BRATTLEBORO -- Jean Maples remembered a different Yugoslavia. From her travels there before the civil war divided the country along its old ethnic lines and pitted Serb against Muslim, she had memories of beautiful cities like 500-year-old Dubrovnik on the Adriatic Sea and of a marvelous and friendly people. So when she read in the newspapers and watched on TV about the war's horrible aftermath of destroyed cities and ravaged citizens, she said, "I had a feeling of wanting to help the people."
Rather than just sending money or supplies, Maples, of West Brattleboro, went herself.
She has made two trips to the former Yugoslavia -- to a Muslim refugee camp in Croatia in the fall of 1994 and to Sarajevo in Bosnia/Herzegovina this past December through February, as the representative of Conflict Resolution Catalysts, a peacemaking organization headquartered in Montpelier. On these trips, instead of sightseeing pictures , her camera recorded building after bombed-out building. Instead of social visits to people's homes, she went to assess the medical needs of elderly shut-ins and the educational needs of children whose schools were destroyed. Along with the old tales told over strong Bosnian coffee, she heard stories of unemployment, displacement, depression, rape and post-traumatic stress disorder.
"In Sarajevo," she said, "so many shells came down and exploded that (the area) was painted red to symbolize blood as a reminder. Practically everyone has lost a close relative." She said she met only one family in which the children, parents and grandparents all survived.
Maples said CRC is basically a one-man operation under the direction of Gary Shapiro. It relies on volunteers and contributions. Its primary funding comes from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and it only can afford to provide living quarters in Bosnia for project workers, who must pay for their own transportation and living expenses. The organization's focus in Bosnia is the People Connection Project through which it hopes to bring about reconciliation among factious ethnic groups and empower the people to rebuild their communities.
The People Connection Project operates out of two centers, one in Banja Luka, a primarily Serbian community, and in Ilidza, a Muslim community in a suburb of Sarajevo. Maples worked out of the Ilidza center, housed in one side of a duplex. She was one of only two people from Conflict Resolution Catalysts in Bosnia this winter. The other was Sarajevo project coordinator Bruce Hemmer. Maples was there for three months, working with a local interpreter.
The hope of the centers was to bring the Serb and Muslims together in a neutral place, she said. "If they could get to know each other, it would be a small step toward future peace." She puts most of the blame on the Serbs, who, she claimed, aggravated the old rivalries of Yugoslavia's many ethnic groups and disrupted the tenuous relationship formed among them since the nation was created from parts of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary after World War I. The people had been living together and intermarrying, she said. "The people themselves say if someone had told them that they would lose their jobs, their homes and fight in a war, they would have said, 'You're crazy. That can't happen.'"
The Ilidza center, opened in November 1996, is an attempt at creating a multi-ethnic community in Bosnia. It offers English classes, young children groups, teen nights, computer classes, dances and art.
A psychiatrist and former English tutor, Maples taught seven classes in beginning English. "The children are learning English in school, and many people spoke English in Sarajevo to get good jobs, " she said.
An important part of her work was to visit homes in the community. She said she had a number of places she regularly visited, including Vreoca, where a heavy population of Muslim refugees lived in abandoned Serb houses. Her visits included bringing much needed donations of clothing, school supplies, games and huge bags of biscuits. Another part of her duties was to visit the area primary schools to assess their needs. Many of the schools were bombed; some had received aid and others had not. She described one school that was primarily Muslim and had no electricity, no library and no books, with only three balls for sports equipment. The Serbs had blown up half of the school and had taken out the furniture and set it on fire. The children went to school in shifts, Maples said, and could not stay after 4:30 p.m. because there were no lights.
"That school had received no aid," she said. "The only thing it had gotten was individual school kits from Italy and Japan."
Yet, another school near the tram station "had been given thousands in U.S. aid," she said. "It was as fine as any in the United States."
She could not explain, or understand, the disparity. At another school, Maples was told about children who had lost limbs and eyes, children who had been put up before a firing squad and survived, children who were missing parents.
"The school psychologist had no testing tools and had to improvise," she said. "The students were hyperactive, had learning disorders and showed aggressive behavior. There was a lot of fighting. These were all due to post-traumatic stress disorder."
On the other end of the age spectrum, Maples visited Croatian and Serbian shut-ins who had remained where they had always lived when the younger people had fled. Many of them cannot afford medical care, particularly after Care Canada, which has been helping them, lost funding.
Most of the time Maples listened to complaints of a people who still live in resentment and fear: resentment of the ones who left when the war began and came back better educated to take the better jobs, and fear that the fighting will begin again once the peace-keeping task force leaves in June. Maples said she and Hemmer, with the help of their 22-year-old interpreter and local Bosnians, were able to accomplish much on a "people level." A lot of help is still needed, she said, as some of the many aid organizations are pulling out because Bosnia is not so much in the headlines since the war ended.
Maples' work has not ended with her return home. She is collecting items to send back and already has sent over a box of testing tools for the school psychiatrist, clothes and yarn for the elderly women. Working with the yarn, she said, "is relaxing; it helps them deal with stress. And everyone wears slippers in the house."