Sretan Božić

Merry christmas, feliz navidad, sretan božić, joyeux noël, buon natal, i Cpetaн Бoжић! This morning I woke up to the sounds of the cathedral ringing its bells and the call to prayer. I love the fact that from my house I am less than a 10 min walk to the catholic cathedral, two orthodox churches, several mosques and the oldest (and only??) synagogue in Sarajevo. It being Christmas, I headed over to the cathedral to see their goings on but it was still closed (it’s being repaired) but I heard that at midnight Christmas eve they did have a little gathering to sing and pray. Of course I was too lazy to leave the house, already having settled into my pjs, but I’m considering going to mass tomorrow there at noon. I can’t remember the last time I went to an actual service (hmmm probably because I'm agnostic!). 

I decided to spend the day wandering. This is a fantastic city to just wander. Everyone was out, walking along the main pedestrian street and Christmas carts were outselling fireworks, toys, lights and general festivity. The street where the catholic cathedral is located has Christmas lights hanging, with big snowflake shaped ornaments and such and Christmas trees flanking the cathedral doors. The other streets, like marshala tita have lights that have been hanging there since Bajram/Eid al-Adha and I hope they keep them up during the whole winter. I did spot a couple of santas and snowmen along the streets, usually with saxes (???).  I can’t find any figure for the current demographics of Sarajevo, but in 1991 Croats made up only 7.5% of the population, and I’m guessing its less than that now, so I’m not sure who is actually celebrating Christmas today since the orthodox calendar celebrates it on Jan 7^th. I wandered in Bascarsija, ate some cevapi for lunch/dinner and then spent an hour reading the New York Times on my ipod in one of my favorite coffee houses, in Morica Han. This used to be a Turkish caravanserai and now has a café in part of it, along with several other shops. It was almost empty, except for a group of young guys behind me who were hilarious. Then I wandered over to the carpet shop across the courtyard and quite unintentionally spent about an hour talking carpets with the owner who is an Iranian who has lived in Sarajevo for 20 years. It was so interesting; he explained certain motifs, their meaning, where they come from, tribes, traditions and such. And because I always have to explain why I don’t look like a “typical American” (sigh…I should write a whole post on that) we talked about Colombia and traditions there. He wanted to know if we had carpets like here, what the economy is based on, etc. Very interesting man and I enjoyed talking to him. He may actually talk me into a carpet one day (when I’m not on a student budget)! 

Since it’s the Christmas season, all the major shops are having their big post-xmas sale (even though today is actually xmas day), so I also picked up some cheap summer dresses and tees from Mango. Then I wandered through the leather streets, looking for a simple leather bag for my laptop since my backpack is prone to pick pocketing (I caught a women and her daughter opening up my backpack, so time for something a little more finger proof).  One fantastic thing about shopping in Sarajevo is that this is a craft town. Can’t find what you need? No problem, talk to the cobbler, jeweler, dressmaker and they will make it for you. I’m going to have a shop owner make me a simple leather messenger bag just big enough for my laptop and water bottle. The rest of the day I just walked. I walked along both sides of the river, window shopped and enjoyed the outdoor culture here. I’m certainly going to miss that when I leave.

Other than that, I’m finishing up a grant application for UNDEF for a TPO project that I designed and getting ready for a short vacation to Berlin for New Years Eve with friends. Very much looking forward to it! Hope everyone had a great Christmas!


Also: tried to upload photos and its not working! Help! trying to upload jpegs from my folder...

Sarajevo 101

Wow I’m bad at keeping this blog up. I have no real excuses, except that I’m lazy about it, and my goal of posting at least every Sunday is somehow too much for me to manage.  Maybe I’ll make this a New Year’s Resolution. 

Well I’ve found a place to live, it took 6 weeks, but I found a place! I’m renting a room in an apartment with a widow (who is super sweet and makes me food!!) in the center. For those of you who know Sarajevo, I’m right next to the national theatre, and only 5 min from Bascarsija, the Turkish old town. For those of you who don’t know Sarajevo, here is a quick 101. 

