US Team and YWAM Team

We got back from our short triplet to Croatia, and our next US team arrived. This time it was just 12 of them, and as they were with us under 2 weeks, we did a shortened version of our orientation with them, before they got into the swing of things with fun game nights, pub quiz, etc. 

They were all studying in North Carolina, and so I could tell them about my visits there to see my friend Greg (who visited me last year!). They were a sweet team and it was fun to have them come and join in with our students and volunteers. 

After they left, we had just 2 days before our final team (from YWAM Trentino) before the summer break arrived. There were 6 nationalities amongst the 7 of them: USA, The Netherlands, Chile, UK, Brazil and New Zealand. 

They were heading down to the camps at Boracko Lake, and the idea was to have an orientation to the country and then help out where they could with us. Some of my colleagues had already left on their summer break, so it was just Kate and I doing the orientation for them.

After that, they helped a lot around the building - helping me with getting my supplies ready for our children's ministries (read: sharpening of pencil crayons!) and also helping me get rid of a lot of stuff from our office. And we also managed to find the right person for the job... of fixing how the books were organised: 

It is so fun when you give someone a job that they absolutely love, and do a great job with it!! 

It wasn't all work and no play, they did go up to Banj brdo lookout with our volunteers: 

And we had a fun last night with them, playing pictionary and other games: 

And then it was time to say goodbye to the last team of the spring/summer and head out on my own summer break! 

Rocky Mountain Region Team 2026 part 2

After I got back from the conference in Hungary, it was time to engage once again with the team. (If you haven't read part 1 about the team, check it out here)

Twice a week the team ran fun events, ranging from fun game nights, to trivia evening and a great cultural dance night - with dances from locals, Americans and Indian students. It is such a great way for the team to learn about the local culture and for locals and International students to learn about American culture! It is also a lot of fun! Below they are learning the "kolo" or Serbian circle dance:

Michael Ots who is the Field Director of FEUER (The Fellowship of Evangelists in the Universities of Europe) and an author of numerous books came and spent a weekend in Banja Luka, where he was able to speak on two events: 

The first night was about some of his travels to 75 countries around the world, ranging from meeting the Crown Prince of Liechtenstein to sharing how he sees God in the wonders of New Zealand. It was fun and engaging and encouraged even more people to attend the next night where he shared on the topic "What makes us human? Faith and hope in the age of AI". 

At this event he not only shared more deeply about faith and the meaning of life, but he was also able to share a copy his new book "Making sense of life" to every one who wanted one. Many stood in line to chat with him afterwards and get their booked signed! Here is one of our amazing volunteers, Vlad, with his signed copy: 

Then all of a sudden, it was time to say goodbye, and we had the traditional pizza/karaoke goodbye party. And the turnout was testimony to the relationships formed over their month with us: 

So, to end off, I do have to share one of the hard parts about hosting teams - and that is when something goes wrong or someone is sick...

Team directors, Hannah and Micah (above with our team) had been staff on 2 previous teams. And both those times, someone had needed to go to the hospital... When they arrived, Hannah jokingly said that they had gotten a "name" for being on the teams that always had someone get really sick and hopefully this time would be better...

Well, this team kind of said, "Hold my beer" to the previous two teams!! This time we had 3 people need to go to the hospital, 2 of them in the middle of the night (poor Ljilja!) and one of those two was really sick and needed help multiple days. Thankfully in the end they all got better (one was a broken toe, so that is still healing...). But the good news is that Hannah who was sick most of the previous two times, didn't get sick herself this time, so we are taking it as a win!!! 

It might not always be easy to host teams (especially big ones like this one), but I can truly say that it is always worth it!

Rocky Mountain Region Team 2026 part 1

I arrived back from South Africa into Zagreb on the 18th in the morning, and waited 6 hours at the airport until this wonderful team of 31 Americans arrived. They are all students in colleges in the Rocky Mountain Region of InterVarsity - from Colorado to Utah and Arizona. We send a chartered bus for them, and so I helped with communication with the driver and got us all on the bus for the trip to Banja Luka. 

We then spent 3 full days doing orientation with them - from history and culture, to do's and don'ts in this culture... it also allows them to get to know us better and we have a fun time. I also managed to get all 31 names (it helps that there were returners and staff that I already knew). 

We end that week off with a fun sports day with our teenagers. Always a highlight: 

After that week, they go to different faculties to get to know the students and also get to understand more about the culture. Here we are at the English department. Because of illness, the  promised lecture on cross-cultural communication was cancelled, but I think the exercise they were given instead was equally valuable. The local students were given the task to translate some of Ivo Andric's "Signs by the roadside" which was a difficult exercise, but actually the Americans appreciated the difficulty of translating by the end and learnt a lot about the language and the culture along the way. 

Here they are trying to figure out what Ivo Andric is trying to say in different groups: 

And then each group was able to share their translation of the different texts to the class: 

Here we all are afterwards: 

More on the rest of their stay with us in another blog post!! 

Book Club at the Children's Home

During the school term, Thursday nights are Book Club nights at the Children's Home. And the kids can hardly wait for us to come! This semester we watched short movies of our weekly story and then coloured in the page that went with it, before doing a fun craft to go along with the story. Above is after we had done the story of the Ugly Duckling (can you spot the handprint swans we did as our craft?)

