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Love in Action |
A Visit to the Former Front-Lines in
Bosnia
by Maggie
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02 June 1999
When I think back to the day I decided to come to Croatia, those words somebody told me then, echo in my mind: "Croatia is a war zone; I mean, the territory, and the lives of people, too."
The following two-and-a-half years after my arrival I spent living on a beach with see-through water, jagged rocks and ever-greenery. I did provisioning, personal witnessing and tooling, just as much as I would anywhere in the world. So, by the time the planning of this trip came along, the battlefield had long slipped from my thoughts.
A BIT OF PREPARATION
Some of us had been to Bosnia only a couple of months before the meeting, and others, like me, had barely an idea of what we were talking about. We were arguing as if we didn't’t love one another on that night, trying to plan where, and when, and even if at all. A veteran in our group sealed the discussion. Instead, we turned our next meeting into a PPM, and from that one the negative thinkers came out encouraged, and trying to inspire everyone else about a thrill of a trip.
We traveled 500 km to get to Mostar, a half-Muslim, half-Croatian town in Hercegovina.
| Maggie sharing God's Love with refugees after a performance. |  |
SAFET
Everyone in the van was talking about Safet (obviously Muslim, I thought, by the name). He organized this show, and he translated that tape, and he did this, and he did that. By the time we got around to visiting his house, I had asked ten times if we could meet him. As we stepped into the doorway, I stretched out my hand to introduce myself, but didn't’t notice any reaction from him. And then, they told me he was blind.
"I went out in the woods one day with friends," he says. "It was during the war, when I was 17. We were chopping some wood, then my friend stepped on a mine, and died in the explosion. Because I was behind him, I only was left blind. My other friend came out unhurt this time, but died a week later stepping on a mine, or a grenade or something. "
Well now, about 4 years later, after Safet had recovered from depression, he wanted to help others. He came with us to take part in a program we were organizing for a Muslim camp, and spoke about his victory over despair, quoting from our pubs and tapes. Now he’s a converted Christian, and has a group of other friends in his town, who also believe in the Family teachings.
THE HOUSE
Creeps crawled all over me when I walked into the house where we were going to stay. I looked around – nothing unusual: the walls were stained with bullet holes. After all, we were on the former front lines. But what was wrong that night when I woke up, stirred up in my sleep, to find that Steve was up and bothered? Spooks! I heard the Lord’s voice clearly: "This house is haunted by the spirits of the men who died inside." Have you ever felt spooky, not afraid, not endangered by the ghosts, but just plain spooky and spirit-sensitive? That’s what it was like as we held hands and prayed together for the spirits of the men to be released. From then on, the house became our cozy home, and it was sure far better than our good old van which we had parked in the center of a refugee camp, and in which we had spent our first two evenings, nights and early afternoons.
THE REFUGEES
Ivanka was a manager of a camp of Croatian refugees. Although her home was only thirty km away from the camp, she couldn’t return, because Bosnian Muslims lived in her house. She’d lost her husband in the war, and since then had been trying to fill up her life by caring for other refugees. Some of the children in the camp had been born in refugee-ship(as they say here), and had never known a different way of life. The men left in the camp were few. Work was scarce, and hope was hard to come by.
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Whatever little love we offered, people grabbed and treasured for a long time. The kids only wanted someone to play with them and love them. The adults only wanted someone to listen to their stories.
STATS AND BLOOPERS
On our trip to the former Bosnian/Croatian frontlines, in our almost untrustworthy team of four(Mark,12, Jonathan, who had his 15th birthday on the road, Maggie,22, and Stephen,46) we did 11 shows, visited 4 schools, 3 refugee camps, and won 102 souls.
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Mark and Jonathan in Mostar |
This is a pretty normal stats summary for a trip of this kind, only the thing that still amazes me is that we went out on the road not knowing where to go, not having booked a single show, and not having even an idea of what our show was going to be like. I remember standing behind our van on the main road, praying and practicing. Then, I remember the tape (to help us do our puppet show in Croatian) getting erased in the middle of our first show. And one more, ha! I remember driving around looking for a supposedly Kosovar refugee camp, when the police stopped us and told us, when we asked, that we had missed the turn-off for the camp. And then, instead of finding some little flaw and giving us a fine, the policemen gave us ice-cream!
The camp we found turned out to be an old Muslim camp, of refugees from Serbian territory in Bosnia, not of recent Kosovar down-settlers. Instead of kids, who we had gotten used to doing shows for, the majority here were teens. We finally managed to put together a show for them, and then the management didn’t even let us do it. But then, even the few songs we sang, and talks we had with them meant much, just like one of the girls at the camp said: "I can’t remember anything like this happening here before. You guys are the first ones to try to do a show for us."
And I still can’t stop the feeling that we didn’t do enough.
