Football Beyond Borders Balkans Tour Day 1 – Mostar

Arriving in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one immediately has mixed emotions. Upon seeing the bullet-holes and mass graves – the recent memories that are a tragically normal part of everyday life in this remarkable country, one could shy away and consign oneself to thinking that this society is far from rebuilding itself. In accordance with our name, however, we at Football Beyond Borders have come to work with and to promote the people who are doing just that – people who have experienced, fought, and lost people to conflict and use these experiences not to remain in bitterness, but as the ultimate benevolent driving force to ensure that the next generation of Bosnians will never have to experience such horrors again.

Such a person is Alen, senior volunteer at Our Kids Foundation in Mostar. His 24-hour working day is solely dedicated to not leaving any of Mostar’s children behind in the constant race for Bosnia’s redevelopment. He runs both an orphanage and a care home for special needs children on the east side of Mostar. Both centres are unbelievably unique places. Not only does the care home cater for the often-neglected disabled in this welfare-starved nation, the orphanage takes care of children from both sides of the city, regardless of ethnicity, should they be left behind, or their parents are simply too poor to provide them with daily care and education.

The institution Pazaric has been established since 1949. It houses 398 people with severe learning disabilities, including 20 children. Without the playground, children used to spend all their time indoors even on days when the temperature was 40° C. Children were bed bound most of the time. Image via Our Kids.

We have begun to implement our own flavour to the usual workshops that Our Kids provides to the orphans, with coaching sessions that the children have really learned from and responded to. The children being of mixed gender and ability has not been so much of a hindrance as we have oriented the sessions so that everybody enjoys themselves and learns new skills. The main aim of our tour is not to make these people better footballers but more tolerant people, after all.

The Stari Most bridge. Image Credit: FrancisTyers 

Alen’s viewpoint of Bosnia as a place where people must be cared to not be left behind was grimly highlighted when we later went to see the famous old bridge, the Stari Most, and we found tiny vulnerable children left on the streets begging to be taken to shelter. As well as promoting tolerance through football, we are an organisation committed to supporting places like Our Kids to ensure that these tragic situations occur as infrequently as possible.

Seeing the children with special needs haven provided by Our Kids was an inkling of how this could all come true. As well as 24-hour care, the children had areas where they were free to play, to relax or to be creative. A particularly inspiring example of this was their beautifully decorated fragments of rocket shells that landed in Mostar a decade ago, now on display as art in their study. Not so long ago, those shells ensured that Bosnia and Hercegovina had no means of caring for these children.

Now, foundations like Our Kids have shown that benevolence is the only attitude to take to properly recover from these atrocities. To progress as a society, the fighters must drop their arms and help those who have no means to protect themselves. In life, as in football, the team is only as strong as its most vulnerable component.

Read the whole of our Football Beyond Borders coverage here.