We Do Adventure

As we write this it is less than a month to the ten year anniversary of us climbing into a Transit van to drive across Europe to start our adventure in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A lot has happened since then. So much we could write a book about it. We haven't written a book but we did push the boat out and make a booklet highlighting ten key things we've learned over the last decades. While supplies of the physical booklet are limited you can grab as many copies of the pdf version as you like! Click here for 10 things we learned in 10 years of adventure Click here for 10 things we learned in 10 years of adventure (+support forms)

We've now been weekly vlogging about our working in Bosnia and Herzegovina for over two years, which means we've comfortably passed the one hundred vlog mark. They're not all masterpieces, but most of them play their part in piecing together a broad picture of what we're doing and why it's important. Plus you get a good view of what the country looks like, which, in our opinion, if often way more beautiful than many people imagine. If you've not checked them out then this trailer will show you what you may, or may not, have been missing!

Thanks for taking time to check out the work we are doing in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It means a lot to us. This post contains a quick overview of where you can connect with us online and how to find out more about Novi Most, the youth work charity we are volunteers with. We make weekly vlogs which we upload to YouTube . We post photos and short videos on Instagram . All of this content is also available through our Facebook page . You can email us and if you like to support us financially you can download this form . You can follow Novi Most on Facebook and on Instagram . Their website is novimost.org .

Our banner image used to proudly declare "blogging from Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2008". These days that would be a false claim. We have been in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2008, all the time working as volunteer youth workers with Novi Most , but the blogs stopped a few years back. After what was an undoubtedly inadvisable absence online we started a weekly vlog back in July last year. Over the last eight months these have highlighted different aspects of our work, as well as giving a glimpse into the travels that accompany it. They are all neatly arranged in this playlist below. We hope you enjoy them. You'll find a new video every Sunday on our YouTube channel .

Don't miss the nuance of the colon: the video is called Happy, and we didn't film or edit it. Rowan, however, did lend her smiling face and improvisational dance skills to the project. Internet people will probably have heard about Happy, the song from Despicable Me 2 by Pharrell Williams. You can watch the original version on the IamOTHER Youtube channel . If that's not enough for you there is 24 hour version , split into hour-long movies on the same channel. It's a genius way to prove a viral concept doesn't have to be short and sweet. Far from the streets of LA, this dance response comes from the streets of historic Jajce, in Central Bosnia. The project was organised by volunteers at the Omladinski Centar, the local youth centre in town. The video was uploaded yesterday and as I'm writing this has just under two thousand views. That's good going. Judging by the number of people we're seeing share it on Facebook that's just the beginning. Enjoy ...

Today is FIS World Snow Day . Last year we were out on a very patchy piste making the most of some less than ideal conditions at the slope above Jajce. This year there isn't a ski lift working in the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina! You can't even say it's been a bad winter, it's barely been winter at all. There was a snow fall in November. A few resorts got enough of a base to open up for a week or two. We managed a trip to Vlašić on 21 st December, the day before World Snowboard Day . It was squeezed into a really busy period of work but the decision to head for the hills when we did looks better and better the longer winter waits to put in a proper appearance. Since the New Year the forecast has been promising snow 'next week'. It's well known that tomorrow never comes; next week has been showing even less intention to turn up. Locals tells us tales of a town virtually besieged by snow during their childhood winters. Even allowing for a little exagge...

Lest our last post read as some sort of rant against English language music let us redress the balance. Last weekend we got to see the powerful impact some properly performed pop can have on people's imagination. The video below is a short clip of Chip Kendall and DJGalactus Jack encouraging teenagers in Mostar to Solve It On The Dancefloor. It proves that language barriers don't get in the way if the energy is right, and that people from all different backgrounds can put their differences aside and party together. It may be presumptuous to suggest such moments solve deep-seated social issues but they have to help build a better tomorrow. So much of our behaviour, individually and as communities, is governed by emotional reactions to events; positive emotions from a shared experience have to be a good thing. It was a night they won't forget. The young people we know are asking for copies of this music which shows the moment may well live on for a long time yet.