Sarajevo runs east-west along the Miljacka river, with the older parts of town beginning in the east and then moving along towards the newer commie-condos in New Sarajevo and the immediate suburbs. The city is small, you can pretty much walk anywhere within 30min. The oldest section is the old Turkish section, Bascarsija, where you can find the oldest mosques, cobbled streets that are divided by craft (silver, gold, leather, copper and others) and caravanseri that are now coffee shops.  At the far eastern end you’ll also find the amazing national library that was mortared and burned down during the last war (http://i47.tinypic.com/2qldhg9.jpg  ) . They are finally restoring it, it seems, as last year when I was here is was open like usual but now scaffolding surrounds it. Along the river on this side is also where you’ll find the corner where WWI began, and there is a museum on the corner where Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated. I live about 2 blocks from there, on the same side of the river.  Moving west, you see more Austro-Hungarian architecture, the main catholic and orthodox cathedrals and the pastel ornate buildings of the late 19^th and early 20^th century.  Keep going and eventually you’ll run into the rebuilt parliament building and the UNITIC towers where various international agencies, major banks and corporation are located. If you keep going from there it becomes commie condo residential areas. Overall Sarajevo is very small, at least it feels  very small, the metro area has 400K people compared with Seattle’s 3.4 million (but Seattle’s metro area is considerably larger).  While the main artery of the city is along the river, the residential areas are above in the steep hills which basically go straight up from the river. You’ll see white patches at the corners of the streets, cemeteries that if you walk through them, will for the majority have their last years between 1992-1996. I was first here 5 years ago in 2005 and there has been a lot more rebuilding. Along Marsala Tita street the facades have been repaired, the bullet holes not as noticeable as I remember from 2005. Sarajevo roses haven’t been refilled as the red cement has gone away (Sarajevo roses are the red stained cement poured into where mortar shells fell, the look like big red ink spots).  So the center looks better, but keep walking and you notice how it’s only a few parts of town that have been rebuilt with new facades. Near to where I work, you walk by ruined out building full of bullet and mortar holes, building with barbed wire around them because they are destroyed and the signs out in front making sure that everyone knows what government/agency is financing their rebuilding process. I’ll try to get some photos up soon, low fog and dreary skies make for bad lighting. 

So I walk about 20 min from my place in the center to the office, and my language tutor is right there, so really everything is very centrally located. I’ve been reading a lot, finding articles online (thankyouverymuch UW library off campus access system) and reading the book that Zilka (head of TPO) wrote based on her PHD research. I’m planning to start organizing interviews and focus groups for Jan so I’m still figuring out how I want to do things. I’ll have a lot of materials to work through once I’m done as well, so I’m trying to figure out how to arrange data and all of that. I’ve brought all of my field research books from classes with me so I’m reviewing those as well. While I expect to get most of my information from these sessions, I’m getting a lot of information from my experiences with people in daily life as well. Scratch the surface here and everyone has a story. Go out for drinks and find out how someone’s family had its members burned alive for being X or X. Sit down to eat some food, talk to the owner and they’ll spill out their frustrations, how many family members they lost, how many of the youth Bosnia is losing. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this of course, the last couple of years floating in and out of the region actually gave me great info for my thesis precisely through this way. But this reiterates that this is a society of trauma, everyone here has some sort of trauma, whether related to the war or just the difficult economic situation that keeps 40% of its population unemployed. It gets depressing. And it becomes disheartening. Through the seminars I’ve been to with TPO, it’s clear that women in particular face immense challenges but this is an economic and political system that is only going to keep the status quo, and these women will continue to face hardships and to try to deal with their trauma on their own with limited guidance and assistance.

This is a ton of information I’m still wading through, and I’ll have a lot more come this spring. Together hopefully I’ll be able to address the questions I came here with.

