You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Forgiveness Project’ tag.
Stef O’ Driscoll (award-winning theatre director) and Mark Griffin (St Mary’s University College, London), friends I’ve made through my thespian daughter, are off to Sarajevo on Friday. They want to dramatise some of the wonderful stories in Miljenko Jergovic’s Sarajevo Marlboro, a collection of short stories on how the young people of Sarajevo from the different communities – Croats, Serbs and Bosniacs – helped each other to survive during the siege. They plan to stage performances in London and in Bosnia.
They’ll spend much of their time listening, I suspect, and it will be hard.
Amila and Niko at Blackburn Cathedral
We had a wonderful time in London this evening with some of the Bosnians who have been taking part in the Forgiveness Project exhibition at Blackburn Cathedral. They fly home tomorrow morning. Stef met Silva (a young woman from the Croat community), Amila (who teaches English in Tuzla and is connected to the beautiful madrassa there) and Niko (Deputy Bishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the Tuzla area).
In a wholly uninspiring hotel lobby, conversation ranged from the dreadful and continuing pain of multiple and unexplainable bereavement, to justice denied, the thirst in Bosnia for creativity, beauty and the arts, the power of women’s stories and of the life-giving and transformative possibilities of carefully devised theatre. It’s impossible to have conversations like these with our Bosnian friends without a great deal of laughter, too – I love it.
I also caught sight of Chris and Anjum from Blackburn Cathedral, who worked hard to bring our Bosnian friends to the UK. We’re hoping that the final report of the original UK visit in October 2009 will be the kind of document that people will say, “If you’re going to Bosnia, read this”.
Friends whom the Zajedno u Bosni group met in Tuzla, Bosnia, will be coming over to the UK for the launch of Blackburn Cathedral‘s hosting of the Forgiveness Project exhibition on 7th February.
Wonderful news! I’m hoping they may be able to visit London, too.
SANA’s Paul Johns has been pulling together the report on our visit to Bosnia last month – heard from him yesterday, as well as from Anjum at Blackburn Cathedral which is hosting a visit from our Bosnian friends in February to launch the F-word Exhibition – sounds great & I’ll be there.
At the Women’s Interfaith Network today, I heard about a recent gathering in Birmingham of the European Women of Faith Network – part of Religions for Peace (if you’re involved, let me know) – but more significantly for Zajedno people, the EWFN started life in Sarajevo with a Bosnia-Kosovo women’s interfaith conference in 2003. We met the Interreligious Council in Sarajevo but I don’t remember hearing about the women’s network.
