Welcome to Belgrade!

Sorry it has been so long since I last posted. I got even busy-er and then internet got a little shady so I'll try to update on everything from the past few days.

On Thursday morning we left Bosnia to drive 9 hours to Belgrade, Serbia. On the way we stopped in Srebrenica, the site of the worst atrocity on European soil since the Holocaust. In a giant nutshell, Srebrenica was a UN safe zone during the war and was filled with Bosnian Muslim refugees and supposedly protected by the UN. But in July 1995 the safe zone was overtaken by Bosnian Serbs, and all of the men of Srebrenica (who the Serbs were scared would be the ones to fight back) were rounded up and tortured and murdered. Over 8,000 men died in a span of just a few days and the city is still struggling to rebuild.

We went to the Srebrenica memorial and spoke with two women from the Mothers of Srebrenica organization. Hearing their stories was absolutely incredible. One of the women told me that every morning she thanks god that only two of her sons were killed. I can't even imagine every day being overwhelmingly thankful that only two of your children were murdered. The other women looked out over the class and smiled and wished us the bright future that was robbed from her son. There are women here who lost 20 or 30 or 40 members of their family in 72 hours. This pain is even further compounded by the delays in identifying remains in mass graves all over the country. New remains are ID'ed each year and so some of these incredible women are waiting for 10 or 15 years with no closure, no grave site to visit in mourning.

It was interesting too, to drive straight from there to Serbia, where people still deny that the genocide occurred at all.

Belgrade is beautiful though! Tonight we walked up to the old city where there is a fortress that was originally built to protect Belgrade from the Ottoman Turks and later during WWI because Belgrade and control of the Danube was a strategic gain on the way to Vienna. We walked along the old walls of the fortress, looking out over the intersection of the Danube and Sava rivers that surround the city.

[The internet is super slow and won't let me upload photos but I promise to load more soon!]