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Bosna’da Haziran 2014’te neler yaptık?

KU GlobalAid, Bosna Savaşı’nın getirdiği yoksulluğun ardından ülkedeki üretim faaliyetlerine destek olmak için Nar projesi adıyla Haziran 2013 ve öncesinde Bosna’dan Geriye Kalanlar adıyla Nisan 2012’te Bosna Hersek’e gitti. Bu projelerin devamı olarak 4-10 Haziran 2014 tarihleri arasında, Bosna Hersek’te idik.

Srebrenitsa kentine gittiğimizde savaştan etkilenen ve yoksullukları devam eden kadınların ürettikleri el ürünlerini satın aldık.

https://vine.co/v/MDzVIt5ZuZm   https://vine.co/v/MDapme17DJQ

Yine bu kadınlarla oturup sohbet ederek dertlerini dinledik, üretim ve satış süreçlerinin daha iyi koşullarda, sürdürülebilir bir şekilde devam etmesi için eksikleri neler vb. konularda sorular sorduk ve cevaplarını not aldık.

https://vine.co/v/MDWBP3Wwd29 https://vine.co/v/MDWJVOhxIaB Arkasından anıt mezarları ve yanındaki fabrika alanını ziyaret ettik, burada savaşı yaşayanları dinleyip belgesel izledik.

https://vine.co/v/MDZ2hrLxpUe Srebrenitsa'da Emmaus yurtlarında kalan çocuklarla vakit geçirerek onlara hediyeler verdik.

https://vine.co/v/MDm5hwah3hY https://vine.co/v/MDODQxwvjV5 Ve duvar boyama aktivitelerini yaptık.

https://vine.co/v/MDm2vYIJBZd https://vine.co/v/MDOWIVIlazt https://vine.co/v/MDO12ZLzB5U https://vine.co/v/MDOgP22BT7U https://vine.co/v/MDOpZTp9372 Ve Srebrenitsalı kadınların üretmiş oldukları el ürünlerinin, bu kentin geniş bir pazar ekonomisine sahip olmaması nedeniyle Saraybosna'ya götürerek, açtığımız standda satışını gerçekleştirdik.

https://vine.co/v/MDpJ5njhege Standımız Saraybosna'da 3 gün süreyle açık kaldı ve son günün akşamında Yunus Emre Kültür Merkezi'nde yaptığımız resepsiyonla etkinliğimizi tamamladık.

Şimdiki hedefimiz projenin sürdürebilir/ kalıcı bir şekilde ve daha kaliteli bir üretimle devam etmesi için gereken adımları atmak. Bizim devreden çıktığımız dönemlerde de Srebrenitsalı kadınların ürünlerinin Türkiye ve Bosna Hersek'te satışını gerçekleştirmelerini arzu ediyoruz. Bu kapsamda, işlenmemiş ürünleri bir marka adı altında kendi el emeklerini uygulamalarını ve daha sonra da bunları Türkiye’de satacak bir mağaza açımı konusunda çalışmalarımızı ilerletmek istiyoruz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ebPj7KCEGc

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Today is the stand day!

After getting great news about our new sponsors just before leaving for Bosnia, we are now in Sarajevo after spending 3 days in Srebrenica. On the first day, we got off the plane and hit the road to Srebrenica, to EMMAÜS headquarters and checked on our magnificent stand. YAY! It's great, preserved well since last year, thanks to EMMAÜS staff. On the second day, we met with some of the women and collaboratives of Srebrenica and they showcased their products, where we purchased a selection for resell in Sarajevo to benefit their crafts. After product showcasing, we had a sincere meeting with people from Srebrenica and they shared their challenges and expectations. Our visit, our sincere interest and just our attention made them all feel hopeful and happy, as you can see in the photographs. :) After spending time with women, we went to the memorial and listened to our guide Hasan, who is a survivor. It was so touching... The children, of course! They were enjoying their lives and they loved to spend time with us, even though we cannot speak the same language, we felt that we knew each other. We played games such as Uno and ninja and had loads of fun. We got our hands dirty! Not just games, in order to make life in EMMAÜS more colorful, we painted the walls together! Balloons, suns, stars and hearts! We had fun together as we were painting the walls. A few hours after that, we hugged each other and we left EMMAÜS and hit the way to Sarajevo! Now we are in Sarajevo and we are very excited to open our stand next to the memorial founain in the city center where we will display and sell the products of the women of Srebrenica for next three days in Sarajevo! All proceeds made from selling of these products will be reinvesed into the project so that we can continue to find ways to support and empower the women of Srebrenica. Don't forget to swing by our stand in Sarajevo, near the central mosque. We look forward to seeing you today!

