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Hello Readers. Welcome to my blog! For the past year I’ve been immersed in a Faith in Action volunteer year with the Columbans in Britain, a year which has transformed how I think and live in the world as a person of faith. The Columbans refuse to separate their Christian identity from the call to listen and respond to the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor, and throughout my time with them I have been continually invited to hear and to respond to that cry. This blog is a response to one such invitation, an invitation to join an interfaith group of Christian and Muslim leaders on a visit to Bosnia, a country which has faced a history of inter-religious and inter-ethnic conflict and now seeks to move towards peace and reconciliation. The interfaith group in Birmingham have met faithfully for many years to reflect on issues of faith and life in the city, and one of these members is Mauricio Silva, the Interfaith dialogue coordinator for the Faith in Action programme, and a mentor for me over the year. A trip to Bosnia offered a unique opportunity for our group to reflect on how we might learn from those who have faced conflict there, to strengthen our communities back home here. It was organised collaboratively between the Dialogue Society and the Church of England, and all together there were thirteen of us from across different areas of faith and community life, who I now call my friends. I'll use this space to log and reflect on my experience of our time in Bosnia navigating a heavy history amongst people of different faiths.  Until a couple of weeks ago, Bosnia was a country that had never really crossed my mind, I’d never heard about it on the news or met anyone from that part of the world. So, aside from some online research, it was a country that was a bit of a mystery to me. I'd been told of its beauty, landscapes of alps and rivers and picturesque towns, it's great historical architecture, and its vibrant culture. I'd been told too of its people, the Croats and Serbs and Bosniaks, and how they shared the same towns and markets, went to the same schools, and lived alongside each other as traders and neighbours and friends for many years.
Until they didn't. During our trip we hope to explore how neighbours and friends turned against one another, an awful betrayal and the largest genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. We'll have the honour of spending time and sharing meals with those who lived through it, we’ll meet local faith, civic and educational leaders, visit churches and mosques, and explore how people remember conflict, practice coexistence and rebuild trust. How does a country and a people begin to recover from something like that? Why did it all break down in the first place? What kind of role does interfaith dialogue play in moving towards peace? Coming together as a group of Muslims and Christians working across Birmingham, we hope that our presence there will be an encouragement to them and we hope to learn lessons of dialogue and reconciliation to strengthen our communities back home too. See the next page for a brief overview of my understanding of some of the history of the land that contributed to the eventual civil war between 1992-1995. I hope you, readers, find these reflections interesting and perhaps make you curious enough to take a trip yourself one day… Becca.
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