She wraps
her thick black hair into a knot on the top of her head. Pulling a small mirror from her large
synthetic-leather bag, she plucks some wisps of hair from the knot and arranges
them carefully to look careless.
Sophia is
Serbian. She’s on her way to Montenegro
to meet some friends for a holiday. She occupies the window seat next to me on
the bus from Dubrovnik to Budva, Montenegro.
“Do you
know any cheap place to stay,” she asks me.
“I’ll stay
in a hostel. It’s 11 Euro a night,” I
tell her.
She stares
at me, her eyes wide in dismay. “Oh,” she
says, “Why don’t you stay in a room? People tell me there are rooms in houses
cheap. I hope there are, because I can’t spend so much money.”
I reassure
her that usually local people show up at the bus stations offering cheap rooms
in their homes.
“How much
are these rooms? I am kindergarten teacher,” she tells me. “I have very little money. I left Serbia and
went to Zagreb for work. But really,
there is no work. I graduated from
Tourism and Culture, but I can’t find job, so I take job in school with
babies. I hate it. Their parents are very rich and they are very
spoiled. I am like baby sitter. And they pay me so little. But what can I do?”
The
Internet source ‘Balkan Insight’ writes that 500 people a day become jobless in
Serbia. They state 27% unemployment with an average salary of 380 euro a
month.
Outside the
bus, green cliffs drop to a turquoise sea. Traffic halts. The coast road along
the Adriatic Sea from Croatia to Montenegro is clogged with vacationing
tourists.
***
I had
stayed one day and night In Dubrovnik. I
was fortunate enough to have a friend living there who offered me the
hospitality of a stay in her home. We
had met the year she had lived in Istanbul.
Dubrovnik
proved a bizarre scene - scantily-clad, rich
foreigners parading about with their well-tanned, well-oiled skin on display,
wearing extremely expensive but outlandishly skimpy outfits.
Entering
the Old Town of Dubrovnik I felt strangely unhinged. I knew I was outside, but felt like I was inside. Walking through the gate into Old Town was
like entering an open-air museum. Unlike
Sarajevo where shell-pocked areas are filled-in with a blood-red laminate to mark
the spots, and walls of buildings are a bullet-ridden pattern of past carnage,
Dubrovnik has erased any and all traces of war.
It stands like a Disneyland theme park for adults: every stone of every
building, every marble cobblestone on every street and alleyway shimmering in
an alabaster-white sheen of prosperity and security. A scrupulously polished
playground for the rich.
The women
strutting Dubrovnik’s Old City were equally unreal. Three women passed me and I had to repress my
urge to stare. Wearing skin-tight,
crotch-high, cleavage-revealing dresses, they hip-swayed over the
glimmering white marble lanes, one stilettoed foot in front of the other.
Ah, they’re top fasion
models on a shoot, I thought to
myself. But there were no camera men. It
wasn’t a shoot. A few minutes later,
along came another pair – with legs just as long and shapely, in equally short,
tight, outlandish dresses, and equally high-heeled shoes. In twos and threes
they strutted their way along the slick streets as tourists sipped fine wine
and twirled expensive strands of spaghetti dishes on their forks amidst
laughter and holiday good times.
“Yes,” said the Croatian friend I stayed with in Dubrovnik,
“Old City Dubrovnik is called ‘the Longest Catwalk in the World.”
“Do you ever go to the Old Cıty,” I asked her.
“No,” she said, “only when I take someone who’s visiting me,
and then I try to send them by themselves if possible. I really never go there.”
“And what about work here??
“Well, in the summer there is work in tourism. In the winter there is no work. My degree is in design. It’s impossible to get a job here. Maybe if I went to Zagreb I could find
something. That’s why I was in
Istanbul. I found work there for one
year.”
***
Things are even worse in Sarajevo. Neno leads a free walking tour of
Sarajevo, depending on the tips of tourists. He’s passionate about his
subject.
“My mother is Muslim.
My father is Serb, but of course he stayed with us during the four years
of the war.”
“What about school during those years,” I ask him. “How did you go to school?”
