Wasim Mir, one of the 2011 Bosnia: The Journey volunteers ran an assembly at Palmers Green Madrasah...

Volunteering with MADE in Europe certainly has its perks and on November 26th I was given the intriguing task of engaging 60 young students aged between 5 and 16 from a Saturday School in Palmers Green Mosque, North London. My objective was to update them on the project we undertook in Bosnia earlier in 2011 and raise general awareness of the plight of the Bosnian people.

I previously visited the school in June with another volunteer from the project, Minaar Hansi, before our deployment to Bosnia. A scheme was started whereby the school children would write letters to children in Bosnia, which the MADE team would take with them and distribute with the partner organization via a ‘Mobile Library’ project. This project involves the donation of school textbooks to children in the troubled Eastern European state. Whilst in Bosnia, schoolchildren from villages had written replies to the Islamic Saturday school, some of which were particularly interesting to read. In one particular instance, two twins, Leila and Aliya had written the exact same message of love to the school in English. The excitement and genuine affection was evident in all of the letters that were sent.

Surprisingly, when asked about where Bosnia was and why it is important, most of the children remembered the first assembly, one young child exclaiming “Bosnians were being killed for lots of years!” We proceeded with an interactive session, getting the children to imagine a scenario whereby they are unable to celebrate the festival of Id-ul-Fitr due to restrictions from the military. The situation was described as being very real for children of a same age and faith, the connection of faith between the two being emphasized.

A question and answer session concluded the brief assembly, with children finding out what life is like for children in Bosnia, living on a farm and waking up to help their parents at 6am, whilst still going to school and doing vast amounts of homework! The pictures of Bosnian children working on the farm with the volunteers seemed to strike home how different their day to day activities are.

What was encouraging was to see the attention paid to the talk and the level of interest the children seemed to have in what is a somewhat neglected subject in the English school curriculum. This generation has no living recollection of the dark events that took place in the Balkans almost 20 years ago, so it is vital that organizations like MADE in Europe work together to raise awareness of even the basic issues facing the Bosnian Muslim population. The vast majority of Muslims living in Eastern Bosnia receive little or no support from the government in returning to their land or sustaining a living; life is no easy feat on a farm with a family history of death and war. A child in Bosnia does not necessarily have the luxury of even buying their own textbooks for school.

However, what is more poignant is that simply by sending a letter back and forth, two sets of youngsters, over a thousand miles away have begun a new relationship. With a message of peace and love, every time a letter lands in their lap they can afford something that money can’t buy…a smile.