Making our way into the Neighborhood

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.