Perseverance Means New Home for Bosnian Family

By David Snyder

With rain beating steadily against the windows outside, Nada Markovic and her teenage daughter cast their eyes to the ceiling and joke that it's the first time in years they haven't worried about leaks. And while the joke draws laughs, there is gravity to the comment—laughter born from more than 16 years of hardship.

Displaced by the war that erupted in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, one year after the country's declaration of independence from the former Yugoslavia, Nada and her three children found themselves caught up in the bloody ethnic conflict. Fleeing with her children to neighboring Serbia, Nada managed to ride out the war, which ended with a peace agreement in 1995.

"In 1992 I took the kids and went to Serbia," Nada says. "We were living in one room and conditions were very hard." But like many of her fellow countrymen, Nada was drawn back to the familiarity of home, even while she had little to return to. "We came back in 1997 because we wanted to be in our own place."

Returning to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nada moved back in with her husband, but the relationship was strained. With her father dead and only her elderly mother nearby, Nada had little support when she left her husband in 2003. She moved into a tiny house on land her mother owned near the town of Bratunac in northeast Bosnia and Herzegovina.

"We fixed the family house up enough to live in it," Nada says. But the years that followed were tough. She was a single mother with three children. Her youngest daughter was born with serious physical disabilities. Nada was barely making it on the small salary she earned working for a local nongovernmental organization.

New Home Project

It was then that she learned of a program by Catholic Relief Services to rebuild homes in the Bratunac area. Through the Durable Solutions project, Catholic Relief Services has been working since 2004 to reconstruct homes for those unable to return home after the war. Thousands are still living in cramped and often unsanitary collective centers across the country. Because the project takes on special cases like Nada's, she applied.

Three months later, Nada got word that she had been accepted into the program. She and her children would soon be among the more than 500 families to receive a home through the Durable Solutions project. Because one requirement of the project is that the beneficiaries contribute some element of labor to the building, Nada and her family eagerly set about preparing their small plot of land for their new home.

"I moved in with my mother, in one room, so we could destroy the old house," Nada says. "My friends and I prepared the ground. There was rubbish and things, and we had to dig the foundation."

Preparation and Perseverance

Though she fell ill during the months of preparation before construction began, Nada remained undeterred. Even while caring for her youngest daughter, she worked on the new home site.

"There's no end to my happiness," Nada says. "The day we dug the foundation, I had a fever, but I still had to get out and do it, I was so happy."

In July 2008, the home was completed—a spacious site with two rooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, running water and electricity: all standard minimums for homes built by CRS. Visiting today with CRS staff who have come to follow up, Nada radiates the happiness she feels at having, for the first time her life, a home of her own.

"Every day I wake up and think, 'Where am I? Whose house is this?' " Nada jokes.

But her life this year has changed in other dramatic ways as well. A chance meeting with an Austrian doctor led to corrective surgery for her daughter. Now, the teenager can feed herself, something she had been unable to do for the first 14 years of her life. Looking around her, just two weeks after moving into her new home, Nada says she feels at times like she is living in a new world.

"I have to become used to the fact that this is my house, and this is my life," Nada says. "It's a very concrete thing, and I am so happy."

David Snyder is a photojournalist who has traveled to more than 30 countries with CRS.