We Do Adventure

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...

Today we took a snowy Sunday afternoon stroll. Partly it was to walk off a generously proportioned late lunch but mostly it was to see the waterfall; we've been back in Jajce over a month and had thus far failed to pay it a visit. It is still there, still looking good. So good I would have been posting a wonderfully wintery picture here. However, it was upstaged by this recently installed tourist sign. Clearly the sign cannot compete with the waterfalls as a thing of beauty. But it highlights what is a surprisingly common problem with tourist signs in this part of the world: poor English translations. This is even more noticeable now we can read the local language. We know what they're trying to say. All too often it is lost in awkward translation. This sign is advertising Jajce as a "museum under the open sky" - something the town genuinely is - and is sponsored by two international agencies. However the English translation is clumsy and, in one section, part mis...

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 ...

It’s been almost a month; in that time we’ve finished the Novi Most summer programme, cleared up Klub and spent a couple of weeks in the UK. Visiting England was an interesting experience, seeing familiar things but from a different perspective. However, I’ll not ramble on and on. Instead I’ll leave you with this ‘Alphabetical English Adventure’ list* and the promise of a BiH-related post tomorrow! Ben & Jerrys, Birmingham, Brighton, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, CBSO, CDs, Coldplay, Delirious, Double Deckers, family, fish and chips, FOPP, Ford Focus, food, football, friends, Gatwick Airport, Girls Aloud, Gunwharf Quays, Hertz, Hillsong, HMV, Hotel Chocolat, Jay-Z, Julie & Julia, Kettle Chips, KFC, London, M25, Mabel, Nandos, Novi Most, O2 arena, Oxford, pear cider, presents, punting, Sherbet fountains, Symphony Hall, tea, The Time-Travellers Wife, TK Maxx, trains, Vivid, WeDoAdventure, Wembley Stadium, You Get The Story When You Go. (*the lines of which may be read between, at your di...

It’s well known fact among British travellers communicating with those of another mother tongue that any English word can be understood if repeated often enough, with increasing volume. That was why our ears pricked up at lunchtime when from the table behind us came the refrain: WE ARE WAITING FOR SOME FRIENDS! As the gentleman in question was not using his native language one might imagine him showing some compassion for someone struggling with his accent accent; not a bit of it. Rowan was soon laughing, indiscreetly, at a poor waiter startled by an English language outburst from a Spaniard. With their beer ordered they sat around waiting for their friends. Before long a line of X-Trails was neatly parked outside the restaurant, leading me to guess our entertainment came courtesy of EUFOR’s presence in Mostar. We know a few words of Spanish, thanks to a number of trips we made to the south of Spain in the late nineties; enough to make the assumption their noisy conversation later turn...

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...

Rowan has bruises on her legs and my right arm aches a little. Such are our scars from shifting shoeboxes. We got the call to join a large team of people to unload a truck full of Samaritan’s Purse goodies for distribution here over the next month. We shouldn’t complain because a language lesson meant we missed half the unloading and the rain was kind and held off by the time we arrived to help fill a second container. As with all repetitive manual tasks there is some fun to be found in it and so we passed a pleasant hour passing boxes. Boxes where obviously a theme for today. Earlier we visited the post office to collect four parcels. This seemed to take an eternity as the lady behind the counter made sure all the paperwork matched up and got signatures in the appropriate places. It also got us wondering about why French is the international language of post. Am I mistaken in thinking that as Rowland Hill is widely credited as the inventor of the model postal service that English woul...

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...