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)

Last night, I was reading in a recent issue of Time magazine how Samuel Eto'o believes football is "the best weapon against political conflict." It may be. But as I'm sitting watching England's oldest allies play in the World Cup I have doubts. Logic says I should want to support a team my country hasn't fought against in a very long time. Emotion says differently. It's not because former England coach Sven Goran Eriksson is coaching the opposition. It probably has more to do with the owner of (arguably) the world's most punchable face just slamming a shot off the woodwork. I jest about the punching, of course, but the presence of Ronaldo in the Portugal side makes it hard offer them genuine support. (That said Droga's place in the Ivory Coast squad does do something to balance this out.) Memories of a cold night in Zenica, where a less-than-impressive Portuguese side ground out the narrowest of victories, remind me of how nearly this could have be...

I got home last night and picked up Martin Bell's book 'In Harm's Way'. Large parts of the book are his reflections of his time in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 90s. I read it before we moved here. Eighteen months later the place names are no longer historical abstractions but 'the place where so-and-so lives' or 'the place where we turn right to get to so-and-so'. This weekend three things made me remember his book; here are two of them. A Bosnian friend told us how she'd been on a trip in Serbia a few years ago. She'd been put up by a very poor but very hospitable Serbian old lady. At one point the old lady pointed out the damage that still remains from the American bombing of her area. 'Was your town bombed?' she had asked her guest. 'I didn't have the heart to tell her the Serbs bombed our town' our friend told us. As we sat at breakfast yesterday the TV played silently in the corner. Radovan Karadžić was making...

One of the perils of language learning is the inevitable mistakes. After lunch on Sunday the waiter seemed in no hurry to present us with a bill so Rowan tracked him down, only to inform him: I need to cry...before correcting herself! Today I was explaining to some of the local people we work with how I might use ‘interesting’ somewhat euphemistically, when referring to something I didn’t particularly enjoy. Words have meanings and then there are the implied meanings. We’ve found many an English turn of phrase cannot be translated, so we’re busy learning new ways of expressing things as well as a new language in which to communicate. The clock is ticking and I sense we need to be making better progress than we are but the key is not to panic. I specialise in the deer-in-the-headlight moments, all too often falling into a panicked silence in which not even English comes to my rescue. And if something does float, nonchalantly, to mind it has every chance of being the dregs of my French G...

An update on our progress learning language out here. The lessons have been intense experiences but they're starting to work!

Since seeing the sorry mess that was the beginning of the restoration of Mostar's Music School I've been pondering the lessons. I should confess I am not a qualified scaffolder. Nevertheless, I have done a bit of rigging in the past. Despite my comment in my video I have combined a rooftop and scaffolding without adding protective headgear into the mix. However, that's not what I've been thinking about. My thoughts are with a damaged building that stood, albeit in a ruined state, for fifteen years since the conflict only to fall when help for rebuilding arrived. Perhaps you can see where this is going? My suspicion is the Music School frontage was pulled down by scaffolding caught in the wind. In every instance of building renovation we've seen here the scaffolding is secured into the front of the building involved. There is little in the way of bracing, certainly none of the big diagonals I'm used to seeing. It seems that scaffolding is not truly self-supportin...