 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
 |
|
||||||||
 |
 |
 |
|||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|||
 |
 |
|
|||||||
 |
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
Travel Stories
>> Bosnia >> A Quiet Week in Sniper
Alley Well... it's been a quiet week in Sniper Alley (my apologies to Garrison Keillor!). I have moved apartments and am farther away from the office, but closer to the old town. My house is one of two that sit in a walled compound of sorts up in the hills east of town. My landlady, Zdenka, speaks very good English as she and her late husband were stationed for some years in Vancouver, BC, Canada. He died before the war, thank God, she says. She has moved into her mother's home which is the second house in our compound leaving the house I'm in, available to rent. There are curious renters in this city. Every "rent-able" apartment I've been in here is chock full of an incredible amount of kitsch. If you walked into my own current residence you would swear the entire family had just stepped out for a coffee and would be back in a moment! I am living out of my suitcases because there isn't a spare drawer to be found - and this a two floor, three bedroom, two full bath house! Zdenka was a professor in Chemical Engineering at the Sarajevo University for a number of years (her husband taught English) although she retired after (!) the war. She has two sons, one living in Canada, and the other in Germany. She gets teary-eyed describing that moment during the war, early on, when she helped them "escape", basically. She says, "you have no idea, as a mother, how horrible it is to reach a point where to want your children to leave you more than you want them to stay with you". The family orchard surrounding the houses is full of pears, peaches, plums, and apple trees. Her gardens are stocked with squash, tomatoes, beans, peas, onions, cabbage, among everything else. She keeps homing pigeons, and she tells me that she and her sons used them during the war, before the sons fled. They make a lovely racket - the chorus starts most days at about 5am. She is Catholic! and living in a very Muslim neighborhood. She describes the daily fear of living for four years surrounded by people who had once been lifetime friends and good neighbors, but who might suddenly be moved to anger by the death of a family member and take revenge. She was very lucky, and although there was a good deal of grenade damage to the homes on her street, the houses are intact. She says that the neighborhood is slowly coming back but that there are certain tensions now that did not exist before. The muslim influence is actually evident now, as it was not pre-war. The mosques all over town are being rebuilt at a rapid pace - mostly Irani and Saudi money - and speakers have been installed to broadcast the muezzin chants - also something never before heard here. I love the muezzin as I am reminded of my days in Morocco - I become so quickly accustomed to hearing them that I miss them when I first get home! There is a beautiful rebuilt mosque in the center of the old town, and on Friday afternoons the men crowd into the building and their prostrate bodies pour out into the front courtyard - a lovely sea of curved backs augmented by lines of shoes awaiting their masters' feet! Some weeks ago was Mohammed's birthday, apparently, and the women (only) were permitted into the courtyard to pray. The increase in the muslim headgear on the women is also more pronounced than pre-war (I'm told). The wonderful thing about this is that the shops here are loaded with silk scarves - many from Turkey, and are "the" fashion statement. Walking along in old town is a treat for the fashion-conscious because, like any accessory, the scarves adorning these islamic heads are meticulously chosen to "work" with the business suits, and high fashion outfits worn beneath them! Groovy! As I said, I am further from the office than previously, and since I am a notorious morning dawdler, taxis have become a new feature in my daily routine. The taxi drivers in Sarajevo have taken it upon themselves collectively to teach me Bosnian. I have quite a number of phrases and questions under my belt now and am proud to use them whenever possible. Because I have a very good ear, the inclination, and had the luck to have captured the Spanish "R" (also very evident in Bosanski), my Bosnian pronounciation is actually quite good. This fools them, you see, because once I blurt out my stock phrases, they usually rapid fire back at me. I then have a chance to tell them, in near flawless Bosnian that I really can't speak Bosnian. They usually laugh, clap me on the shoulder (I always sit up front, I mean, come on!), and proceed to tell me my Bosnian is great followed by another stream of unrecognizable words! If I tell one cabbie I like the music, he will exclaim that it is really Croatian, but here, let me find my Bosnian tape. And as he ducks his head below the dashboard - thrusting us both into precarious and suddenly unnatural traffic patterns (as I suck wind quietly), he will pull out a tape, pop it in, and grin at me, as the ten seconds I listen to before exiting at my now nearing destination sound EXACTLY like what I've just heard. Ah, well, it gives me a chance to use the few sentences I've learned like, "Oh, I LIKE Bosnian music," or, "Oh, this is beautiful!" We arrive, I pay him, he pumps my hand and drives off and we are both happier for having had the "conversation". I have had exchanges about where I'm from, where they're from, what other jobs they've had, what I'm doing here, do I like the food? Have I tried cevapi? Croatian wines are the best, especially from the island of Korcula, my son/daughter/father/uncle/cousin/dog is living in Texas/California/Canada/the Bronx, etc..... Exchanges like these always bewilder me somewhat because considering the overwhelming foreign population living in this city they must encounter just a volume of foreign riders, and yet they seem to enjoy these brief exchanges in such a genuine way. I spent another