The main reason our blog had been sitting unattended was work winning the battle for attention. Part of what we do here is work with the Evangelical Church of Bosnia and Herzegovina on youth work projects. This includes summer camps and conferences. Anyone who has ever been to a Christian camp will probably have experienced singing of some sort or another: maybe camp-fire songs, maybe things that sound like they come from the Bible, maybe tunes that sound like they came off the radio. The English speaking world has hundreds of artists producing all this and more. The Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian speaking world doesn't. All of that to say the work in question - producing new music recordings – is something that needs to happen more here. Music is such an important form of expression; we don't want young people to miss out on the chance to sing things they mean in their own language. People can, and do, translate English language songs and sing them. Sometimes they work, but of...

New Year has come and gone and we've missed the opportunity to tell some good stories here. Well we have if we enforce a new news policy. However, in the interests of letting you in on the interesting stuff we're going to do a bit of a rewind over the next couple of days. Sometimes there isn't the time to be involved in cool things and blog about them at the same time, so kicking off our retrospective of recent events we'll start with New Year's Eve. Budo, our Novi Most co-worker in Jajce, decided the town needed an open air concert with fireworks to see in the New Year properly. This is not an unusual idea, similar events happen all over the world, but this had never happen here before. Together with the local Omladinski Centar (Youth Centre) he got the idea off the ground, securing the all-important permissions and sponsorship from the town council, local businesses and Novi Most and the Omladinski Centar. Budo plays in one of the main local covers bands. The...

AVNOJ stands for Antifašističko Vijeće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije, or Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia. If you were to take a visit to the AVNOJ museum in Jajce – and understand enough of the different languages the information panels are written in – you would come away with the impression that the establishing of Yugoslavia was a very organised affair. I've not come across anything to suggest this wasn't actually the case. That this organisation happened under occupation, while fighting a resistance movement is impressive. It provided the basis for a establishing a country that lasted fifty years, give or take. Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the meeting in Jajce that saw Yugoslavia signed into existence. Today more people will pass through the museum's doors than probably will on any other day of the year. The local news are reporting more than a thousand visitors in town for today's commemorative events. We went out ear...

A couple of weeks ago one of my guitar students asked a question. Was it me who made the video of a girl he knew singing? Yes, was the simple answer I gave him. The slightly more complicated answer would have gone something like this. That video was something I filmed while recording them rehearsing a couple of songs for an acoustic performance with Budo, our Novi Most colleague in Jajce. I'd sent it to her in a private message, she'd left her Facebook signed in somewhere public and a friend leaked it online. She had about 1500 views overnight. I think she was happy about this. Either way, it wasn't my fault! His follow up question was obvious. Could I film him? He had sung a song at the same performance and wanted to record it to put on YouTube. The challenge for me was he didn't want to play the guitar, opting to just focus on his singing. This left me needing to learn the song and play while overseeing audio and video recording. We filmed on Wednesday afternoon,...

If you watch the video you'll see a guy lighting a flare in celebration moments after Bosnia and Herzegovina qualified for the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. For him it was a surreal evening. I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I know how he felt because he told me. I also remember him once telling me: you don't understand, England always qualify for tournaments. English fans will know that qualification, when it happens, doesn't often come without some drama. But the point stands, England expect to qualify, and more often than not they do. Tonight is truly historic for Bosnia and Herzegovina. They have never qualified for a major tournament as an independent nation...until now. They made the playoffs for the last Euros and World Cup, losing to France and Portugal. We heard people try to offset the double disappointment with conspiracy theories as to why they came so close but remained so far. This time those are just not necessary. There will be in Brazil. Leg...

On Friday night we took a group of young people to Zagreb to see Martin Smith and Matt Redman in concert. We first saw Martin Smith when we were teenagers too. His songs, and the music of Delirious, have been a big influence. Sometimes it's easy to forget how big but there's nothing like the live experience to jog the memory; no escape from the weird and wonderful joy of revisiting the familiar in another time and another place. Context may change but truth doesn't for those who want to be History Makers . The focus my be different but the passion still comes from a heart that burns with that Obsession . Taking It Wherever It Goes was what they used to say. Back then we didn't expect it to bring us to this point, but here we are...happy we still have the energy and desire to out dance the teenagers on God's Great Dance Floor !

Yesterday we arrived back in Bosnia and Herzegovina after three weeks in England. Most of the people we met during this trip have never seen this country. If they have heard of it their only frame of reference is usually news reports from the early nineties. We tried hard to give them a fair picture of how things are now. This included enthusing about the hospitable people and the beautiful countryside, as well as talking about the segregation ingrained in society and the state of political stalemate that saps all sense of hope from most normal people we meet. Sadly these last two points can be linked to the international intervention the ended the armed conflict. This intervention did stop the killing, of which there had been a lot, but progress towards a fully functioning democracy has not been so quick. At least that's what I used to think. It was the Belgium elections in 2010 that first got me questioning. It went without government for 541 days while political parties fail...

