Smiles on Children’s Faces

The Dayton Peace Accord had, in essence, put the lid on military operations but there were still very large warehouses of weaponry and folks who really weren’t all that trusting, one of the other. The interesting thing from my perspective was seeing the change that the youth brought along. There had been inter-ethnic hatreds in Bosnia for over five centuries and interestingly after the Dayton Peace Accord was implemented the youth of Bosnia got access to the internet and discovered that there’s a whole bunch of really nice stuff out there in the world that they could have. And they realized that if they were at war or otherwise arming for war that they couldn’t afford to get this stuff. So within a generation they had actually stopped the different hatreds that they had because they wanted to join in the rest of Europe and its modern wealthy status. It was marvellous and, you know, to go back five years later and see such a difference. When I was there during the war children didn’t smile. They basically moved around furtively from cover to cover and when I went back five years later it was very, very different. They were not clannish. They interacted well with one another and you could see smiles on the kid’s faces again. It was really, really heart-warming.