A series of small-scale projects try to make a difference

“In the war the kids were happy with what they had. They were delighted with hand-me-down clothes from the Red Cross,” a young Bosnian woman said. “Now they want the latest shoes from Adidas and Nike.” A second woman attending a recent meeting in a ‘conflict resolution center’ in downtown Sarajevo added “Our children have grown up too quickly and become old too fast. School is boring and meaningless. And we feel so helpless.” A third woman added her point of view, “The war was straightforward. Peace has become very complicated.”

The physical scars of Bosnia’s war are slowly being repaired, but the psychological trauma suffered by all of the country’s four million people – soldiers, refugees and the displaced, survivors of the Sarajevo siege, ‘ordinary’ villagers – runs much deeper. Experts believe it could take years, if ever, to repair the human damage from the conflict. Last year, UNHCR allocated $3.6 million from funds primarily supplied by the United States, to help finance an estimated 220 projects for one particular group – women – to try to patch their lives back together again.

The projects, organized through local organizations and collectively known as the Bosnian Women’s Initiative, are deliberately low key and small-scale, designed to make a direct impact on individual lives. Effectively they help women become more independent and self-sufficient by training them in new skills, finding them work, helping them to overcome psychological scars and providing legal assistance.

The women at the Sarajevo conflict center, many of them displaced, were attending regular meetings organized by a local group called Corridor. They learned to design and knit yarn products and each meeting turned into an informal rap session where the women could discuss personal problems and their frustrations.

Across the city in Vogosca municipality, a young mother and her six-year-old son from the town of Srebrenica sought help from a lawyer at the Sun Side Pro Femina Center to qualify for state benefits. Her husband disappeared during the fall of Srebrenica and since returning from Germany recently she, her mother and son, have survived on a $70 a month pension. “I cannot face the question my son keeps asking again and again ‘Are we going to stay here this time or are we going to move again?’” the woman said. “I’m so tired. There is no solution.”

At another meeting, a group of doctors, social workers and counsellors sit around a table with several patients in group therapy, including a single woman trying to raise a child on $12 a month and a father and his daughter who had been raped. “We are trying to break the cycle of emotional numbing,” explains one counsellor. The woman patient explains, “We have no self esteem left. And we have no money to replace that missing self esteem.”

“The country is still in a mental limbo,” says social worker Ragib Vacnaga. “The real problems are still to surface, especially in the young.” For Bosnia, that is the real long term worry.

Source: Refugees Magazine issue 114 (1999)