We Do Adventure

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...

Back in the UK I used to take lessons, that is I was the sort of person who'd give the real teacher a break for a lesson or two. Who knows how many times I wielded a dry-wipe marker during the late-nineties and early-noughties but I do remember the first time I stood up in a classroom with an interactive whiteboard. What a distraction, to me at least. The subject of that lesson escapes me although me the memory of playing with the light-sensitive pen on the projected image does not. Nevertheless, as a child of the seventies chalk dust and free school milk were part of formative educational experience. I learnt something about Bosnian handwriting today. Somehow in a little over eighteen months here I hadn't noticed that, from an English perspective, handwritten m's and n's have an extra hump. Look closely at the picture above and you'll see a sentence that starts: Moj otac je. That means 'my father is'. The next word was a mystery to me. It looks vaguely ...

You might remember me writing about our first concert. Well, our second one is on Friday night at a local internet cafe with a habit of staging rock gigs! We have twelve songs all ready to go but we have a problem. We have no name. We need one for the advertising by Monday. Perferably in Bosnian. We're a three-piece alternative rock band, singing in English. If you think you have a name that might match our volume and energy then please let us know. (Comedy candidates need not apply!)

Tonight I’m shamelessly stealing an extract from a brilliant post on Brits in Bosnia. This particular aspect of the Bosnian fascination with paper work was new to me but it’s one of the best illustrations of their national fixation I’ve read. The subject is birth certificates... "The problem is that in Bosnia your birth certificate is re-validated every 6 months. Yup, every 6 months every single Bosnian must go back to the relevant ministry and get a stamp, or whatever it is that they do to show that they are still, well, born. Because, you know, just maybe they have been born again and not in the religious sense."

I’ve long said i speak two languages: English and foreign. ‘Foreign’ is my personal amalgam of words and phrase gleaned from my travels. On the surface it could seem a diverse and useful tool, however it is not. The one thing I can guarantee is whatever country I visit only the words and phrases from every other country jump up and down shouting ‘pick me’ in the back of my mind. We are working hard to get to grips with the Bosnian. At the same time I am shocked by the amount of schoolboy French that has resurfaced from my subconscious. A French friend recently sent us an album they have produced but Rowan doesn’t really approve of me listening to it. She claims that it’ll just confuse us. She is probably right. However, today I was at a kindergarten discussing a redecoration project. Of the four of us visiting two were local, one German and me, an Englishman. They were looking at large tubs of paint in a store room when I started to hear disgruntled noises and the word ‘Francuski’. Sud...

I was chastised tonight for my reticence to speak Bosnian, by a Bosnian in Bosnian. That I understood it was a telling off says something about the improvement in my language skills. But they have a point. It is the embarrassment of being wrong I need to get over. Perhaps I need someone to get in my face a scream: get over yourself! Yesterday I was reading ‘It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be’ by Paul Arden*. He extols the freeing power of being wrong. And in this context he’s right. I know it. When it comes to working with ideas I constant encourage others not to fear being wrong, yet perhaps the same fear is stopping me from opening my mouth. I know I’m becoming too comfortable being silent – not needing to explain myself of have my say in a conversation! When I do try it can all backfire. If nothing else, those moments give Rowan the chance to laugh at my deer-in-the-headlights facial expressions. She is enjoying watching me struggle at something, and I can’t bla...

Doctor Dolittle – and I’m speaking about he of the Hugh Lofting books, not the unwatchable Eddie Murphy – spoke to the animals. He understood their language. Today I gained a greater understanding of how Bosnian animal differ from their English-speaking counterparts when it comes to their most famous phrases. English cats ‘meow’. Cats in Mostar, of which there are many, can be heard to ‘mijau’. Like several Bosnian words we’ve found this is basically a phonetic transliteration. ‘Džem’ is a favourite example. ‘Šorc’ is another. Yes, ‘jam’ and ‘shorts’ respectively. Back to the animals, it seems that baring the transliteration cats and horses, and ducks and cows speak the same language – and rabbits don’t speak at all! But the surprising difference is dogs. My English-speaking audience will know that when a dog barks they say ‘woof woof’. Perhaps it’s the lack of a ‘w’ in the Bosnian alphabet; perhaps it’s their Balkan temperament, but when a dog here bares his teeth to make some noise t...

