Day 64: To Ask Or Not To Ask

(Her : Joanna)

Just reading the raping camp from the war time in Bosnia and Herzegovina gave me nightmares.  I can’t imagine what these people have to go through or still living with after the war.  The war is still so fresh.  A pure 15 years is not enough to “move on” or forget.   

Before this trip, I have always thought that the war time is the toughest time for people but it is extremely difficult for those who survive and have to live with the memory or rather nightmare.

The mood or tone changed whenever the topic of war was bought up when we talked to a local family here.   Implicitly, I can feel that they try to move on.  When they told us sparsely things they went through at the war, I felt that they lightened up a lot as if they are just talking about a normal event in the past.  And at times, they joked about some things they themselves or their family went through but through the jokes, I can superficially imagine the hardship they have went through.

Almost every local we have met, though we didn’t meet too many, have been affected by the war.  There are ruins of building mix with new buildings and a lot of buildings with something like bullet holes on the exterior of the wall.

The tour guide of the tour we took lost 20 family members from the war; and the tour bus driver, who was only 2 when the war happened, showed us the scar he got from an explosion on his arm.

Though we really want to know more what it is like going through the war and what happened from people who went through it but it is too cruel to ask about a wound that everyone tries to recover from.  Perhaps, we should look forward and see what Bosnia and Herzegovina has to offer as a country.