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Methodist mission team builds barns in Bosnia
By Justin Goble
Methodists from Sylva and Cullowhee recently returned from a trip to Bosnia-Herzegovinia.
The mission team, which included members of Sylva First United Methodist Church, spent 16 days in the region building barns for two families. Along with the barns, the group gave each of the two families a cow.
Munib Oric of Bosnia-Herzegovinia stands with the cow given to him by a mission team that included Methodists from Sylva and Cullowhee. The group donated cows and built barns for two Bosnian families displaced by the country’s 1992-95 civil war. According to Sylva First Methodist Pastor Paul Christy, the cows give the families milk and cheese for their own use as well as to trade for other goods. The church plans another mission trip to the country in 2007, Christy said.
The country was ravaged by a civil war that lasted from 1992 until 1995. More than 250,000 people were killed during the war, and many towns and villages were nearly destroyed.
One of the most publicized incidents in the war was the execution of 8,000 Muslim men and boys when a United Nations safe haven in Srebrenica was overrun by Serbian forces.
Members of a recent Methodist mission team to Bosnia-Herzegovinia work on a barn for a local family. The team, which included members from Sylva and Cullowhee, spent 16 days in the country during September and built barns and gave livestock to two families. According to Sylva First United Methodist Church member Susan Sterchi, the goal of the trip was to empower families returning to the country after the civil war which displaced more than two million people. She said that though the barns were not of a complicated design, the fact that most of the work had to be done by hand and the country’s mountainous terrain made the process difficult.
It was this history that made the country a prime choice for the group’s missionary work. Susan Sterchi, a Sylva Methodist member who helped organize the trip, said the main goal was to help some of the families who were returning to the region after being displaced by war.
Sterchi, a former health educator with Project HOPE, lived in the country for two years and taught physical therapists how to work with disabled children. Her experience was another deciding factor in choosing Bosnia for the mission trip, she said.
“I had a history with the area and a history with the culture,” she said. “That was the big push.”
By giving the recipients a cow, the group is helping Bosnians function in the local market, Sterchi said. Not only can the families make cheese from the cow’s milk to eat, but they can use milk and cheese as a means of trade, she said.
“We agreed that building a barn and giving someone livestock was what we wanted to do,” she said. “It was about empowerment. If there was anything we wanted to accomplish, it was that.”
The Rev. Paul Christy, First Methodist’s pastor, said that giving the families a means to help themselves was the ultimate goal of the trip.
“It wasn’t just building something, but giving them a livelihood,” he said.
To get the group to Bosnia, Sterchi and Christy said there was a lot of local fund-raising that had to be accomplished. Though they received a gift from a donor and a grant from the United Methodist Committee on Relief, both were adamant about the fact that there would not have been a mission trip if not for local money.
“The support of local fund-raisers was amazing,” Sterchi said. “Women knitted hundreds of winter scarves and made pocketbooks. Our silent auction was phenomenal.”
One fund-raiser for the trip, had Christy, a dyed-in-the-wool Duke University basketball fan, dressed in some unusual University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill garb.
“Someone came up to me and asked me how much it would take for me to wear a UNC national champions T-shirt and ride my daughter’s bicycle down the street,” he said. “I told them they would have to raise $1,000 for me to do it. They eventually raised $5,000, and I rode down the street dressed as a UNC cheerleader. That was our biggest fund-raiser, and there were pictures of that all over Bosnia.”
When the group arrived in Bosnia, they faced a good deal of culture shock. Christy said though they had been told a lot about its tumultuous history, team members were unprepared for what they saw.
“Susan tried the best she could to prepare us,” Christy said. “We met six or eight times before we left, and she tried to let us know the history of the war. But when we got there, you still could see buildings with bullet holes in them. You could still feel and see the prejudices between Bosnians, Croats and Serbs. It took our group awhile to get over all of it. This happened in 1995, not 1945.”
“I think there was a paradox,” Sterchi said. “Our group was overwhelmed by the history of the place, and it felt like it was in conflict with the warmth and happiness with which we were received.”
Though religious tensions are a major part of Bosnia’s history, Christy said they were not an issue for the team.
“The neat thing was that we were helping a Muslim family,” Christy said. “(The difference in religion) wasn’t that big of a deal, but human love and grace was a big part of it. We didn’t go there to convert them. We went there to build a barn. It gave all of us a new appreciation. These were good, hard-working folk.”
Many of the people that they dealt with were impressed that the group was there to help others instead of trying to win converts, Christy said. Many times he heard stories and saw evidence of how groups would come in and build large, elaborate mosques and churches yet would not help the people in the surrounding area.
“There was a man named Otto who was with us on the ride over from the airport,” Christy said. “He said, ‘You know what impresses me about you Methodists? You don’t come over here to build churches. You come over here to work with people and build relationships.’ You could see these really nice churches and mosques and right beside them would be houses destroyed by the war.”
“Bosnians feel very aggravated by this,” Sterchi said. “Where are the factories? Where are the schools?”
As for building the barns, Sterchi said it was a good deal of work. While they were, as she puts it, “small and not incredibly complicated,” the topography made much of the work strenuous.
“A lot of it was physical grunt work,” Sterchi said. “We were hauling wheelbarrows full of concrete, blocks and materials. They had to be moved by hand to the site. I give the men a lot of credit. The concrete and things like that had to be moved uphill, and a lot of the women team members just weren’t big enough.”
A lot of the construction was done without many of the tools that American builders take for granted, Sterchi said. While UMCOR had given them a concrete mixer, most of the work was done by hand. She also said that all of the wood cutting wasn’t done with a circular saw that many builders use, but with a chainsaw.
Though he was far from home and the mountainous region created some construction difficulties, Christy said the area looked very familiar.
“It looked just like Western North Carolina,” he said. “When I saw where we were going, I said ‘This looks just like Jackson County.’”
Many on the mission team had done mission work before, but there was a big learning curve while building the barns, Sterchi said. Many times she and the other group members felt like they were a hindrance to the contractors they were working with, she said.
“I talked with the local contractor and asked him how long it would have taken them to build the barns without our help,” Sterchi said. “He told me it would have taken them about 15 days without the group because he couldn’t have built them alone and hauling the materials uphill alone would have taken three days. But there were times where we felt like we were slowing them down.”
Though there was a lot of work to do and a lot of emotional issues to deal with, Sterchi and Christy both said that the mission team had a lot of fun.
“There was a great deal of levity,” Christy said. “We played basketball in the middle of town one day, and all of the kids and adults came out and watched. We gave the basketball away afterwards. Everywhere we went we gave away toys. Meals were like traditional family meals. We’d work hard, but we’d come back and eat and laugh.”
“One beneficiary was a widow, and she slaughtered a goat and prepared a traditional roast when we were done,” Sterchi said. “We all were there. It was a big sacrifice for her, but there definitely was an air of celebration.”
As for future mission trips, Christy said that the church is looking to going back to Bosnia to continue working with returning families.
“Right now this church is very mission-minded,” Christy said. “We’re trying to achieve an international mission trip every other year. So our next one will be in 2007, and I think we’ll be going back to Bosnia. The feeling of these 15 people is infectious. ”
Sterchi said that while she is excited about such enthusiastic support, response to the next mission trip may be too overwhelming.
“My fear is that we will have to beat people away with a stick.”
All of the effort that went into this trip and the excitement surrounding one in the future is due to Sterchi’s efforts, Christy said.
“Susan kept up with every detail,” he said. “This was her vision. It’s amazing how one idea can turn huge like this.”
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