From the Bay to the Balkans: A Unique Service-Learning Opportunity
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 comprises two interlinked components—a weeklong orientation and research session in the spring and a two-week journey to Bosnia-Herzegovina in the summer.
During the five-day orientation session held during the Spring Discovery interim students are introduced to the history and culture, of the region through a research and readings (including the writings of Samantha Powers, Michael Ignatieff, Mark Danner and several other pertinent scholars and analysts), lecture, discussion, regional and documentary film, language exercises, and fieldtrips off campus to meet with human rights professionals.
In the past, students have meet 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 the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley, and San Francisco’s Center for Justice and Accountability, which has provided legal assistance to victims of human rights violations from Bosnia and elsewhere.
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.
Students also learn about the efforts of the local population and the “international community” to restore peace as well as the complicated nature of humanitarian intervention and assistance.
While in Bosnia, students meet with representatives of a range of organizations, including UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the International Commission for Missing Persons (ICMP), and the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN). In 2007, participants attended the Seventh Biannual Conference of International Genocide Scholars in Sarajevo. 
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.
Read the student's daily blogs:
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.
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Students
and teachers convene for daily discussion and reflection, and students
are given ample time for journaling and exploring the cobblestone
streets, 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 web journal, which is
updated regularly with photos and reflections on the day’s activities.
The
program is coordinated by San Domenico Upper School teachers John
Bowermaster, Jill Hoefgen, and Ian Sethre, who have all travelled
extensively in the region.
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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 through arts
and crafts, sports, and study of English language.
For more information about the program, please contact Ian Sethre at isethre@sandomenico.org.
