Memorable Day #4: Tears in Sarajevo

One of many “Sarajevo Roses,” which mark where people were killed.

In the summer of 1997, John and I went to Bosnia with a group called Hoops for Hope. The war had been over for only a year and a half, and the city was still heavily scarred. Running water was turned on for only a couple hours a day, so the residents collected it in 2-liter bottles and stashed it all over the house.

We conducted basketball camps in the sports-crazed, war-torn, infant nation to coax children to come out of their battered homes. We fed them lunch, and gave them Nikes donated by the company. An ophthalmologist gave them an eye exam and glasses if we had an approximate prescription. Many, if not most, had never had an eye exam, and the younger ones were terrified of her.

We visited several small villages along with Sarajevo, the former capital of Yugoslavia before it was ripped into several smaller countries.

A destroyed district of Sarajevo

One day after camp we visited an orphanage. The children were not available for adoption by foreigners. Our native Bosnian guide told us the reason was “Bosnians belong in Bosnia.” A western nun, more cynical, said they were saving them for the next war. And as “rape babies,” the result of Serbian or Croatian soldiers raping the Muslim Bosniak women in conquered villages and towns, they would not be adopted by Bosnians, either.

The first room we came to was for the infants. It was subdivided into smaller rooms, each with four or five tiny baskets connected to the wall about waist high, close together enough for one nurse to reach all of them.

That was as far as I got. I ran outside, sat on the curb and sobbed.

The thought of all those babies growing up without families when we wanted children so badly was more than I could bear.

John and the others went farther. They said the toddlers called them “Mama” and “Daddy.”

That was the day John changed his mind about adoption.

Emma was about four then, and we had been unable to get pregnant again. John had been resistant to the idea of adoption, but seeing all those kids there, knowing they would not be ever be loved by a family got to him. He said he would have taken home all his arms could carry if they would have let him.

I have no idea what happened to any of those babies. Bosnia rarely allows international adoption. They’d by 17 now, aged out of the orphanage, on their own. Maybe on the streets. If they survived.

I pray somehow they found someone who loved them.