Snježana during marseillan workshop of SIC, Dec. 2016
My name is Snježana Blagojevic and I am 29 years old. I grew up in Bosnia, last three years I have been living in Slovenia. I have come here as an EVS volunteer in Association for Developing of Voluntary Work, since then I have been working with children coming from different backgrounds.
I guess it hasn’t been a coincidence because I was migrant myself and survived the war. I was a child back then and luckily most of the things I don’t remember. What I remember is a fear that my family still has, fear to lose everything and everyone once again. I started volunteering since I was second year at the college. Mainly I was helping with English. I didn’t see it as a big thing. For me it was normal to offer those children distraction, company, and piece of normal life, cartoons and songs which were the right way for children to remember their childhood. I guess it was normal for me to understand and help because it was all that I wanted as a child, normal childhood.
We were living in multi-ethical surrounding, we were children and didn’t understand much what was going on. We all were speaking the same language. For us, back then, the only thing that mattered was to play outside since we all were displaced and mostly in safe zones. Language wasn’t been a problem for us, and now when I have moved once again, l could communicate and learn, this was allowed to me because there was will to communicate and help.
Mostly, problems arrive when you have people who never had to run for a bare life, not to mention spending days without food and water, shelter, your parents… once when you run for your life it doesnt matter who you are, and where you come from, people who never had witnessed it could find themselves hard to understand and easily jump to conclusions.
I came here to develop and to try to find a better life. I still have a place where to go back and it took us years to build it again, from the start. Now, try to imagine that you have no place to go back to?
I came here on an exchange program, I am volunteer so I didn’t have a lot of problems at all. Now the problems would start if I wanted to get the job because I am a foreigner.
As I said it, it’s up to area where you are, some make it as simple as possible, and some add more and more issues up to that.
When I was playing with all of those children in post war Bosnia and when I am playing outside with children that I am working with now, there is just one thing crossing my mind, wars can happen everywhere and must end also but what will stay are the memories, even if you haven’t been part of the experience make sure to be remembered as someone who brought water, bread, clothes, a book, who planted a tree, shared a house…
This is what all of us at SIC are trying to do, as people who had gone through all of it, we are trying to create an area where we could one day be remembered for helping, because we know the most what means to have someone supporting and helping as much as it is in their power.