Ying and Yang

So I’ve been here just over 2 weeks and while I still haven’t found an apartment, things are settling in. I am working for TPO (check it out at tpo.ba) an organization that is the non-profit arm of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies (CIPS), a program at the University of Sarajevo.  The program focuses on gender, democracy and human rights and religious studies (and I just went to the graduation ceremony for the first generation of graduates).  For TPO I am working on various grant applications for several programs that they have and doing some program eval and other policy wonk type stuff. It’s a great place for a practical application of what I’ve been doing at the Evans school the last couple of years. 

We (myself and 2 TPO staff) just spent a couple of days at a project in Bijeljina and Bratunac last Thursday and Friday reporting (well I was just sitting and listening) on the status of women returnees. Both of these cities are in Republika Srpska, a separate entity from the Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina, but still part of the country. Republika Srpska is in the north and east, bordering Croatia and Serbia and has a majority population of Serbs. The Federation is primarily Croat and Bosniak, with Croats in the south and west and Bosniaks in the center. While both of these make up the country of BiH they function quite differently, with separate parliaments, presidents, executives, police forces, and pretty much everything else you can think of as separate. Although the national presidency is rotated between the three main constituents, Republika Srpska still maintains a high level of independence, be that negative or positive depending on your perspective. 

The program that TPO was reporting on is part of their larger national scale “Social Inclusion of Women Returnees” project that targets women returnees (primarily Bosniaks). TPO was reporting data on returnee employment and political and social inclusion to the representatives of various gender and women’s groups in the regions. The results were disappointing, as their data reported that women returnees continually are underemployed and struggle with political and social participation, even 12-15 years after having returned.  This community obviously faces greater challenges due to being women  returnees, often without a traditional breadwinner (husband, son or children in general) and the overall theme in the discussions that happened after the data was presented was the level of uncertainty present in the daily lives of women returnees.  Official unemployment hovers around 50% though the actual number is likely a little lower as the informal economy fills in some of the gaps. Women in particular are often more likely to take part in informal economies since they can make money selling crafts and prepared foods from stalls and homes (although they won’t admit to this in the surveys and so the data is skewed from the start) . Many women view their lives in survival mode. 

”When you don’t work how do you live?”

“We don’t live we survive.”

 They survive from eating from their gardens, remittances from children living abroad and working informally and sporadically. What is here today may be gone tomorrow and so it’s difficult to trust that the future holds much stability. And so they wait to leave, as soon as their children can afford to send for them.   

This leads directly to the second theme that became apparent during these sessions, the great sense of apathy in working to change a system that’s already broken for these women. 

“What concrete suggestions can you provide to help communicate job opportunities to women then?”

“Let them know jobs are available”

“But how do you suggest this?”

“Just let them know”  

Part of this problem I think lies in the communist legacy of inactivity and the top-down nature of authority. From schools to work to government, tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Ask me to be critical and proactive and nothing will ever happen. People expect to be told what to do and have their problems fixed for them because, since it’s as bad as it gets and they are still surviving, it must not be that bad. And so the facilitators are left frustrated since these representatives, who are suppose to be the agents for action and change, are unable to come up with a strategy to let women in the community that jobs do exist. And so I asked the TPO facilitators, how do they stay motivated?

 “How do you know we are?”

So are people just going through the motions because it ensures their personal stability? A lot of money is given to projects like these from foreign governments and international institutions and so the people who administer them and execute the projects have jobs and some sense of security. But like any situation, that’s too simplistic. Of course people and organizations are trying to affect a system that is deeply broken and mistrusted, but it takes time and patience and motivation. The war in BiH officially ended 15 years ago, but that’s not a long time, especially when you just don’t know what happened, what is happening. Case in point, one person at the meeting talked about how women are still saving the clothing of their husbands and sons in case they come back. They are not coming back. In all probability, they are dead. But again, the truth is hard to bear. 

