.
Two small rooms and a small kitchen and a bathroom.
I am at home here. Happy to see me come, sad to see me go.
So one evening around sunset she asks me to come with her to her garden. I expect a small patch of ground on borrowed land between parking lots, like a number surrounding the apartments. But I am now in her car, rattling up the hills surrounding Pozega. Fifteen minutes later we come to a stop by a rusty gate and walk into an orchard. Apples, pears, apricots and grape vines big and small all laden with fruit. We fill two baskets as we work our way down the gentle slope, to a spot clear of trees and overgrown with weeds.
The view from this spot of the valley is breath taking.
"My kitchen here", she says pointing where she stands.
It is at this point I see the remains of a slab of concrete.
This was her family home.
Born in it.
Raised in it.
Gone.
Someone came in the darkness of night and blew it up.
Burned it to the ground, flames fed by anger and prejudice.
No one was hurt, physically...
Milka's family origin is Serb.
Pozega is a fiercely nationalistic city in Croatia.
And she loves Pozega.
Milka works in the police station, and has for over thirty years.
No investigation was ever made.
This woman has no malice toward anyone that I have seen.
Everyone seems to know her.
She chooses joy. She chooses.
One more teacher...

A Sunday morning, roosters and light rain

Full from a deep monolog from Branka before I could even wash my face... About her changes, her decisions, her awakening. The ways she woke up to her life and what she needed, what she "had to do". She left her mirage of 25 years, a flat with lovely "things", a very successful career as a clinical psychologist with respect and money and turned her skills toward peace work in the face of hatred and mistrust. How the brutality of the war was more than she could bear. Much of her "war wounds" came from directing a rehabilitation center for mostly young Croat veterans suffering not only from post traumatic stress but also from unspeakable physical torture from time in Serb prisons. Listening to the stories of men missing limbs and facial features day after day as they worked through their pain and experiences left her exhausted and driven... And then, when Croatia reintegrated the Vukovar region in 98, took it back from the Serbs with the help of international forces, she worked for reconciliation and did what she could for Serb people who shouldered the collective guilt for the atrocities on Croats during the Serb occupation of the city, at great risk to her self. She "had to" she said. Her father is Serb, her mother Hungarian. She had to work in this direction to keep her from a deep depression, to keep her pain from overwhelming her, to act from this intense fear she had for her son and nephew, both in the army, and each on different sides of the boarder. So she worked for peace while simultaneously trying to reclaim her sisters flat, taken over by a Croat neighbor, where her nephew now lives when he can face the bleak realities of Vukovar. Then some years ago she moved to the small village where she had spent holiday time with her grandparents when she was a child to connect with a simpler way of life less obscured by the expectations of society. Living with almost no money, not enough of everything, and with little support from anyone except her son for all the choices she made, she let the village of her youth remind her of what is important. This story and conversation springing from the need to tell me she comes back to music now, after being so focused on standing for peace in the face of war and hatred. How much music means to her, how it feeds her. She is ready to re-embrace some of the pleasures in her life. A coffee out with friends, a movie from time to time. She is a lucky one. She moves from her feelings, has psychological awareness, and the courage to act. This is the Branka I have come to love and respect, and have a deep connection to. I can feel her vision for the Peace Camp Project she started. It moved me beyond words to take part. Youth from all sides during the war coming together to meet and know one another in a peaceful beautiful setting. Gathering to heal the trauma they experienced as children when the adults around them went "insane" with bloody violence. Branka, Kruno, and I, (one of the two founders of the Osijek Center for Peace), will now go for a walk to the next village in the rain to visit Princess, Branka's goat, now living with Lilija, a woman working with the project in Latinovac, until she gives birth to hopefully a couple of babies, (the goat that is). This will mean fresh milk and cheese to people who depend on the land these days for their survival.

All these names have their stories. Everyone does.

Our dear friends in Nove Travnik

Our dear friends in Nove Travnik are Muslim, and found them selves engulfed by the war. Nove Travnic was important for the factory that made tractors. This was the cover business, but from the time of Tito, it was mostly used to produce cannon, tank, mortar, and rifle barrels. The factory was pretty much destroyed, but Nove Travnik remained a front line for most of the war. Their town is predominately Croat and Bosniak, (Muslim), and after a period of united fighting against the Serbs, they divided and fought each other. This was how it went across Bosnia. Somewhere a small group of pare military nationalists would commit some unspeakable massacre, it would get splashed across the TV news in graphic detail, and the fear would spread, fueling hysteria and revenge. Sometimes refugees were created as the minority in a town or area fled, or in larger or strategic areas, the populations simply separated. We would walk through town for coffee, or to pick up some bread, and the stories would flow. "This was the front line, snipers were in that building, I lost a friend over there, there used to be an apartment here", and on and on. Our friend was a nurse before the war. When the fighting broke out, he became a first aid Medic on the front lines. He was essentially the chief medical officer in the region. We passed a house on our way to the near by mountains for a May 1st picnic with his family where he said he did most of his field operations on the wounded. This included men, women and children. He lost 363 people out of more than he could possibly count. He was a very important man during the war, very few people in his community were not directly or indirectly impacted by his care. Now he is with out work, and needing to do many hours of volunteer work at the local hospital and pass new tests in order to go back to nursing, for which there are no jobs. His story is common although extreme. His wife just found a gray market job in a clothing store. She earns the average wage in Bosnia, 300 KM, less than $200, a month. She works ten hours per day, six days a week, with no benefits or security. Her boss is a very typical example of the black marketers during the war who made fortunes, and now are investing in businesses that will launder the money they made, and are often still making in various illegal activities. She is at his whim and has no recourse for anything he may ask of her as an employee. Even quitting is tricky to do with out being marked and not hired again by others. More on the black market later or in future stories...