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Awesome news! Just before we get on our way to Bosnia, we had our new sponsors from Bosnia & Turkey!

Thanks a lot to Hakto Tekstil from Turkey and Ekipman d.d.o from Bosnia for their special interest in our project.

Special thanks to Hakan Koç ve Kemal Koç for their unique support to our project.

We are very excited!

Stay tuned.

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DAY 5- SUMMING UP

During our journey, we listened to local people, we learned a lot about the past from them, we met with kids, spent time with them, we felt the experience inside us. Every day was a new journey in itself where we got together as a group and met new incredible people from whom we learned a lot. On our fifth day, we were again near our stand, selling our products as much as we can. In the evening, we were glad to have had this journey completed successfully and feeling accomplished about what we did. What we didn’t do was saying that this was all we could do; instead even now, we started to talk about how we can improve this project and have a more successful, more sustainable one next year. With such ambition and belief, there is nothing one couldn’t do. Thank you and good bye to all the readers of this blog until KU GlobalAid’s next journey, as the blue butterflies fly away.

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DAY 4- Let’s Sell Our Products for Srebrenica People! : SARAJEVO

The 4th day and the 5th day of our project were left for the stand. We aimed at selling the most products possible. Early in the morning, we headed to the Yunus Emre Cultural Center to take our stand from there. We detached the parts of the stand so that we could carry it on the streets. We were all carrying our heavy parts on the streets to arrive at our destination.

We arrived at the place where we had permission to put a stand on. However, it was impossible to fit a stand there! It was extremely small and we would be blocking another lady’s store by our stand. There came another solution: with the allowance of the police, we decided to put our stand in a place nearby where there was a closed store and we wouldn’t be blocking anyone. We prepared our stand and put the products on quickly. It was a lot of fun and it included a lot of group work. 

During the day, we were drawing so much attention from outside. Everyone was asking what we were doing and we told them about our journey, our NAR project. It was fun. We found a guitar from a local-Turkish lady and was able to play it from time to time to attact more tourists. It was a long day, but totally worth it. We left our stand in the mosque nearby thanks to the imam who agreed to take it in. It was a long and tiring day full of experiences.

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Photos of Day 3 - Busy Day:The Day for The Reception: SARAJEVO

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DAY 3- Busy Hours: The Time for the Reception : SARAJEVO

We woke up early today as the rain of Srebrenica does: since we needed to set the road to Sarajevo and leave the lovely town of Srebrenica behind. We are a bit hüzünlü (collective melancholy) because we had to leave the kids whom we became friends with behind. Again it was a journey of around 3 hours back to the city. The road was almost always passing through mountains where we were surrounded by trees. While we were going to Sarajevo, one of our friends Can was on his way to Doboj where there is a rehabilitation center for mentally-disabled people to give a bag of our aids to them. He told us that he was very warmly welcomed there and he made a small speech about how he is happy to be there with them which he received a lot of applause for.

Meanwhile we had arrived in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia. The city was on lowland. Edina explained us the name Sarajevo comes from “Saray ova” which means Palace on the Lowland in Turkish. It was surrounded by mountains again, creating a strong wind. There we quickly left our entire luggage in our hostel and went to the Yunus Emre Turkish Cultural Center to get ready for our reception. We felt like this place was like a small Turkey in itself since we were able to communicate in Turkish with the people inside and felt like home. On the first floor of this place, we started getting ready for the reception. We brought together the pieces of our stand. We put decorations around like a map that explained our journey and a slight-show of our photos during our journey and a part of the wall where people could write what they think about the future.

Meanwhile the band took their place and started playing Bosnian music. By 5 pm, the place was swarming with people. Interesting conversations, lots of laughter, our lovely stand always drawing the attention, the reception started. It was going so much fun. Around 6, we gave a little break to our conversations and our project head Utku and KU GlobalAid founder Ayşe İnan both made short speeches about the NAR Project: what we aimed at, how our journey was going.

Then, we thanked to a couple of significant people who helped us with our project: Edina from Emmaüs, the head of the Student Council at Sarajevo University, the head of Yunus Emre Cultural Center and Satı Hanım from the Turkish Consulate in Sarajevo. It was a lovely evening. At the end of it all, we were extremely tired but we felt accomplished, at least partially. Tomorrow, the most challenging part is coming: where we are going to be on the street, selling our NAR Products.

