When the Reverend Frederick J. Streets recently asked a woman in Bosnia if there was anything that the doctors in her country were not giving enough of to help those hurt or injured as a result of the three-and-a-half-year war there, he was initially startled by her answer.
"Time," she responded.
The time she wanted, the woman made clear to the Yale chaplain, was not so she could discuss her health, but so she could have an extended opportunity to tell her physician her personal stories about the war.
In Bosnia-Herzegovina, the trauma of the war has left most of the population there feeling varying degrees of pain, and in their search for healing, many Bosnians find it difficult to make distinctions between emotional and physical pain, says Streets, who spent two weeks in the country in June.
Streets discovered that the woman's longing for time to talk is shared by many of her fellow citizens. The telling of their personal stories, he explains, is one of the many steps that the people of the war-torn central European country are trying to take in order to move on, psychologically, spiritually and in the physical realm of their everyday lives.
"Although there are general psychological and spiritual wounds shared by most of the Bosnian people, I heard many of them say over and over again that they don't want their individuality to be lost as the nation struggles to heal and recreate itself," explains the Yale chaplain. "They do not want to be grouped together as victims of war; instead, they want to be understood as individual people with their own unique experiences, and they want those experiences to be understood and heard, particularly by their health-care providers."
Streets, who is also assistant professor of clinical social work at the Child Study Center and adjunct associate professor of pastoral theology at the Divinity School, traveled to Bosnia at the invitation of psychiatrist Dr. Richard Mollica, whom he met when the two were students together at the Divinity School during the mid-1970s. Mollica (M.A.R. 1979) is founder and director of the Harvard University Program in Refugee Trauma, which provides clinical services dealing with trauma in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Cambodia and Japan. Streets is a senior consultant with the program.
While in Bosnia, Streets met with Jewish, Muslim, Serbian and Croat refugees, members of the clergy, civic and educational leaders, student groups, and mental and medical health-care providers to discuss the pastoral, psychiatric and social services needed in the post-war period. He was both uplifted and saddened by what he saw in the country three years after the war's ending.
"When I was first flying into Sarajevo, I was struck by the beauty and lushness of the landscape," says Streets of his first-ever visit to eastern Europe. "I had seen all the media images of destruction during the war, and I was expecting everything to look like those pictures. But there has been a great deal of recovery. Of course, I could clearly see the impact of war all over the country -- in sections that have not been rehabilitated or have only been partially rehabilitated. As I got around and talked to people, the effects of the war truly sank in. Being there, you are unlikely to meet a person who has not experienced loss of family members, friends, homes often all of the three."
Today, he points out, approximately 250,000 people live in Sarajevo, only half of the total population before the war. The other half are missing, dead or in diaspora, he notes. For the many Bosnian refugees who fled or were driven from their homes, the question "What is now home?" is "profound and existential," says Streets.
"I visited a Serbian section that is now inhabited by Muslim refugees who don't want to go back to their former communities," the chaplain recalls. "One refugee asked, 'How can I go back when my neighbor is the one who killed my loved ones?' The same questions are now being raised in Kosovo. I even heard of former residents of Bosnia who fled to Kosovo during the war, only to be attacked again. People's fears about going back to their former homes are very intense."
Streets admits that when the war first broke out, he had difficulty understanding why the various nationalist groups in the former Yugoslavia -- Muslims, Serbs and Croats -- who had lived a relatively tolerant coexistence for hundreds of years before the war, could find themselves feeling such hatred for each other.
"Coming from this country, which has historically been divided by race, and going there, which is divided by nationality, made me feel that I was in the context of a different human experience," says Streets. "For 500 years, this once-pluralistic society got along; the different groups shared the same land and spoke the same language.
"Yet I heard stories that seemed beyond my comprehension, such as one about a Serbian man, who, when the fighting started, took his children and left behind his Muslim wife. There were so many examples where the nationalist sentiments were far stronger than familial ties. It's a very complex phenomenon to us in the United States."
In spite of their pain and loss, the Bosnians are resolute in their struggle to move beyond the war's destruction, Streets discovered. Their challenges, however, are great, the chaplain says.
"In addition to the destruction, the country is now experiencing new problems as a result of the war, including domestic violence, alcohol and substance abuse, adolescent acting-out, petty crime, prostitution, psychosomatic illnesses, behavioral problems in children and depression. A significant portion of the population suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or some form of depression, and there has been an increase in suicide.
"So in addition to mending the souls of its people," he continues, "Bosnia has to create a democratic form of government, establish itself as a major player in the European economy and create an infrastructure to tend to the physical, mental and spiritual needs of people devastated by war. Essentially, the country is in the process of creating an entirely new society, all at a time when it remains one of the most vulnerable places in the world."
The Bosnians' own sense of vulnerability became especially apparent to the Yale chaplain during a conversation he had with some elderly people in the country about the impact of the war. As the Bosnian men and women recalled scenes of destruction and its effects on their own lives, Streets realized that they were, in fact, describing World War II.
"For some of the older Bosnians, the recent war excavated earlier war wounds that they had never talked about before," he says. "These older people said they saw signs of an emerging war over six years ago but they didn't want to acknowledge it; they said they couldn't believe it could happen in their country again."
Streets spent some of his time in Bosnia talking to religious leaders about how they can work together with the mental health community to help the Bosnian people regain hope and trust.
"Right now, one of the large questions for mental health professionals there is 'How do you redefine yourself after you've been traumatized -- both as an individual and as a country?' I quickly noticed when I asked people questions about their feelings that they would preface their answers with the question 'Do you mean before the war or after the war?' The war is the divisive element in their lives. Trauma splits the self, and for the Bosnians, part of their healing is to learn to live with a divided self."
Streets' trip to Bosnia, however, has convinced him that despite their fragmented lives, the Bosnian people are well-equipped to meet the physical, psychological and spiritual challenges they face.
"If there's anyplace on earth that can rise from the ashes, it is Bosnia," he says. "One of my most uplifting experiences there was meeting with a group of high school students who are members of a group called 'Say Yes.' What they mean by that is that they 'say yes' to a new, democratic, multicultural, inclusive Bosnia. Their idealism is not only age-appropriate idealism; it's balanced by their experiences of war. They have all experienced loss, yet they were incredibly mature and reasoned, and, to see them all gathered together on a hot Saturday afternoon to share their convictions and hopes was a wonderful experience."
The rest of the world will learn a great deal from watching the Bosnian people attempt to heal from the civil war, says Streets, particularly about the effects of and recovery from trauma. Some of the lessons learned from the Bosnian experience may also be useful in understanding the trauma of urban violence, he adds.
"The symptoms I saw in people traumatized by war parallel the symptoms and behaviors of people I've seen traumatized by urban violence in our own country," Streets explains. "Although we may not have the bombed-out buildings, our cities are full of people who have been traumatized by violence. The experience of watching the Bosnians going about their business while feeling unimaginable emotional pain is one that I'll never forget. I hope that it's something that we can all learn from."
-- By Susan Gonzalez
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