So on one hand, I hear apathy, a bit of desperation, a severe lack of empowerment and agency, but on the other hand Saturday I went to the graduation of the first generation of the CIPS MA program where young Bosnians (and internationals) are working on projects to try and rebuild their government and community. As the ambassadors of Sweden and Norway said, these are the future leaders of Bosnia. But when 50% of your political leadership in the country reiterates how Bosnia is doomed to fail and must separate, where does that leave one?

It’s been a bit of manic last couple of days overall.

Back in the Balkans again

After a two year hiatus of writing (but not traveling) I will try for once, to actually keep an updated account of what I’m doing on this blog. Last I wrote I was traveling south from Belgrade in 2008, where I was doing an intensive language course (ha. There was nothing intensive about it) for three months. I was going through Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Bulgaria with my friend who had traveled with me in 2005 while on a UW program in the former Yugoslavia. I went back the summer of 2009 for two months, but this time based in Zagreb where I did another intensive language program and then went to Sarajevo for two weeks after to do some research for my thesis on education policy and the international community. Well all that is over and done with but I find myself here again, this time on a NSEP Boren fellowship, based in Sarajevo and for the longest continuous duration of time that I will have spent in the region. I’ll be here for six months doing three things: 1) another language program 2) a research project on religious identity and its impact between the three different ethnic groups and finally 3) an internship with a locally run NGO named TPO (more on that later) that works on a variety issues, but primarily pertaining to religious and gender issues. For them I’ll be doing a program evaluation and implementation but the details are still somewhat murky until I meet with them. I hope that I’ll actually have time to do all of these effectively, and will have to manage my time better so I can make sure and address everything I’ve wanted to.

I’ve spent the last four days traveling. Seriously. My flight was late leaving Seattle to Amsterdam and so I missed my connection to Berlin, and I had to spend an unexpected night in Amsterdam. I know, pity me spending a day in Amsterdam. Luckily I have amazing and wonderful friends there who offered to put me up for the night and so I was able to sleep on a bed. They also took me out, tried to keep me awake to fight jet lag and even took me to the airport. Love you guys! Then off to Berlin in the morning but my luggage decided to take the evening flight instead and so no baggage for me! It turned out for the better though as I didn’t have to haul my 75+lbs of luggage (in my defense I’m packing for fall, winter and spring!!) around town to get to my friend’s apartment which required 2hrs of traveling on the Berlin public transport system (I swear the most confusing I’ve ever been on) and getting lost at least once. Again though, amazing friends who put me up and offered me their homes even while they are not in the country! (Profound thanks to you guys, you made this jet lagged, dazed, hungry and stinky girl very happy in offering me your homes and showers ). So, after leaving Seattle Thursday afternoon at 3pm, traveling to Amsterdam in a freezing plane for nine hours, 23 hours in Amsterdam, 22 hours in Berlin, four hours traveling to Sarajevo via Budapest, I made it to Sarajevo at 3pm Sunday afternoon local time. There I was again welcomed by a friend who has put me up in her spare room until I find a place of my own, made me feel at home, and helped me get oriented. So once again, thank you Peter, Dina, Fran and Polina!!! You guys are amazing!!!! Thank God for friends.

Now I’m day 2 in Sarajevo, finally have a local phone, did e-errands (lots of emails, bank, etc, etc), finally stayed awake past 7pm, grocery shopped and got myself more or less oriented. I still have lots to do, (meeting my organization being chief among them and then finding a place to live and fighting off this cold that keep threatening) but I’m slowly getting settled. My fellowship ends April 18th, which will be my final day at TPO, and then I expect I’ll have some things to wrap up before heading home.

One more thing that I realize is pathetic (but hey I’m a true Seattlelite): I am terrified of winter. I don’t do cold. My range is 45-75F. Its 2C today (that’s 36F people, 36!!!!) and I AM FREEZING. It’s raining but it feels like it should be snowing, and it’s that icy freezing raining that rarely happens in the south Puget Sound. I should’ve brought my down throws.

This will be my one plea: send hand and foot warmers!!