General Overview of my First Week

Here’s an overview of mz first week in BiH as promised:

My family has a cat named ˝cat˝ aka ˝Mačka˝ which was interesting. She just had four kittens two weeks ago which are SUPER adorable and that I openly want to take home with me, but know that I can’t.

The food is AMAZING here. I’ve had spinach pitas (it’s a Slavic dish not the American dish), a delicious kiwi/banana cake, rice with beef strips, cevapi (MMMMMMMMM) and more. For Mother’s Day my sister and I made our family crepes after church and put the BiH brand of Netella and the maple syrup I brought from a St. Jacob’s farm on them. Most mornings we eat cereal made of cocoa and maple with warmed milk straight from the cows. At night we usually have dinner at 8-9; it usually consists of eggs, salami, FRESH bread (which I cannot get enough of) and cream cheese. Lunch is usuallz at 2 or 3pm and is usuallz the largest meal of the day. It´s hard to get used to only eating 3 times a day and eating late at night when I am used to smaller portions and more frequent meals at home. (My clothes are already getting tight, even with the extra physical activity that I´m doing on a regular basis.)

On Saturday I spend the day in the outskirts of town helping my family plant potatoes. I have never planted them before so it was a great experience to see the complete process. It was also a VERY good workout. My BiH parents prepared the potatoes days before: they cut old ones into fourths, trying to keep the roots intact. Then on Saturday a neighbour used a machine to make the rows for the potatoes on the large field (about 1/3 of a soccer field). We planted the potatoes, roots up, a foot apart; and then we racked the soil over the potatoes. It was a great way to bond with my family and one of the neighbours.

On Sunday my sister, neighbours and I went to church at 8am. It was a small building. The mass was very short; Ryan, who went with his BiH brothers, said it was about 35 minutes long. Apparently their old priest´s masses ran over an hour long, where as the new priest likes to keep it short & concise, which the locals appreciate. I am happy that I used to go to the Croatian church with my Baka because it allowed me to know some of the prayers on Sunday.

At the beginning of this week we, the ICVs, created a program for next week. We then created student sign up sheets for the different classes offered next week. After getting permission from the principles, we put up the two promossional posters we made earlier that day in both the Bosnian and Croatian schools.

Yesterday we met the major of BiH. We asked if he could hire someone to clean up the park across the street ASAP so that the children coming to the Centar would have a place to do sports. He was very nice and said he would try his hardest to have the park cleaned by next week. He also invited us to go with him on a private tour of the mountains and to see some deer, which I found to be a HUGE privilege.

Today (Thursday) we went to Travnik which I’ll explain in my next post.

That’s it for now,

~G.