Flex Mentallo

On arrival in Sarajevo we quickly learned to conceal these, as most of the population - over 400,000 strong - did not posses them. An average of 8 citizens were being killed by Serb snipers every day. Over 10,000 people were killed in Sarajevo between 1992 and 1995 in this way, over 2000 of them children.

We made our way to Zagreb, and thence to the headquarters of the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) to request blue cards and a flight into Sarajevo on a Russian transport Plane. These blue cards were the equivalent of a passport, without which free movement in and out of Sarajevo was impossible.

Warchild wanted to cancel our trip. We told them we were going anyway, with or without their support. They capitulated, and Nigel Osborne agreed to meet us at a flat he sometimes stayed at in the old part of Sarajevo by the covered market, owned by the sisters Misha and Yasna.

At this point we had been out of touch with our Warchild friends for 6 weeks. When we finally managed to establish contact, we found that the person who we'd arranged to rendezvous with in Sarajevo had recently been trapped there during a period of intense shelling and could not face going back.

As Bobby pointed out, sometimes things that seem on the surface to be random aren’t random at all. Our understanding of the unvoiced trauma was from this point deepened by our observations of their complex reactions to seemingly straightforward situations.

It is hard to put this precisely into words, but it informed subsequent decisions which otherwise we might have made differently. What also happened is that the children began to focus their anger, resentment and sense of loss on me. When on one occasion I got separated for an hour while we were walking in a dense wood, by all accounts the children became unreasonably distraught. They were both relieved and angry when I reappeared. I had made the error of trying to take a shortcut through dense undergrowth after falling behind so I could relieve myself, only to find the woods much thicker than I was used to.

As were the children, their fathers away, perhaps dead in the fighting, with no word from one year to the next. A strange metamorphosis began to take place. Both Bobby and I recognised that after working in the camp for over a month we had begun to assimilate the mindset of refugees.

The men were consequently simmering with anger and frustration.

The vast majority of people in the camp were women and children, with a few men who were either too old or considered too young to fight.

Meanwhile I adopted a different approach, working for example with groups of young people to make a large cognitive map of Bosnia.

And barely 20 minutes later:

And this is the work she made in one to one sessions with Bobby. First:

It was as though they were trying to recapture the homes they had fled, sometimes at great risk to life and limb. In an attempt to stabilise his polyglot and largely artificailly invented nation, Marshall Tito had resettled Serbs among Croats, Serbs and Croats among Bosnians, but the old hatreds still festered. (Dating back a millennium to a time when Catholic, Orthodox and Moslem empires all came into direct conflict here at what is known as the "fault line" of Europe) When Yugoslavia began to fracture, the hatreds re-emerged, and suddenly neighbour was murdering neighbour, teacher, pupil... This girl recalled fleeing her home through a burning forest; fleeing from neighbours she had known all her life

Any crossroads in Slovenia has its share of roadside shrines:

Or graves....

beds....

shrines...

Which by turns we realised could be interpreted as houses...

In the forest and the local dump, we found the raw material to encourage the children to play at building structures...