Gaining Perspective

A silent bus ride was always rare with our group, but one particular afternoon you could hear a pin drop on the ride home. Silent and saddened, I spent the time to reflect on the days unique experience and process all of the thoughts in my mind. With all of the tours and culture we were experiencing on our trip, sometimes it was easy to forget the people that lived there and what their experiences were. When we went to the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, it brought a lot of things into perspective for me. We had spent the day learning about the war in Bosnia and going to different cultural sites that go along with it. We discussed the bomb droppings and memorials created from it, a red coloring in where the bombs went off if three or more people died. The more we walked the city the more of these memorials I saw but I still couldn’t put things into perspective. We went to the war tunnel and walked through a portion and for some reason I could not connect to this. Feeling slightly uneasy and overwhelmed with different emotions we headed to our last stop. When we walked into the War Childhood Museum, I became overwhelmed with emotion. It could have been all the sights in one day right next to each other, but I connected. The first thing I saw was a collection of candy bar wrappers that a boy had during the war to trade with friends and to try to remember what it would taste like. Sweets were something not easily accessible during the war and so he held onto those wrappers as a sign of hope that he would be able to have chocolate again. This made me feel all sorts of feelings that I hadn’t felt on this trip before, I felt like I could begin to understand how it was really like. I don’t know if I will ever begin to fully understand what these children had to go through and all the troubles, they faced but I felt something different. I felt like everything we had seen just started to fit together like puzzle pieces. This moment defined a big part of my trip, it marked a spot where everything we were learning about clicked. That moment was filled with sadness and raw emotion which is what I needed to understand. I haven’t had to experience anything quite like they have in my life and I began to think what it was like for them. This made me really reflect on all the places we had been and really look at things through a much different lens. I needed to take away my personal lens and try to see things in the eyes of a local. This is such a difficult thing to do and often I find myself forgetting about anything outside my personal bubble. Suddenly my problems seemed to be so small and insignificant, and my daily annoyances didn’t seem so bad. I shifted my view to a worldly one rather than confined to my personal circle. It’s not a change that can happen overnight but something I have to remind myself of daily and it makes me appreciate everything life has to offer just a bit more.