I was sitting in a small park

I was sitting in a small park in Pozega playing my guitar next to what turned out to be the high school, when I realized an old woman, all smiles, was in front of me talking away at me about something something something music something something kuna and??? I motion for help from a near by kid, maybe 15, and it seems this woman is asking me to play my guitar at her 80th birthday party next month. She is hunched over, walking with a cane, probably worked in a field most of her life, and just chattering on like I was an old friend. We are all charmed. She takes Milka's #, my friend in Pozega, my email incase she has a grandchild on line somewhere... And walks off, chattering as she goes. I'm told by this young translator that she is "crazy".

"What do you mean crazy?"

"She won't remember you in five minutes, she made little sense"...

Just another sweet moment with people close to themselves, the earth, their hearts.

Conversation on the train

Conversation on the train with Branka, a friend, host, and guide to me, a kind of angel to others. In 1995 a family living near Pozega, Croatian wife, husband Serb, two teenage boys, feel pressure from with in their community to leave their home, pressure from hidden places, yet widely known. They refuse, they are decades here, "we are not at war". Then one night, 2am, bullets tear through the windows of the dark house as a warning. A warning that leaves a wife and mother dead. The two boys end up with grandparents in Latinovac. Branka is with them regularly. Not as a skilled psychologist, as a neighbor, but skills are skills... Relationships deepen, and they are often together doing one thing or another in the village, or simply for tea or coffee. Time passes. Some years later the boys are back to their home, Branka is now a lot in Vukovar with the Peace Camp of youth from all over the Balkans. Another year passes, and lives drift as lives do... Branka is driving at night to Pozega, is pulled over, "nothing wrong just routine", and from out of the darkness emerged one of these boys who was passing and recognized her. He tells her he and his brother are in a Tamborica Orchestra, (she had encouraged them to play music when they expressed an interest), and now they are performing regularly and loving it. It was a pathway back for them, emotionally, and to the community where they were born, where their mother died.

"We saw you on TV", he says. The Peace Camp is something new and strange and gets mostly good press as there are supporters of this work in the media. "Call my conductor, we would love to come and play, my brother and I want to support your work".

She does, and they do.

35 musicians, singers, and dancers from a conservative Croatian town, come to a mostly Serb populated village, and perform for youth from all over the region, from all sides in the conflict, Christian, Orthodox, and Muslim. No one knows what Branka has been through with these boys who survived their own tragedy in this conflict. She is crying as she tells me of the joy she experienced watching these two playing, and the mix of every one dancing and singing around her.
"I just laughed and cried, laughed and cried, laughed and cried".

There is a subterranean life here, under everything, veiled in silence.

Now 7 years later, no investigation, a killer from with in the community is silently moving through life.

No one speaks of it.

Not openly.

Life in Sarajevo

Life in Sarajevo is a strange mixture of feelings and awareness. There are still many scars from the war and siege on this city, ruins of buildings, scars on inhabited structures. People are generally warm and kind, sometimes hard and cold, almost always with a story. There are a fair number of people begging, some wounded from the war, others Roma of all ages. In the center of the city it is very beautiful, with sections from the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Old stone, Churches and Mosques, are scattered everywhere. I am once again with the calls to prayer. They drift in the distance 5 times per day through our flat. I love this sound as it passes on the wind, a dreamy reminder that God is near.

Films and photos have helped to illustrate how insane and awful it was for four years in this city. As I walk by people in the streets, I imagine their lives less than a decade earlier. Death and destruction everywhere. Dodging snipers as a matter of habit, risking mortar and tank fire, scavenging for fuel, water, food, news, everything one might need to survive. Sniper casualties were sometimes left where they lay as it was a tactic to shoot the people who tried to help the wounded or remove a body from the street. One friend told of a wounded woman in Nove Travnik, near Sarajevo, that ended in three people dead who attempted to pull her to safety. Can you imagine the courage to run out into the open to help someone after two have been killed only moments before trying to do the same? The inadequate mandates of UN forces who could do little but witness genocide, followed by the at best misguided and at worst greedy and political nature of aid from foreign and domestic government policies when it finally did come, has shaped attitudes toward the international community. Through all this the locals in Sarajevo, and people in Bosnia as a whole, have a darkly ironic sense of humor. With all they have been through, it is remarkable to me to hear some of the responses to topics and policies. Fueled by the lack of real action taken during the war, they are left with little faith outside their own survival skills. I suppose it is a way to emotionally survive the bleak reality most people face, particularly those with out “connections”. During a tree planting ceremony in a park across from the US Embassy, a pet project of a previous American Ambassador's wife, a friend was told by another friend in attendance under his breath, "Oh good, this will give us something to burn in the next war". This same person told me of sharing a smoke with a sniper he bumped into while running from alley to alley, building to building looking for water. A cigarette one moment, a bullet the next... This was not totally uncommon. What begins to make weird sense is sometimes the most disturbing and simultaneously human.