About the SD Summer Program in Bosnia
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| San Domenico students and faculty in Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2004 |
The San Domenico Summer Program in Bosnia-Herzegovina is part of an ongoing relationship forged between our school’s Global Responsibility Forum and the Balkan region.
The program combines several facets of international education, including cultural immersion and interaction, academic study, service learning and personal reflection.
The program in the Bosnia comprises two components—a weeklong orientation and research session in the Spring and a two week journey to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
During the five-day orientation session which is held during the Spring Discovery interim, students are introduced to the history and culture of the region (including excerpts Samantha Powers’ “A Problem from Hell”: America in the Age of Genocide, as well as the writings Michael Ignatieff, Mark Danner and several other pertinent articles), lecture, discussion, guest speakers, regional and documentary film, language exercises, and a fieldtrip off campus for some regional cuisines.
This year, the students met with Belma Demirovic, a Bosnian woman who fled her home in Banja Luka as a teenager and now works at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, as well as representatives from San Francisco’s Center for Justice and Accountability, which has provided legal assistance to victims of human rights violations from Bosnia and elsewhere.
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| Students feast on regional cuisine with hosts Julia and Zdravko Pecak at San Francisco’s Bistro E before heading overseas. |
Once the school year is over, the students and teachers travel to Sarajevo, where the first couple of days are spent touring the city’s cultural and historical sites, various markets, squares, mosques, churches, synagogues, museums, cemeteries, and 1984 Olympic sites.
Students also learn about the efforts of the “international community” to restore peace as well as the complicated nature of humanitarian intervention.
While in Bosnia, students meet with representatives of a range of organizations, including UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Development Agency (UNDP), and the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP).
Students get quite a bit of “hands-on” service and intercultural experience at a multiethnic summer school program—founded in 2001 by San Domenico teachers Ian Sethre and Jill Hoefgen—in the ethnically-mixed mountain town of Vares. San Domenico students help volunteer teachers facilitate basic ESL lessons, art projects and sports for younger kids, and enjoy opportunities to interact with Bosnian youth their own age. Additional excursions include an overnight trip to Mostar to see the newly-reconstructed ‘Old Bridge’, which had been destroyed during the conflict in 1993, as well attendance of the annual commemoration of the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995. Students also visit the Kolar family home, which served as the endpoint of an 800-meter-long tunnel designed to break the three-and-a-half year siege of Sarajevo.
Students and teachers convene for daily discussion and reflection, and students are given ample time for journaling and exploring the cafes, restaurants, dessert bars, and shops of Sarajevo’s Ferhadija walking street, which runs from Bascarsjia—Sarajevo’s Ottoman-era ‘Old Town’—through the city’s late-nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian City Center. During their time in the region, the students maintain a weblog, which is updated daily with photos and reflections on the day’s activities.
The program is coordinated by San Domenico teachers Ian Sethre, John Bowermaster, Shelagh Smith, and Jill Hoefgen. Prior to working with John Bowermaster to establish this program, Ian Sethre worked as Director of the University of Denver’s Project Bosnia, an international service learning program that facilitates partnerships between an array of humanitarian organizations and graduate and undergraduate students interested in human-rights related fieldwork. At the same time, Jill Hoefgen coordinated a summer school program, which was co-founded with Ian Sethre in 2001 and designed to bring Croat, Muslim, and Serb children together in the same classroom. The program continues under the direction of the University of Denver.
For more information about the program, please contact Ian Sethre at isethre@sandomenico.org.
