more whatever

This is a continuation of yesterday’s entry.

The days spent in the bowels of Zetra are rather a blur. We were waiting to be farmed out to various locations throughout Bosnia, so we pitched in with whatever needed to be done. The locker room adjacent to the tennis courts had a boiler that was still in pretty good shape. For whatever reason it had not been looted and the war and neglect had not affected it too much – possibly because it was so deep in the facility no one could find it. After two days we had that thing putting out some HOT water. In fact, there was no way to adjust it. People wandering the dark, damp corridors could hear the eerie, echoing, tortured screams of folks determined to get clean, but being alternately cooked alive in the water and frozen when they jumped out. The trick was to fill a bucket, let it cool down a bit and, stripping only about a quarter of your body at any one time, wash with a cloth. Since there was only one shower room functioning it was a multinational, unisex affair, but we were all grateful for it. The dining facility was located in a tent on what had been the ice skating rink. It was run by the Norwegians and served predominately fish and soup, very often fish IN soup. The menu was appropriate in a way because what had been the roof leaked, filling the skating rink (and the dining facility) ankle deep with water. A practice basketball court was transformed into a pub, because wherever the Europeans go, there must be a bar. Everyone had to practice the two can rule – no more than two cans per person per night. I don’t think anyone really counted so long as no one got into trouble or sloppy. Finally, after about four days, we got to go out. We went out as a ten man team to walk about a six mile circuit. In the daylight I could see that the hillsides around Zetra were filled with graves, some hasty, some elaborate – thousands of them. I don’t think there was a whole pane of glass in the city. Burned out cars lay in impossible places, as if some huge child had strewn them around and forgotten about them. You could see where things had impacted with the buildings – the marks looked like splats in the bricks or mortar, large or small depending on what had been fired. People still lived there though, the blue UNHCR sheets of plastic covering huge holes in the walls. Weeds grew out of the streets and sidewalks, sometimes up to two or three feet high. Red marks painted on the pavement pointed the way to unexploded ordinance or mines. Sarajevo had once been a first world city, full of cafes and clubs, museums and schools. It had hosted the Olympics and had been the starting point for World War I. Now it was plunged into the third world where apartment dwellers burned wood to keep warm and hauled water for blocks. I had been dying to get out and try my Bosnian on the locals. At that time, Sarajevo was populated mostly by Bosnian Muslims. My understanding of the situation had been shaped primarily by CNN, and I believed we’d get a pretty warm reception in Sarajevo. I thought we’d gone to Bosnia to stop genocide against the Bosnian Muslims and that they’d be happy about it. Actually, very few people were willing to talk to us or even look at us. Menacing Mujahedin, devout Muslim foreign fighters imported from Afghanistan and Chechnya, glared at us from their positions on the street corners or followed us at a distance, harassing those who dared speak with us. After he realized that I understood him, one man, obviously drunk, launched into a tirade asking why didn’t we stop the killing sooner. He spit in my face – the yellow, mucussy spittle clung to my eyelashes and slowly slid down my scabby cheeks. He laughed and announced to all that he had TB. I was stunned. I am not really proud of what I did next; I know I was the ambassador on the street for the US and all, but I spit back. Not every trip around town was so awful. There is a lot to see in Sarajevo. There is a Jewish Temple with about 200 Spanish Jews not far from the bridge where the Archduke was shot. A warren of alleys hide some amazing copper and brass shops, everything hand worked. Some people would talk to us, if they were sure no one was looking. Still, I was glad when the time came to be assigned elsewhere.