Building Bridges and Crossing Borders

(this is an excerpt of an article I wrote for my church newsletter after returning from my final trip to Bosnia)

According to Alihodja, a character in Ivo Andric’s Bridge on the Drina, there is a Muslim legend that God created the world out of a soft material. Satan, in a jealous rage, raked his fingers over the earth to create valleys in order to make life difficult for the humans trapped on either side. In response, God sent angels to spread their wings over the valleys, thus giving humans the gift of bridges.

I recently returned from my fourth consecutive “servant trip” to run friendship camps in Bosnia with the NJ Synod. The camps were a huge success, and we served over 2,500 children! Our theme this year was “Building Bridges, Journeying Together,” and what I think makes this trip so incredible is the way we try to conquer the valleys of hate and misunderstanding between people by building bridges of friendship, love, and respect.

The goal of our trip is healing and reconciliation from the civil wars that wracked the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Even though the war officially ended in 1996, the ridges left in the bullet-scarred countryside and in the wounded hearts of the people are very deep. We try to help rebuild bridges and strengthen relationships between the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats.

You can see it happening, slowly but surely: when Muslim and Serb children who are in a segregated school play together at our camps, or when children who draw nationalistic Serb artwork bond with our Muslim interpreters. A bridge is built when, for example, our fourteen-year-old Serb interpreter Petar goes over to Emsuda, the Muslim woman who is sharing with us her story of surviving a Serb concentration camp, and gives her a hug and commends her for her courage.

We try to build bridges as well between our team of Americans and the Bosnian children and adults we serve and are served by. You can see it when the children make “shrinky-dink” medallions as gifts for ELCA High School Youth Gathering participants that have messages like “I love America” or “Bosnia + America = friends.”

above: me with Vladana, in Brcko
I see it personally in the special connections I build with the kids at the camps, like the 12-year-old girl named Vladana who gave me her “hug pillow” as a special gift this year, or the young boy named Pero who wrote me a thank you note in broken English at the end of camp. The great thing about returning is strengthening standing relationships, like my bond with the now fifteen-year-old girl named Ilma who I have been exchanging letters with every year since 2003, or the girl named Durđica who I bonded with in 2004 (because I was one of the few Americans who could pronounce her name) and have gotten to see two more times since then.

As always, words cannot adequately describe how amazing this trip was. It was eye-opening, life-changing, and uplifting. Like in the Muslim legend, this bridge-building truly is a gift from God. The best part about the trip this year, however, was that it didn’t have to end when I got back to the United States. New Jersey Synod, on a grant from Thrivent Financial, took a group of eighteen Americans and five of our Bosnian Muslim interpreters and friends (one of whom, Jasmin, is staying with my family) to the National Youth Gathering in San Antonio, Texas. For both weeks of the Gathering, we ran educational and interactive workshops and exhibits about Bosnia, the war that happened there, and NJ Synod’s responses to it. We wanted to educate young people, let them know that this sort of thing happened in Bosnia and is currently happening around the globe, and that there is something they can actually do about it.

The Gathering theme was “Cruzando: Journey with Jesus.” Cruzando is a Spanish word that literally means “crossing,” and the Gathering focused on expanding our horizons and crossing the literal and figurative borders we have in our lives, which fit in perfectly with our friendship camp theme of building bridges. In order to cross borders of apathy and ignorance, you have to build bridges of education and enthusiasm, and this is exactly what the American Lutherans and Bosnian Muslims on our team did with each other and tried to do with the Gathering participants.

The Gathering was a fantastic experience for all of us—we really got a lot out of it, and I think we contributed a lot to it as well, as we offered participants a very different experience than many of the other workshops and activities. For example, one of our workshops was the “Terrible Great Game,” a war simulation that gave people a small taste of what it is like to survive an ethnic cleansing. It was especially valuable that our Bosnian friends came with us to share their stories and experiences about the war with the teens at the Gathering—it’s one thing to read about a story, but to hear it first-hand is just so much more powerful.



We probably communicated directly with about 6,000 people at the Gathering through our booth and workshops, and I hope we helped some of them to cross borders and to look at the world in a new way. The first time I went to Bosnia, I crossed from my sheltered suburban world to a realization that there is more out there, and that though much of it is real, dark, scary, and different, it is beautiful. I think our team helped some of the youth we interacted with take a step closer to or come to a similar realization.

above: a sign at our booth in San Antonio