"I can starve, I don't care - as long as there is peace"

Sanski Most, Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH): Krajina Tear.

I can hear the evening call to prayer being sung from the minarets of the Sanksi Most mosque. And yes, minarets as Sanski Most actually has four...but we’ll save that story for later…

Most everyone else in the group has gone downstairs for a session on transitional justice. But, my mind is still reeling from today’s experience at Krajina Tear, so I have decided to stay and write.

Krajina Tear is an organization that was started by widows of the war. In a nutshell, “Kraijna Tear aims to improve the living conditions of women, children, and elderly regardless of their national, racial, or political identity. We have been actively promoting women’s and children’s rights and providing direct services for over 10 years.”

Part of the GYC Delegation includes three days of volunteer service or field projects. For my field project, I chose to work with Krajina Tear. In the descriptions of the projects, GYC explained that Krajina Tear “needs volunteers who can assist with some of the direct service delivery, especially work with the elderly population and women’s groups. Since last year, they have lost some international funding support and had to close down some of their programs, including the only center in the region that was assisting children with special needs and providing support for their parents. Thus, they need a lot of help with research on potential new grants, especially possibly for new EU sources. Finally, they would benefit from some needs assessment projects in terms of their other initiatives, especially focused on the elderly assistance.”

Although the organizations of our field projects are supposed to benefit from our time with them, today, I felt the biggest contribution we gave to Krajina Tear was a listening ear. And I know that I finished the day feeling that I probably gained more from our meetings with the women than they did from us. But, Miki and Elma (a fellow delegation member, but who is also Bosnian) assured us that simply our presence and our listening is a huge contribution to these women.

We started out the morning with a meeting with one of the founder’s of the organization who explained what the center does. She also explained what the center used to do, and what services they can no longer provide due to a lack of funding. She described the great need for assistance to the elderly in the community, but how the organization is stretched so thin, they cannot even think of where to save any more money. Krajina Tear started out with 100 volunteers to serve 400 “beneficiaries” (elderly people in the community). However, due to a lack of funding, they now only serve 170 beneficiaries with the help of 35 volunteers and 7 staff members (only 2 of whom are paid by the government). Last year, the staff members forwent their salaries for four months in order to be able to continue providing their services to their beneficiaries…There are so many stories that Almira shared with us about the difficulties that the organization faces. I wish I could share more with you...it seems that around every corner they turn, there is another brick wall that they have to figure out how to either break through or climb over. However, they continue to break through those walls and serve the people in their community.

Our group leader, Miki, who was our translator for that portion of our day, explained how every year he comes the organization has gotten more funding cut, it is smaller, but continues to go on. Despite their meager wages, Almira and her staff continue to go on…despite their own need to strive to survive, they continue to place value on helping the elderly in the community. Miki expressed his amazement of this to Almira, who explained, that all she needs in life is happiness. She gets her happiness from working with people, talking to them and helping them the little bit that she can. She explained out after living through the war, everything seems easy. “As long as there is peace, I am fine,” she explained. “ I can starve, I don’t care, as long as there is peace...”

The steadfast resilience of these women amazes and inspires me. We also met with a remarkable poet as well as another women who works at the center. The poet read us four poems, while the other woman shared her story with us for about two hours. I hope to share a bit about what I learned from meeting with them as well, because it truly was, albeit heavy, deep and difficult at times, a very powerful and above all, inspiring day.