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!

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 ...

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...

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.

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...

Last week we were part of a guided walk up one of the mountains that surround Jajce. Like in much of the rest of the country, you don't go for walks in the countryside without consulting local knowledge. Bosnia and Herzegovina still has an unknown number of land mines unaccounted for, despite it creeping closer to two decades since the end of the war here. Some are in marked mine fields; many are, at least assumed to be, still scattered indiscriminately in areas where fighting took place. It's not something you take chances with. As we hiked up in the hot sun we stopped in a bit of shade on the edge of a forest clearing. Here our guide pointed to the shallow hole in the ground that you might be able to make out in the picture. This was part of the frontline in the fighting that went on around Jajce. It was here that two guys who'd sat next to each other at school killed each other; a story horribly reminiscent of lyrics from the song Crazy by Seal. “One of them...

By now friends and followers of this blog who like the Novi Most Facebook page will be well aware that the organisation is making the most of the opportunity afforded by social media to get the word out. This is important. We who are involved in the work know it's needed, and appreciated, work that's making a difference. However we also know that if we don't explain that whats and the whys of it the details can be hard to second guess from the other side of Europe, less so from even father afield. That's the idea behind the series of short videos Novi Most is releasing: concise presentations of the issues affecting young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina and what Novi Most is doing in response. Having worked on putting these, and the accompanying photos, together it's good to seem them being shared and commented on online. Social media provides a great opportunity to share a story at the click of a button. We want to make the most of this opportunity. But we are al...

It's been just over two years since we moved from Mostar to Jajce. Mostar is not short of internationals living there; there are governmental agencies, non-governmental agencies and the United World College that between them draw people from the four corners of the globe. Jajce is different. There are very few foreigners who live in the town and while many of the young people we work with seem to have cousins or aunts or uncles scattered across Europe, or in the States, we found ourselves with a lot of explaining to do. “Where are you from?” “England.” What's that?” is, believe it or not, an accurate translation of an early conversation. At least one young person was convinced London and America were basically the same thing. Another stated categorically that soon the US would be part of Europe, because eventually everyone was going to be part of Europe. This had to be true: their teacher had told them! But all this happened before One Direction. In the last year they hav...

Back when we were living in the UK there was a time we were proud owners of a new new MINI. It was yellow. It was also a great car; the sort of car you could get back into after a day at a motor show and be completely satisfied with, even though it cost a fraction of the price of some of the cars you'd sat in during the day. It was during on of these motor show trips that I paid a tenner for a ride in a Caterham 7. Because if the MINI had a reputation for go-kart like handling the Caterham represents a whole other level of raw motoring. And so it was that I had the wildest five minutes I've experienced on four wheels. Apart from the few seconds after pulling away the car never travelled in a straight line. It slipped and slid, squealed and spun its way around the little test track. All hot exhausts and burning rubber. The definition of a blast. These days I don't drive a MINI, or a Caterham; I drive a Volkwagen Transporter. It's not a car but in my experience it...

Five hours and twenty minutes sat on a bus between Zagreb, Croatia, and Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, yesterday morning gave me more than enough time to ponder some of the idiosyncrasies this mode of transport offers in this part of the world. I suppose I should confess I'm no expert; the town I grew up in was not big on buses and, baring one memorable overnight coach journey from London to Edinburgh, most of my bus experience involves the top deck of old London Routemasters. That and school trips. The distinction between a bus and a coach that the English language provides is not one that holds up in translation. Everything is a bus here. There are local buses and there are buses that make international journeys. From the bus station in Jajce we could travel to a number of nearby or neighbouring countries but the only trip I've made thus far is the one to and from Zagreb. This latest journey was the first time we've travelled the route through Bihać and Karlovac; ...

The other day the M40 cropped up in a conversation with a friend. We discovered we have differing views on this sweeping stretch of motorway that connects London and Birmingham. I used to look forward to it as a relatively congestion-free chance to actually drive after grinding around the M25. She was too aware of the accident statistics people playing this kind of catch-up caused to ever enjoy using it. At 89 miles long, or 143.2 kilometres, the M40 alone provides almost exactly double the amount of motorway capacity that the entire country of Bosnia and Herzegovina has. It is a country with only two sections of motorway: around 40 kilometres between the mid-Bosnian towan of Kakanj and Sarajevo, and around 30 kilometres heading north from Banja Luka to Gradiska, on the border with Croatia. I have driven both sections end-to-end several times. The good news is more is on its way. BiH's Federation government has just signed an agreement worth 115 million euros with a...