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Photos of Day 2 - Integrating with The People of Srebrenica

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Day 2 - Integrating with The People of Srebrenica

We woke up to a lovely cool morning today in the pretty town of Srebrenica. Being out in the country again for the second day of our project, we were all a bit more smiling, but also still shocked about all the terrible history of the town that we had learned yesterday. 

The first half of our day was to be spent with the women who came from villages around Srebrenica to bring their home-made products to us. The women from the villages started coming after we had a strong breakfast. There were around fifteen of them with a wide range of ages. They brought us all the accessories, knitting, hats, bags, socks that they made. It was a fun morning choosing what to get from them for our stand in Sarajevo. The most touching part was when one of the women said “Even I can’t believe how strong we are sometimes. I hope nothing like Srebrenica massacre happens to anyone else.”

It continues raining each day a little bit even though it is June. For people coming from the heat of Turkey, that is pretty unexpected. Therefore, we are enjoying it a lot. In the afternoon, after the women left, it was time for us to meet with the children which we were all looking forward to. A group of eight to ten kids are staying in the center of Emmaüs. They come from poor families who are unable to take care of their expenditures. Therefore, to be able to attend school, the kids stay at the center during the week and attend the school in Srebrenica and on the weekends they go back to their families. They had prepared us an unexpected, lovely mini show where they sang Bosnian songs, some read poems, a couple performed a short. We enjoyed it truly and were all amazed by how lively these kids were. Later we started playing with them. We painted our faces, made creative shapes with play-dough, we played games all together jumping running all around the garden of the center. It was so much fun that we lost track of time.

Another full day, with a whole bunch of new experiences; we feel tired, but peaceful. We are content with what we have done and we try to relax under the shadow of the balcony. Tomorrow, we set the road to the capital, to Sarajevo, where we’ll have lots of work to do. For now, we enjoy the cool breeze that come from the green mountains around Srebrenica, still unable to believe what this place has seen twenty years ago.

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Day 1 - Digesting A Day of A Lifetime

In the evening, we worked on our products that we’ll be selling in Sarajevo in 2 days time and we tried to digest the day. A day that felt like a month because of all the realization and the thought-provoking way it is. While we were going to sleep, we were happy to have experienced such a day, melancholic about the things that these people faced not a long time ago but still hopeful about the future.

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Photos of Day 1 - A Town of Hope: Srebrenica

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DAY 1 – A Town of Hope: Srebrenica

A journey that started with the cold weather of Sarajevo… As we arrived in the capital of Bosnia Herzegovina, we were all extremely excited about what was coming up next and somewhat sleepy from the early plane. Edina who Works for the French NGO Emmaüs welcomed us in the airport. There, we got on the bus that would take us to the town of Srebrenica. The first thing that we noticed in Srebrenica was how new it was. There was a lot of restoration and construction going on in the town; mostly funded by Emmaüs. The town seemed quiet and calm contrary to what it had experienced around 20 years ago.

In the center for children by the NGO, being welcomed warmly by the people, we put our stuff in our rooms, had lunch and set off for the Srebrenica monument cemetery. A whole bunch of pure white, simple but dignified tomb stones on one of the hills of the town all facing East for paying respect to the dead, a fountain with red water in it symbolizing the blood of victims and an open-air mosque at the bottom for the Muslim visitors, all created an atmosphere that gave a clue about what had happened in the past in the territory. Later in the open-air mosque, we started listening to the story of Hassan, a Srebrenica Massacre survivor who told us all about that period and current state of the town.

As Hassan told us, Srebrenica had been occupied by the Bosnian Serbs in 1992.  The town started being protected by UN officers from Canada in 1993 since the Bosnian Serbs had started sniper-shooting the locals. However, the help of UN wasn’t sufficient at all. More and more Bosnians were getting killed each day. The people of the town didn’t have access to food either. “We were treated like animals” Hassan said at that point with a little bit of melancholy. On July 1995, the Dutch UN soldiers weren’t able to protect the town and Bosnian Serbs captured it. While some went into the Dutch base for protection, other people became victims: women and men were divided and all men got killed after everyone was taken out of the town. The international community was just ignoring such a big human rights violation that took place in the middle of Europe.

After listening to Hassan, we were all chocked with the things that we heard, and started thinking how human beings could do this to each other; and how this town was able to leave it all behind, fight no matter what and become the hopeful way it is today. Lastly, we visited the Srebrenica Memorial Room where we watched a short documentary about the massacre and visited the small exhibition of photos and memories from the period. 

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For each ‘Nar’ product you buy, the blue butterflies will rise to support Bosnian families.