A home cooked dinner.
Different tour agencies offer different experiences to make their tours more enticing than similar ones offered by their competitors. As I booked my first trip with Overseas Adventure Travel (OAT) they enticed me with the opportunity to have a home hosted dinner and on this particular adventure we had two of those scheduled. This night in Sarajevo was the first.
Let me preface my experience by noting that I am, by nature, a bit of a skeptic so I approached the evening with some anticipatory agnosticism regarding the level of authenticity we’d experience. Additionally, my mild cynicism had been reinforced by one or two people on the journey who had previously traveled with OAT and said that they’d sometimes felt the experience was closer to “Sunday best” than to everyday dinner. By the time we left our dinner with Sanela and her family, my doubts had been thoroughly erased.
OAT had arranged for two host families so our group of 12 split into halves of six each. I think one group consisted of me, Alison, Jackie, Judy, Marie, and Trina but the gauze of memory has obscured that aspect. Nevertheless, as soon as we arrived at the building where our host family lives – a mid-rise apartment building that still bore scars from the war – I had the immediate sense that the dinner could be genuine.
We arrived a bit earlier than originally scheduled due to an upcoming and previously unscheduled surprise that some of us would share later in the evening. Damir introduced us to our hostess, Sanela (thanks to Damir for the correction). We crowded into an old elevator and rode up six or seven floors to a small apartment where we met her husband, son, and mother-in-law. (My apologies to Sanela and her family. Once again, my memory has blurred and I simply don’t remember anyone’s names.) We didn’t meet Sanela’s daughter whose medals you see hanging on the wall in the photo. She’s a rhythmic gymnast who was off at practice.
The apartment was small and clean but just untidy enough in spots to reflect the presence of children. The young fellow in the picture is Sanela’s son and yes, he’s wearing a soccer jersey. As you can see, everyone is dressed informally and this not only gave me an immediate sense of comfort but also made me feel that this could be happening anywhere in the world.
The dining table was small and accommodated Sanela, her mother-in-law, and the six of us so the two males in the family ate their dinner at a small table in the living area while the younger also played games on his mother’s phone. Although I sensed that we weren’t eating on their everyday dishware, the general ambiance was so casual that, once again, I had the feeling that we could be not only sharing a meal with a family much like my own but also as though we were simply friends or neighbors who had dropped by for dinner. Because she was the only one in our host family who spoke English and, since outside of a handful of phrases no one in our group spoke Bosnian, we talked mostly with Sanela and she occasionally served as a translator with the rest of her family – mainly her mother-in-law who was in and out of the kitchen.
We learned that Sanela works as a prep chef – though Alison elevated her to the status of sous chef – in a local restaurant who rarely has a day off and that she had arrived home just minutes before greeting us. Her mother-in-law had prepared the meal of soup, a meat dish (but chicken for me), mashed potatoes, and (I think) elderberry juice. I don’t recall what we had for dessert with our tea and coffee. Sanela’s husband works in a warehouse. Like parents everywhere, their focus is their children and was another trait that linked to my experience.
(For the first two years or so following my decision to retire, I filled much of my time covering as many as 11 different sports teams at the University of Maryland for the website Testudo Times. I’d attended these events for years before I began writing about them and over the course of those years came to be acquainted not only with the student athletes and coaches but often with the athletes’ parents as well. I learned not only about the time and treasure the parents of these athletes devoted to supporting their child’s training in the years before they reached college but also looked on in some awe at the frequency with which they’d travel eight hours or more to watch the team play – even if their child saw little or no time on the field or on the court.)
I don’t know why it surprised me to learn that Sanela and her husband do much the same. They work hard, live modestly, and scramble to accumulate enough money to be able to send their daughter to her training so they can pay for her to travel with her team to various gymnastics competitions while doing likewise for their son to support his interest in soccer allowing him to train and travel like his sister.
During the course of the evening, we all knew that it would only be a matter of time before the subject of the war and Sanela’s experience became part of the conversation. What Sanela told us about her experience of the war was, in many ways, eerily (yet predictably) similar to what we’d heard from our guide earlier in the day.
Our guide, Danijela (again, thanks, Damir) was in college at the time (and please excuse me if I misreported this in a previous entry) and had two main factors that prompted her to stay despite the deteriorating situation. One was that Sarajevan sense of disbelief that the situation would deteriorate as it did. That, of course, had its roots in the ethnic harmony and mixing that predated the fighting. She told us that she herself was the child of a “mixed” marriage. Her father was a Bosnian Serb and her mother a Muslim. The other, and perhaps more important reason, was that she had a (Muslim) boyfriend whom she would eventually marry in July 1993. She also told us that the event was so unique that the German magazine Der Spiegel reported on it.
Although she was younger than our guide and Der Spiegel reported none of her experiences, Sanela talked of living in basements, moving through trenches, and constant bombardments. It was Sanela who helped care for her younger sister. Her description of trying to maintain a sense of normalcy by continuing her education was harrowing. We learned that at war’s end, she studied without a break, choosing school over social life so she could finish her education at the same age she would have had the war not interrupted the process.
We grew so familiar so quickly that the time passed rapidly and we suddenly realized we had to make a rather rushed departure so we could be back on our bus by the appointed time of 19:30. I left thinking that if only everyone could share these cross cultural, multi-ethnic dinners from time to time, without being able to frame someone as some “other”, as someone somehow alien to us simply because their belief system or facial features or skin color might differ from ours, we couldn’t help but find our common humanity. Leaving my visit with Sanela and her family, I left a family that spoke a different language, held different religious beliefs, and lived 7,500 kilometers from my home but ultimately who were very much like the parents of every student athlete I’d met at the University of Maryland who do all they can and make all the sacrifices they need to try to secure better lives for their children.
That they were able to do so with joy and optimism having come through a terrible, terrible war was all the more remarkable.