“We had classes in basements in different
neighborhoods. We ran through sheltered
streets to these underground schools. My
mother is a nurse. And she refused to
stay home. Everyday she walked to the
hospital where so many people were injured and dying. And my father fought for the resistance.”
He points to one of the “roses” on the street. – a shelled
area filled in with red. I stand and look, try to imagine what it must have
been like to spend four years being shot at by men on the hills surrounding
Sarajevo. To be a moving target in a life and death game of chance.
Now the hills are green and verdent. An early morning mist hangs like wisps of gauze over them.But the people of Sarajevo are still struggling.
“There is 65% unemployment in the winter among the youth of
Sarajevo, only 45% in the summer,” Neno tells us. One online source states
that 1.35 million Bosnians live abroad
out of a total population of 3.752 million. One survey of Bosnia’s young people states that 81% of those polled
stated they would leave tomorrow if they could, in order to find employment
opportunities.
On the Balkan Express mini-bus from Budva, Montenegro back
to Bosnia, the road winds up into the mountains from the Adriatic sea. Suddenly I look down and see a river that’s a
shade of milky tourquoise. We continue
to serpentine along the Tara River Canyon gorge. No people.
No houses. Only craggy gray cliffs,
deep-green-leaved trees, and a wide party ribbon of turquoise at the bottom.
When we go uphill, the driver cuts the
air-conditioning. The steward opens the
air vent in the roof. The mini-bus huffs
and puffs it’s way up the steep canyon like the little train that could. The passengers pant and sweat in the heat. We
make it to the top of the ridge and begin our descent, finally traveling alongside
this incredibly startling light-blue river. It pools into lakes, then swiggles
into a river again.
Eventually we come to a town and stop at a tiny bus
stop/cafe. Passengers slide out of the
bus covered in slick sweat. The driver
shouts something in some Balkan language. A tall, long-haired, natural blond steps out
before me.
“How much time do we have?
Is there enough time to use a toilet?” I ask.
She smiles a charming, white-toothed smile.
“Yes. Yes. Come quick with me. I take you,” she says.
When we get to the toilet, both myself and a young English
girl traveling on the same bus fumble for correct change to pay the toilet
attendent. The long-haired blond pays
for us and instructs us to go ahead.
When I exit the toilet I try to pay her back.
“No. No, please,”she smiles.
“Is nothing. You are guest in my country. Come sit a minute with me.”
Her name is Jelena.
She comes from Foca. I force a euro into her hand.
“How did you learn to speak English so well?” I ask her.
Her face brightens into a big smile.
“Really? You think I speak English well? .”
“Absolutely,” I say, “and I’m an English teacher.”
“I never took a course,” she says, speaking quickly. I didn’t go to university. I just watch TV shows in English and listen
to music and learn. Also this way I
learn German.”
“You are so smart,” I tell her.
“Really” But I just work as au
pair in Germany - Frankfurt,” she tells me.
“But people are not good people,” she says. “They tell me they pay 300 Euros a month, but
they only give 200. They say I get 2
days off every week, but I work 7 days a week.
But what can I do? If I leave,
then what will my family do? I’m only
one with job now. If I leave, we don’t
eat anything.”
She roots through her yellow plastic hand bag and pulls out
a pack of cigarettes.
“Would you like one?’
I decline.
“I never smoked before, but I get so nervous in Germany I
start.” She scratches at her arms and
legs, draws on her cigarette, compulsively scratches some more.
“I am not lucky,” she tells me. “I was born here.”
The bus driver honks the horn, summoning the passengers back
into the bus. When she gets off at Foca,
she smiles and waves to me. I continue on, returning to Sarajevo.
In the morning I walk up the hill to the war cemetary. White stone markers pop from the ground like
a field of death flowers. I gaze down at
the red tile roofs, the domes and
minarets of the mosques, and tall crosses and church steeples.
Sarajevo is such a lovely, tranquil place now. On the 16th,
the Sarajevo International Film Festival will begin. It will be packed with
tourists.
The war with bullets and mortar shells has ended. But the war with poverty rages on.