weekend in Dubrovnik this last weekend. More pictures, more sun, more cold, salty Adriatic water. I could live here. This trip was different because I travelled with a close friend (who was to become my husband) and two young Bosnians. Having Bosnians with us is always enlightening because they offer such wonderful perspective and insight to what we can only look at and speculate about. Tomo, our conductor at the wheel this weekend, is 25 years old. He has the wisdom and common sense of a man in his 60s, and the sense of humor of a 14 year old (the operative phrase this weekend was Rosanne Arnold's dry, "oh baby, oh baby"). He was a soldier and a truck driver during the war. He transported fuel for the Bosnian Army. Gasoline. He looked at us and said, "you know, all it would have taken was one bullet in the wrong place." "I figured if I got hit, I'd be lucky because I wouldn't have suffered - it would have been immediate" (and he made the sound of an explosion) He said he survived by blocking pieces of his mind. You just don't think about these things. You think about your mother's cooking, your grandfather's whiskey, your girlfriend's hair (Ivana looks Irish, gorgeous long wild red curly hair, button nose, freckles), or the pillow on your bed. Without repeating any of the stories of death and destruction we were told as we passed the towns and villages in those mountains, let me relate some of the incidents that seem commonplace on the Bosnian roadways. Coming back into Sarajevo on Monday evening we were routed, with other traffic, off the main highway to get around an accident. A young woman had hit an old man on a bicycle. The bike lay twisted in the middle of the road in a sea of windshield glass. The old man's lifeless body lay some fifteen feet from it, face down, in a pool of blood, uncovered. The car's driver sat huddled alone by the side of the road near her totalled car. I experienced a similar scene the first weekend at the beach in July along the Croatian coast - Mercedes cruised around a corner and ate a pedestrian. Same scene, body on the road uncovered, the driver squatting on the shoulder - arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth, back and forth. There is no good and organized method for dealing with these accidents. No ambulance, no way to alert next of kin, traffic slowly wedging by the scene, everyone sort of frozen waiting for someone to figure out what to do. On the coast, we had been laughing and be-bopping in the back seat of Jenny's car until that moment. The radio went off and the interior of that car was silent for 1/2 hour. No one said a thing about it - either then, or later. At the scene coming into Sarajevo, the men in our car wrenched their necks to stare at the scene, the women looked quickly then stared straight ahead. After a few minutes I turned to my companion and in a hoarse whisper said, "...that was someone's grandfather." He grabbed me and held onto me for a couple of really awful moments. I can't express the difference in your throat and stomach between looking at grisy war pictures in a book, or fake horror-gore on a movie screen and looking for real at the victim and the one responsible. Ok, shake that one off. This evening as I sit in my office typing these words, they are setting up a rock concert right below my window. It appears to be a group of German SFOR fellows. They have set up a stage, replete with camouflage netting around it and a large SFOR flag hanging next to the German flag as their back drop. The children in their mini battery-powered vehicles have been relegated to a little corner some yards down the walkway. The band has been testing their audio system so while quiet for the moment, they throw off bone-jolting series of chords every so often. The keyboard player is a particularly eager bandmember and whips off little riffs from old Led Zepplin tunes every couple of minutes. It isn't so weird that in the warm summer afternoon of Sarajevo there should be a little summer music. What is so bizarre is that it's a bunch of men in camouflage and boots on a stage covered with like material - what, if attacked they won't be seen? The crowd has started to gather, although the clouds have as well, so I expect that regardless of the quality or volume of the music, there shall be some excitement. Ah, there we go, the music has started....and oh, my God, the Germans are singing Elvis Presley - Do I wish I could record this and send it off with this message!? (ok, picture Arnold Schwartzernegger singing, "I'm in love, I'm all shook up....") Too much. Well, before I close this, I leave you with
a "moment in the life of...an expat in the Balkans" So my
colleague and friend, Jay and I walk across town this afternoon to deliver
some loan materials and training manuals to our sister project, USAID
Business Consulting (we are USAID Business Finance). After dropping
off our goods at the BC offices, we stop by a stationery store (Staples
this ain't), Jay picks out paper, a box of 8 wine glasses, and a plastic
package of kitchen cleaning sponges (see, Staples, it ain't). The store
is large by Bosnian standards. Jay hands the young guy behind the counter
a 20 DM bill, they don't have change (of course). The young man has
to go to a neighboring store to get change - we wait. He comes back
with change, then looks at Jay and realizes Jay can't carry all these
awkwardly shaped packages without some sort of a bag. The young man
then sends the young "assistant" to who-knows-where to get
a plastic bag. While she is gone, he proceeds to badly wrap the box
of wine glasses in brown paper and LOTS of scotch tape (picture a five
year old wrapping a Christmas gift. She returns with a small bag into
which the two of them fight to stuff the box of glasses (Jay will have
to grasp the handles of this bag with the tips of his thumb and pinky
to hold it). They then look at the paper and the sponges - hmmmm, Sherlock,
another bag is needed, and off she goes again. This entire transaction
has taken almost twenty minutes. Welcome to Bosnia. Copyright © 1997 – Rachel Peterson |
|