We Do Adventure

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...

Earlier this summer I saw an “article” on The Telegraph website which consisted of little more than a string of Lily Allen tweets, linked by some poor prose, masquerading as an attempt at celebrity gossip. It was the kind of sub-journalism that one hopes resulted in someone being relieved of their writing duties! I don't blame Twitter for this. The micro-blogging site delivers the weird and wonderful with surprising ease. Try searching its feeds for mentions of 'Bosnia'. You'll quickly discover there are plenty of Bosnian Beliebers desperate for Justin to visit the country. Today, however, I saw something genuinely interesting: a link to a UWC Facebook page. While we were in Mostar we knew several United World College students in the college there. We heard a lot about the UWC philosophy and we saw the opportunities it opened up for them. I was intrigued to read that a student from one of the world's more closed countries is about to enter that world. At the risk of...

If you want to hear Rowan and I rocking out head over to the Gilgal Facebook page . Plus, there are a bunch of older live videos on the Gilgal YouTube channel .

If you happen to be my friend on Facebook you might have noticed I updated my status the other night to say I was off to read what The Economist had to say about social networking. Someone asked me what they said. I replied: nothing that I didn't know already. This post is intended to clarify what might be seen as both a sweeping and an arrogant statement! I'm typing from our computer room in Klub. Around me are teens and twenties online. They all live in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and represent a mix of the different ethnic and social backgrounds of the city's residents. There are all on Facebook. I don't just mean that they all have Facebook profiles, they are all on Facebook now. While the whole world of the internet is at their fingertips they have all chosen the same destination. Well done Mark Zuckerberg. The Economist says social networking dominance in Facebook's to lose. Experiences like mine help prove the point. It is an indicator of that all importa...

Rowan came back from two hours of teaching on a rubbish dump this afternoon. She was cold. This is hardly surprising. Although we're still yet to see serious rain, or the fabled wind we've been promised, temperatures have dropped noticably over the last couple of days. Two hours outside and you're going to feel it. Even indoors you can feel the change. Our apartment doesn't have central heating, which is normal for Mostar. We have an air-conditioning unit that will blow hot air and a couple of small heaters. These do warm things up but this heat quickly disappears when you switch the heaters off. So it seems important to be wrapped up against the cold. This presents a challenge for Rowan. She has never 'believed' in coats! It has taken some measure of arm-twisting on every occassion she's come close to buying sensible outer-ware. Today's incident can be excused to some degree; due to the dirty nature of working on rubbish dump she'd been told not to ...

It's hard to imagine what moving to another country would have been like in an age before mobile telecommunications and the internet. The distance, the time delays in messages and the chance that you might be somewhere so remote you were completely cut off from the outside world. (People pay good money for that kind of solitude these days.) We've found the adjustments of settling into a new environment much eased by being able to chat to parents and friends on Skype. In fact we've been in contact with friends and family around the world about our move. Then there's this: the blog. Who knows where you're reading it? But for all the wonders of modern technology these electronic communications have a drawback. There's no e-equivalent of walking into a room and refusing to leave until you get what you came for! I have a situation where something borrowed from me before I left the UK was not returned. I've left an answer phone message: no reply. Text message: no ...