When you live in DC and you work in foreign affairs, you are immediately asked by everyone if you plan on living abroad. Usually, the answer is yes. That's basically the biggest benefit of doing this sort of work: the ability to live and work abroad in a comfortable and safe situation. But the idea never really appealed to me, because well, living in Bosnia with small children never appealed to me.
But...
I've always liked exploring. So has Jeff. Honestly if we had to fill out a couples' questionnaire about our marriage, that is probably our favorite thing to do together. We drive to the next towns over and drive around to just see what the neighborhoods are like. We walk the roundabout way to places for no reason at all. We visit all of the obscure branches of the country library and compare the selections. We just enjoy seeing new places, no matter how mundane. Maybe especially how mundane. I like to visit the small towns in Loudoun County and wonder what people do for a living. Do they commute to DC? How early do they get up? Do they take the toll road the whole way? I know that is basically the most boring thing you can think about, but I do. A lot. I just like to see how people live.
But...
That didn't mean I wanted to go to Bosnia. I guess I have to admit that I really didn't know very much about Bosnia. I knew that it insists on being called Bosnia AND Herzegovina and that there was a war there in the '90s and that some of the population was Muslim. I never really had any more interest in it.
But...
Jeff came home his first day of working on Bosnia and sat down and said, "That place is a mess." And the promise of something being a mess intrigued me, so I started learning more about Bosnia. And Jeff is right, it is kind of a political mess. (They have a tri-presidency! They have one president who represents the Serbs, one who represents the Bosniaks and one who represents the Croats and the three of them just BE PRESIDENT together.) But the more I learned about the people of Bosnia, the more they inspired me. They are rebuilding their country after a horrific (seriously, just terrible) war and they don't have the luxury of separating themselves from their enemies. I really don't think very many people would be able to move on as well as they have. And I know that anyone who knows anything in-depth about the country would probably disagree with that statement, but the fact that they live and work together and don't kill each other gives me a lot of hope for the world in general.
And...
Admiring a place doesn't mean that you pack up your family and go spend a few months there. Obviously. But opportunities kept coming up for Jeff to do some short-term work in the region and he never took them because he didn't want to be apart from us for that long. And we never asked about the possibility of our whole family being accommodated because it wasn't something that I wanted.
But...
Suddenly I did want it. Actually it was probably gradually, but I realized it pretty suddenly. I wanted to spend some extended time in Bosnia (and for honest record-keeping, the opportunity to go to Serbia came up too) and I don't know what changed in me, but I wanted to go because we can. Does that make any sense? Probably not.
I just...
I don't know. Do you ever think about if you were to die tomorrow what you wish that you've made sure to teach your kids? I think about that a lot. I know that it sounds pretty corny when I type it up, but something that I want to make absolutely sure that I teach my children is that their reality is not everyone's reality. We live in the most affluent county in the country and we can go 30 miles east to DC or a little further west to West Virginia and find people, really good people, living in generational poverty. And we'll drive back home and go to Safeway or walk to the library and our lives will continue as they were before. I know that sounds heavy-handed and I don't know how to articulate it, but I hope that I can show them that there are good people living in very different circumstances all over the world. And yes, I do hope that develops into empathy, but mostly I just want to them to remember that there are people walking, working, laughing, skinning their knees all over the world. I guess that I just hope that maybe someday the kids will read the news and see something about Bosnia and picture all of the people who have helped lift the stroller, instead of just reading a headline.
And...
Yeah. Heavy-handed or not, we decided to come to Bosnia. I mean, that is simplifying a lot of components that caused me a lot of extreme angst and vacillation (like: how coming would impact Jeff's career, how it would impact Adam's schooling, the children's genuine desires to travel, Ben's easygoing nature, how it would impact our church responsibilities, the Paris attacks and the State Department's travel warning and the general office bureaucracy and flippancy on our specific dates). But eventually, we made the choice and we stuck with it. And then we finally got specific confirmation that we were leaving like three weeks before the actual day and everything was craaaazy. I can't remember, but I'm pretty sure I had a two-week-long mental breakdown.
Anyway...
We're here in Sarajevo and we're very much enjoying ourselves. They eat a lot of bread and meat here, so basically... Mama like. There's so much to say about what being here is like. It's actually probably a lot like if you put a completely picturesque city in a snow globe and then shook it up and everyone started smoking cigarettes. That's a pretty decent start. It's a mess, it's beautiful, and everyone smokes. Everrryone smokes. I saw a kid who was smoking and put out his cigarette by driving over it with his Razor scooter. (Oh yeah, he was about 10).
But...
Despite the fact that the toy stores smell like bars, the people are good and kind and every single day that I've been here someone has been exceptionally kind to me and my family and maybe that's worth going across the world for.
Also, for all of that bread and meat. That makes it worth it.
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| I always feel like I should put up pictures after posts, but I'm feeling really lazy. My Instagram is public right now, so you can see some pictrures on the right. I go back and forth between public and private based on whether someone has been creepy, so reign that in, Creeps of Instagram.This is Avery at a cafe today. Food is ridiculously cheap here and I don't have all of my cooking utensils, so we eat out more than we would in America.Also, I literally push the kids in the stroller a few miles a day (Adam is too big for the stroller, I know, but cars drive on sidewalks here and he likes to run ahead of me so I frequently make him get in the stroller because I'd like him to survive this trip) and I get ravenous after a while. Yes, I let Avery drink a Coke. She had like three sips and I finished it so I'm not feeling too bad about it, Actually, I'm feeling pretty good about it. |
1 comment:
I love your blog posts, Sarah! Those are great things to hope to teach your kids, and I've been envious of the five of you living abroad for a few months. What a neat experience!
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