Tales from the Island of Serendip 4 4

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The residents were not allowed down into the town. We didn’t go either - until we learned that the residents were sneaking down regardless! So we snuck down too. We lived on the same diet - stale bread and chocolate soup for breakfast. Cracked a tooth on the bread one morning I recall. but we were allowed to take the children on escorted trips beyond the camp, higher up into the hills.

 

 

 

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

 

 

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

 

 

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shrines...

 

 

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beds....

 

 

 

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Or graves....

 

 

 

 

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Any crossroads in Slovenia has its share of roadside shrines:

 

 

 

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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

 

 

 

 

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

 

First:

 

 

 

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And barely 20 minutes later:

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

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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.

 

 

 

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