Tonight my brain hurts. I’ve worked almost thirty-six hours in three days – which is part of the problem – but the primary cause this evening was a cheap game of nylon tipped darts! This budget purchase has been a hit with the older youth at Klub. We’ve been playing down from 301. Keeping the score has its challenges, particularly when the local habit is to abbreviate twenty, dvadeset, to dva’est, which doesn’t sound so different to dvanaest, or twelve. Then you’re doing sums and writing digits while thinking unfamiliar sounds. But it’s all good, and necessary, practice so I won’t complain!

In English it is somewhat hypothetical to postulate about the naming of roses. They are roses. That’s the name they’ve been given. We talk about someone’s given name and it is indeed their unchanging identity unless they choose to shorten or misspell it, or allow others to do so. It seems teenage girl particularly enjoy experimenting with alternate spellings; perhaps in search of a unique identity, perhaps just to give some of the English language’s more underused letters a run out! I am Matt, and have been for years, although my mother will argue that ‘Matthew is such a nice name’. It is: it’s just not one I readily associate with myself. Here in Bosnia, however, names change not just on the whim of the individual but through the nature of the language. I’m still coming terms with this linguistic intrusion into what I’ve always perceived as the hallowed ground of nomenclature. I read a Bosnian TV magazine with film stars name’s transliterated. Recognise Vinz Von anyone? I decided my...

We visited Mostar in March this year. It was our reconnaissance trip. A time to see things and meet people we'd being working with. We also took the time to assess the shopping situation, noting what we saw stacked on the shelves of supermarkets. However, it was a causal comment that really stuck with Rowan. A Novi Most member mentioned her washing was still damp after five days hanging out to dry. Suddenly 'tumble drier' was indelibly written at the top of Rowan's must-take list. As our drier was old (read dispensable) we figured there was nothing to lose by putting it on the van. Now we find we've rented an apartment that has a drier. This is a rare but welcome circumstance. Our spare appliance quickly acquired an eager new owner. So before it spun its last spin for us I thought I should replace it's trusty three-pin plug with a local two pin version. Plugs here can go in the socket either way up. They have an earth connector on both sides. That's strange ...

This morning I was beaten by the weather. Rowan is anxious that we attend to the decking at the back of our house. She left the house announcing that 'it will be sunny and cloudy' today, which was code for 'I expect you to have stained the decking by the time I get back' ! I was a little surprised seeing as only yesterday we'd had a conversation about the weather forecast being rain all week - and you can't stain decking in the rain. I was a third of the way through the first coat when I felt the first drops of rain. I know when to quit! It was back to the Bosnian - the faithful flash-card programme on my laptop . It is going in, albeit a little slowly. A recap of what I've covered the last couple of weeks was encouraging although I know I need to keep up the speaking part. Rowan has plans for us to make videos of the role plays in one of the books we're studying from. That's sure to give you some amusement, whether you understand the language or not...

Yes, it's Monday! Monday morning and I'm sitting down for my first focused Bosnian-learning session. Rowan has a head start on me and while I doubt I'll catch her up soon I certainly can't afford to fall any further behind! Rowan's already spent hours on a flash-cards programme from Before You Know It , so that's where I'm starting. So far so good - although my head hurts now. I'm attempting a multi-sensory-assualt by listening to CDs of songs that are sung in the Bosnian church we'll attend when we move. We'll probably end up playing them at some point too, so I'll get round to learning them properly before we leave. Now I'm off to label our household appliances in Bosnian!