Past Scars - #76HT

ANA was living in a really central location. We walked about 15min until arriving her place. My first impression about the neighborhood was the houses built most in the same way and style. Some of them I had the feeling that nobody was living there because of the stage of conservation In Ana's place was the same, from outside her place looked like a inhabited building, but inside, it was such a cool apartment. 

It was the same feeling that I had in České Budějovice, when I stayed in a place that from outside I couldn't see how impressive was inside.

This was my feeling from Ana, Mostar and Bosnia at the same time. Looking from the outside I couldn't really see the identity of these ones. In my first night I decided to stay not just one day in Mostar, but 3.

Everything was so new for me that I didn't want to just cross this city and lose the chance to know the real Ana, Mostar and Bosnia. I had the feeling that as a tourist or quick backpacker I would lose the chance to get know deeper them. It happens often when I’m traveling and spending short time in a place or just interacts with tourists around attractions. In the way I'm learning while I'm traveling, my souvenirs. 

Ana seemed like to be a person busy with work, with some social life, having a fixed daily routine. At the same time when we started to talk I could see how she was excited to listen, learn and understand me. She was also opened to accept ideas and try new things not common in her routine.

The Ana that I talked in the first minutes was completely different than the one that I talked in our last minutes. In fact she didn't change, I just didn't know her that well in the beginning.

Mostar was the city that I saw old and destroyed buildings around a sign of poverty that it was the closest poor aspects that I could compare with some places in my country. I felt that Bosnia and Brazil share similar social problems. There is something that made Bosnia be unfortunately different: the War.

Not just for Bosnia, but all of other Balkan countries, several wars in the last decade, impacted a lot these countries. Not just the buildings in the city center with couple whole of bullets in the wall, where nobody was living. A building that started to be built and in the middle of the construction it was interrupted by the war. I was trying to travel back to the past, at least mentally. See these bullets reaching the walls, seeing the soldiers fighting, some of them dying, someone them surviving and come back home traumatized. This feeling of empathy made me start to see things differently. These are some impacts from wars. I have no idea how is being traumatized by war. This is probably really bad to live part of your life afraid to be killed and kill other people. It's not because they really wanted, but because their government forced or convinced them to do it. This is the huge cancer of the humanity. Just the two world wars were enough to decimate over 100 million people and consequently other millions of the got in someway traumatized with it. We weren't born to kill each other, if you don't have a psych disturb that make you feel pleasure for killing someone, you'll never going to have the desire to take someone's life. It's a bit insane for me when someone has a fake desire the death of someone else, this life is like ours, but lived with different ways. If you have this feeling sometimes, I hope that it's an emotive and confusing feeling, otherwise you don't understand the sense of life, humanity.

The soldiers that survived and are coming back to their homes, they are also carrying with themselves the war’s scars. All of these experiences about this strict life, killing and being afraid to be killed, make they don't think more with a human feeling, they were following orders without questioning from a small group with their own interests. In fact the mind of the war is never in the front line fighting with the troop, if their life would have any risk, they wouldn't be in this war. 

Personal experiences from family, friends acquainted are shared during and after the war and the fear created is like a virus that access their brain and make they have a natural protection. This fear creates a wall between them and what's unknown. This protection that we call them as "cold people", but we don't know what's behind this wall.

We just need a little bit of patience to remove all of fear from the unknown and we can reach them deeply. For this group of "cold people", I can mention mainly Germans, they are closed in the first contact, but if you buy their trust, you can go so deep inside them and build a strong relationship. I prefer is so much more than superficial contacts, full of small talks, but no real connection. Most of my good connections are with Germans, I just learned how to reach them and see how amazing they are :)

I needed more than one night to know more about Ana, Mostar and Bosnia. This experience was just starting. If Ana was serious and close in the beginning, but it was already changing. If Mostar was a city with just old and destroyed buildings, it was already changing as well. If Bosnia was place with the scars of the war, it was also already changing ;)