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 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, lecture, discussion, regional and documentary film, language exercises, and fieldtrips off campus to meet with Bay Area human rights professionals at the Berkeley Human Rights Center and the Center for Justice & Accountability.
In previous years, participating students have had the opportunity to meet MacArthur Fellow and foreign affairs expert Mark Danner, Pulitzer-Prize winning genocide scholar Samantha Power, Sarajevo-based human rights activists and journalists from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, representatives from various humanitarian organizations such as UNICEF, the International Commission on Missing Persons, IOM, and even Bosnian pop star Dino Merlin. In 2007, participants attended the Seventh Biannual Conference of 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.
Additional excursions include an overnight trip to Mostar to see the newly-reconstructed ‘Old Bridge’, as well attendance of the annual memorial for the victims of the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. 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.
The program is coordinated by San Domenico Upper School teachers Ian Sethre, Jill Hoefgen, Kristen Levine, and John Bowermaster, who have all travelled extensively in the region.
For more information about the program, please contact Ian Sethre at isethre@sandomenico.org.
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