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The first United Methodist Volunteers in Mission team to Central Bosnia arrived in early June to help repair refugee housing centers.
By June 8, the 16-member team was painting and doing light repair work at centers in Zenica, with some members also assigned to work in community service programs for women and youth, according to Dirk Van Gorp, coordinator of United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR) work in the former Yugoslavia.
Called "Operation: Restore Bosnia," the United Methodist summer work program originally had a goal of dispatching four 25-member volunteer teams to Central Bosnia during three four-week periods.
In a June 8 telephone interview from Washington D.C., where he was conducting business before returning to Croatia that night, Van Gorp admitted that renewed fighting has reduced participation in the project. "Some of the people who had signed up chose not to come," he said.
However, about 40 people remain committed to go, mostly from Oklahoma. Besides Zenica, volunteers will work in Gornji Vakuf, one of the cities most severely damaged during the war. Van Gorp said that Gornji Vakuf offers "lots of different opportunities" for relief work, including repairing war-damaged homes and working at the local health care clinic and kindergarten.
He stressed that both cities have "an acceptable level of safety," in his opinion, and explained they are too far from the fighting to be shelled from ground level.
Volunteers will not visit projects outside of those two cities and will travel to and from Split, Croatia, on a secured central road, he said.
Building upon grants from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and the U.S. Agency for International Development, UMCOR coordinates a number of rehabilitation projects in the region. "We are still taking care of all the refugee collective housing centers in Central Bosnia," Van Gorp said. "There are 76 of those."
A few of the centers are in "front-line towns where the Bosnian army is trying to push back," he explained, making decisions on how to monitor programs in those places "a day-to-day judgment."
UMCOR projects in Sarajevo -- a community center for women and youth and an income-generation program in refugee housing -- have all but shut down recently because of shelling and the lack of electricity and other necessities.
"The last three or four weeks in Sarajevo have been very difficult," Van Gorp confirmed, although he said the local program staff has remained. "It's been impossible for me to get into Sarajevo in the last two months."
June 8, 1995