Ćao!
Greetings from BiH! If you read the article in the
church newsletter, this will look familiar, though a little more
up-to-date. Sorry! There will be other blog posts coming.
I
have been in Sarajevo for more than a month but I am still
unaccustomed to living in a city with a well-known name, let alone
one where there are daily reminders of events in world history. There
is the Latin Bridge where World War I began, on my way to language
lessons I pass a venue from the 1984 Olympics, and everywhere there
reminders of the war twenty years ago—scars on apartment buildings,
scars in the sidewalks from mortars (called “Sarajevo roses”),
and scars, visible or not, on the people of this place.
So,
what am I doing here? Mostly I'm peeling potatoes, washing dishes,
and building relationships. I work with one of MCC's partners, Bread
of St. Anthony, a Franciscan nonprofit that addresses a vast scope of
needs on a limited budget. Right now I work mornings in the soup
kitchen in BSA's main building and study Bosnian with a tutor in the
afternoons.
Due
to circumstances at work, I won't start working at the therapeutic
community in Plehan until sometime in November or December, instead
of October as I had initially anticipated. So I'll continue to work
in the soup kitchen and begin work with housekeeping in the
dormitory, as well as possibly working with students in some
capacity, possibly teaching conversational English. And maybe
teaching conversational English to some other staff? We'll see.
The
soup kitchen is similar to many soup kitchens in North America;
people come five days a week for bread and a hot meal of stew, pasta,
or polenta. Many bring soup pots or plastic containers and take their
family's portion home with them. We receive fresh bread every
morning—250 loaves Monday through Thursday and 500 on Friday—and
the kettle we use for cooking the stew is enormous, at least as big
as the rendering kettle my family uses for rendering lard, and
stirred with a similar large wooden paddle. I am consistently amazed
by how much food we make and how little is left at the end of the
day. The cooks seem to know most people who come through by name;
there isn't the same culture of mobility that you find in North
America since families tend to live in the same house or apartment
for generations, and though many live in poverty, there is a very low
rate of homelessness.
I
live in an apartment on my own about a twenty-minute walk from Bread
of St. Anthony. It has been a blessing to have a well-furnished
apartment with a good kitchen and enough space to host a few other
MCCers who have come through Sarajevo. One of the ongoing challenges
of living on my own rather than with a host family, as most SALTers
do, is feeling connected to Bosnians outside of the workplace, but I
live close to the other MCCers and often spend time with them, which
has been both life-giving and a lot of fun. Learning Bosnian has been
another challenge, but it is encouraging to realize how much I have
learned in the last six weeks, and it has given me a fresh
appreciation for anyone who has taken the time and effort to become proficient in a second or third
language.
