Our team has been in Dobrinja, a suburb of Sarajevo, for about 10 months now and we're still trying to figure out how to find favor with the community. We have been running a book table with Christian literature twice a week in the evenings (when everyone is out for a stroll), and that’s been going pretty well. Every evening there are some people coming up to us to check out the literature we have to offer.
In addition to that, we also want to show the people in our community that we care for them, and to show them that we’re not just interested in ‘harvesting souls’ or what have you. So we came up with the idea to clean up the parks in our community. This really is no small feat as Bosnians in general haven’t been educated in environmental conservation. In fact, Stacy and I once witnessed a man take a whole wheel-barrel of trash and dump it in a river that runs behind his home. You would think it’s bad enough that one would dump the trash in a place that wouldn’t affect him, but the fact that this man dumped his trash in a river that was only 20 yards from his own back door really confused us. Anyway I digress, the point is people don’t think twice about throwing trash on the ground. Oh, one more funny trash story. A couple of years ago we cleaned up a park with a summer team from Manteca, California. As we started working some of the children from the neighborhood helped us pick up trash. Afterwards, we thought it’d be a nice gesture to give these kids ice cream from the store. The children delighted about the ice cream tore off their wrappers and threw them on the ground. We just looked at them with utter shock.
Needless to say, the parks in Bosnia are strewn with trash. Our team has decided to clean one park a week while the weather is still nice, and in that way follow the Matthew 5:16 principle, "let your light shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven."
The top picture is of a park that was littered with broken glass. There was an obvious difference afterwards. Below is a picture of a group of young girls who decided to have a picnic on the newly cleaned park grass.
I hate to bug you all again with another park clean-up blog, but i got a decent "before" picture that i wanted to share just so you'd get a visual of the situation here. This week we were even more encouraged by the clean up time because one very grateful lady came to talk to us, and then realized that we were the group that had a book table in town. This was one of the outcomes that we were hoping for by doing theses park clean-up days, so praise be to God!
We have been really encouraged by our park clean up days. Not only is this kind of work gratifying being able to see a clear difference after we're done, but it seems that we're not the only ones interested in improving the neighborhood. A few days after we had cleaned the first park, some men from the city came out and fixed the swings and the teeter-totters. We have been living in this neighborhood for almost 10 months now, and the parks were in a state of disarray from the first day we moved in. Who knows how long those swings were broken before we had arrived. Then last week after we had cleaned our third park, the city came out again. They fixed one basketball hoop on one side and added a backboard and hoop on the opposite side making the only outdoor full basketball court in our area, and one of the few in the whole city. So was it a coincidence that our cleaning and the cities timing for fixing up the parks happened only days from each other? Whatever the case, we're giving glory to God because as we cleaned these parks each of us realized that there was also a need to fix the playground equipment, so that the parks would not only be clean but functional. We were going to take it upon ourselves to raise the money to fix the many parks, but it seems that the Lord was way ahead of us.