Tonight we are officially at the end of our Novi Most summer activities for another year. We had a parents evening to finish things off, giving them a chance to see what their young people had been up to over the last two months. We crammed a bunch of activities into a short video to tell the story, although there was plenty of good stuff that didn't make the cut. It's been another summer where we've seen lots of young people get the opportunity to try new things and have some great some great experiences they probably wouldn't have got on their own. For us it's encouraging to know we have happy parents of the happy young people we've been working with. As we said to them this evening, now we have a bit of a break and we start to think what's going to make this winter special when our activities start up again in October.

At one of the summer camps we were part of in July there was a workshop on survival fire starting. It was a popular session, understandably. When young people see the seemingly impossible demonstrated they want in on the action. The guy leading the session had some serious mountain craft credentials to burn – if you'll pardon the pun – and he didn't disappoint. We, however, had one disappointed young person. For some reason he'd missed the workshop and really felt like he'd missed out. So we decided we'd do a bit of firelighting ourselves. Not wanting to stake a claim as some kind of mountain man I did some research on YouTube for some more urban ideas. A shopping trip this afternoon equipped me with enough cans of Coke, chocolate bars, sticks of chewing gum and AA batteries to go around. Yes, all of the above can be a useful part of an improvised fire starting process. Sadly, at this evening's get together the sun was too far gone for us to get the chocol...

Pedalo is a word with certain connotations, at least in my mind. At best, I'm imaging a slightly suspect water craft sporting original seventies' styling, the worse for wear as a result of almost four decades providing pleasure trips on a touristy lake or at a tacky beach resort. Truth be told, I know exactly where to find pedalos that answer to this description. However, they are not alone, nor are they the final word in recreational rentals. Tonight we went out with one of their near neighbours and experienced what has to be described as some next-generation pedalo action!

We have a floorball team here in Jajce. That is unusual. Although I'd never heard of the sport until I arrived in this country it's not one of the main sports here. Football undoubtedly claims that prize, although handball, basketball and volleyball would all give it a good run for its money. While floorball may be largely undiscovered here, as it is in the UK, it's huge in Finland. The couple of times I've been there it was the only sport I saw kids playing in the streets, unless you count cycling, which they do a lot of too. When I heard our team had been drawn against a Finnish side in an international floorball tournament hosted in Banja Luka this weekend I was a little concerned. Concerned that we would be on the receiving end of a lesson that our young team might take a little too harshly. There is, after all, no shame in being beaten by people who may have been playing the game longer than some of our team have been alive! I made sure I mentioned this per...

Yesterday I led a mountain bike trip for a group of young people. I used to do this back in the UK. The big difference: the distinct lack of mountains in the south of England. Here we were up at around 1000m, or 3300ft, depending how you like to measure your elevation above sea level. However the basics were the same. Giving hire bikes the once over, making sure seat heights were appropriate and that sensible gears had been selected. Like the in the UK, the aim is to ensure everyone in the group feels they have been challenged, but not freaked out, by the ride. Some of this is achieved by allowing people to ride certain sections at their own pace before regrouping, another part is in setting challenges that focus people to think about elements of their riding. One of my favourites for this the slow race. You set a short, straight course – about half a dozen bike lengths – and race head-to-head. The last person over the line wins. I was never a rider who enjoyed flying down hil...

I guess it was iTunes that began the new music Tuesday thing. I'm sure the back in the days when Our Price existed you'd go and buy new singles on a Monday. Times change and Tuesday's it is. While I can have few complains about iTunes' service the Tuesday thing is slightly annoying. Monday's are often a day off – we work most weekends – and therefore an ideal day to go previewing new releases. Obviously, I'm ultimately the winner the way things are as the chance of impulse buying a new release is effectively removed. And for that my wallet is thankful! Throughout this summer Tuesdays are our music day. We didn't want to stop music courses altogether over the holidays so we set aside Tuesdays as the day to teach. This morning I've taught keyboards, guitar and bass guitar. I will be back in this evening for more lessons. All of us on the Novi Most team in Jajce teach music, all of us have students at different levels. Some came to us with a little ...