I like driving. This is a good thing as a lot of my work here in Bosnia and Herzegovina revolves around driving. Almost all the driving I've done in the last three and a half years has been behind the wheel of one of Novi Most 's Volkswagen Transporter vans. I won't claim extensive knowledge of this catagory of vehicle but I will say the Volkswagens drive better than any Ford Transit or Renault Traffic I've driven, particularly when road conditions are less than perfect. Conditions are thus a lot of the time; either due to the immediate impact of weather, the aftermath of weather or attempts to repair the damage both of the above cause. I made this video on Monday, when I spent almost eight hours doing a there-and-back-again trip. In five minutes it gives a good glimpse of what it looks like to be behind the wheel in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Much has been written, tweeted and retweeted, today about the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the 11,541 red chairs laid out in Sarajevo to commemorate those who died there. I saw this photo on Facebook and felt it expressed my feelings better than I could in words. This stretch of street in Sarajevo is a place we know well now - we were last there last weekend - but I have no idea what it was like to be there during the siege, although we have friends who spent four years trapped inside the city. Occasionally war stories crop up in conversation but it's never something we've asked questions about. We will never be part of that past but we are here now, working for the future of the people here. It is right that, on all sides, what happened is not forgotten; that it is remembered so it never happens again. That twenty years from now the country can look back on two decades of peace and progress, not a descent again into division and destruction. (If you'v...

After a busy weekend in Sarajevo, today was a day off. I decided to make the most of the sunshine and head out on my mountain bike around the lakes near Jajce. I'd been going about an hour when I stumbled across this sight: the super-sized marriage of a decoy duck and a pedalo. Obviously, a photograph was essential, not just for its comedic value but because it illustrates an important attitude we have to our work here. Last summer we ran a month of activities with Novi Most for young people in Jajce. At the end of August we asked those who been involved for some feedback. Of the seventeen who filled out our questionnaires fifteen acknowledged they had some new experience over the summer: for some it was visiting a new city; for others it was going down a water slide at an aqua park; others went up an escalator for the first time. Having new experiences, at least fun, positive ones, is an exciting thing. The young people we worked with over the summer ended up with a better sense o...

Finally, after about forty-eight stubborn hours, YouTube decided it would start up loading this video this morning. I won't claim it's a visual epic, but it is a short-and-sweet glimpse at an interesting diversion we took on Saturday. If nothing else it shows that the long winter is finally over!

I'm not sure why I ended up watching a video featuring Eurovision expert Liam Jarnecki on the BBC site earlier this week. My attention was caught, however, by his irony-free embrace of the iconic singing contest. He was had a clear argument as to why Engelbert Humperdinck is the right choice this year for the UK. A big part of this argument hinged on the assertion that he was big in Eastern Europe. Living, as we do, in south-eastern Europe, I thought I'd put this to the test. Here's the shocking truth. My survey says 100% of residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina have never heard of him! Admittedly my survey involving asking just one person so it my not be entirely representative, although the person in question will likely watch Eurovision Song Contest. I will continue to pose the question and if there is a drastic change in the result I'll be sure to post an update. In closing I should add that on the subject of tactical voting expert Liam Jarnecki has much to learn a...

Yesterday as we we walking through the slush to the supermarket to buy water I had a thought. Having survived twelve days with just one tap in the house this had been turned off at 4pm. This was to enable repairs to start on whatever it was that needed fixing so we would get water back to the rest of the house. Our urgent requirement now was enough bottled water for essential washing and teeth cleaning. But this was not what was foremost in my mind. I was suddenly struck with the similarity between an unusually heavy winter and wartime. Several local people we know who have had a hard time over the last few weeks have said it reminded them of the early nineties. I have no first-hand experience of war so I'll take their word for it. I do know that the last thirteen days have been the first time in my life I have lived in a house without working sanitation . Washing has happened with a bucket and a bottle of water and we'll not talk about the toilet situation. Two weeks ago t...