It can be quite chaotic, but we try to have enough volunteers so that we can have enough attention given to each of the children during the activities:

For our "Rapunzel" craft, we made our own tower and hair to be lowered down - it really was a fun activity: 

(On an aside: I wanted to get the triangles at the top to be as big as they could on an A4, so I asked chatgpt and Claude how they would do it to maximise the triangles. And both of their solutions weren't as good as mine. They both told me so when I uploaded it to them to compare... so I was quite chuffed at having outdone not one but 2 AI models!)

I made us each our own little booklets for each of the stories we did: (Klub Citalaca = Club of Readers)

And in the end this is what it looked like inside: See if you can guess the stories!!!*

After having a really fun 4 weeks of working hard it was time to have a bit of a break and have their favourite format - different stations around the room with all sorts of different activities! They really wish we could do it that way every week, but it is definitely more fun when it is done less often! 

(*Rapunzel, Little Mermaid, Cinderella and The Ugly Duckling)

Drama Club thank-you: David the movie

We usually take our wonderful teenagers who are part of our drama club (check out about that here) and do our Christmas plays to treat them to something as a thank-you. It has ranged from 10-pin bowling to ice-skating. This year we decided to take them to see the movie David. 

It was dubbed into the local language, and I was wondering how it would be as it is a musical. But I really enjoyed it. It was translated really well (the songs even rhymed!) and the singing was phenomenal. I look forward to eventually seeing the English version with Phil Wickham in the title role - especially as it was all done in South Africa! 

But the teens loved it (they like the singer who sang in the local language!) and enjoyed learning more about one of their favourite characters in the Bible. I was just sad because our wonderful volunteer, Jovana, who was the one who came up with the idea to take them was sick and couldn't come with us :(

Video: looking back at 2025

 

Christmas packages

I am part of the Operation Christmas Child team in Bosnia and for the 2025-2026 season, we decided it was the best plan for all of Bosnia Herzegovina to take a one year break from receiving packages. So, I only had myself to blame for not having our normal quota of "shoebox packages" to give out while performing our Christmas Plays for our sponsored children...

But praise the Lord, we had a mix of donations from all over - from other organisations, local donors, and even a special collection at our little church. So all of our 80 sponsored families received a package of food and hygiene items, a bag of new clothing in different sizes and one huge bag of sweets for the kids. 

It was a bit harder to organise how we would be able to give it all out, but just seeing the smile on the children's faces makes it all worth it!

 

Drama Club and Christmas Plays

This year was the 10th time I have run a "Drama Club" (above, starting the process reading our parts out loud for the first time) and rehearsed for our Christmas plays with children/teens from our sponsorship project. The 4th time with this group. They are all becoming such good actors, but I pushed them this year as we had the fewest amount of rehearsals ever... 

{We started later than ever due to my travel schedule and then I had to cancel one rehearsal because a LOT of snow fell through the night before... and as I have to go collect 5 of the kids from the top of a very high hill with very steep roads that do not get cleaned quickly... I decided that it was not the wisest move trying to get up there! (I did it last winter once and discovered what traction control is! So wasn't keen on repeating that experience!)}

The story is one I wrote back in 2018 for my other group of kids, and so I just took that script and rewrote it for this group. And despite the lack of rehearsals, they still did amazing and I am so proud of them!!

Indian Christmas Eve

In December 2024, we decided to hold a special Christmas Eve celebration for our International students (mostly Indians). They are in Banja Luka studying Medicine in a special program in English just for them. And 55 International students came along despite heavy snowfall the day of the party. It was complete chaos as we had two teams cooking in the church, and of course it became a competition! And we didn't get the smell of the spices out of the church until February! 

In 2025, we decided to do it again! We learnt our lesson and just had one group of students cooking at their own home, with my wonderful colleague, Graham, making sure they kept to time. And Carolyn and Kate made flatbread to make the food go further!

After last time, we weren't scared of the amount of students who might come. And that was a good thing, because this time we had almost 70 students join us!

There was food aplenty - the dish they eat at holidays: chicken biryani. And even though they told me it was "not spicy" it was certainly too spicy for me :) 

We also had a bit of a Christmas program where we sang some carols (below) and Ljilja shared a message about whose birthday we were celebrating (and I translated into English). 

These students really lack places they can have community, and so it was great to be able to provide that, as well as share why we celebrate Christmas! 

Volunteer Christmas party

Each year we have a party for our volunteers to celebrate Christmas together. It is an opportunity to celebrate them and all the things they have done during the year with us, and we always have a wonderful time together!! This year we had chilli and baked potatoes, and it was yummy! 

We all had a great time catching up with the goings on at our tables! 

And after out volunteers asking for a long while for t-shirts they can use while volunteering, this was the year we finally got it together to get them made... they are all very happy! 

We really are blessed with wonderful committed volunteers!

In 2025 there were 30 volunteers who gave 1091 volunteer hours. I have to keep track of their hours and it is always so encouraging to see how many hours they have given! Mainly through our projects with children and teens, but also in preparation for events or a twice a year "craft making party" to sort all our supplies and get all the "examples" made for our children's crafts. 

Children's Home "trip around the world"

We have just finished up our an autumn series of "Reading Club" workshops at the Children's Home. We are going "around the world" and learning about different countries each week. Each child has a "passport" to which another country gets added each week - and then the craft is connected to this country.

This was the week we did Finland, and made reindeers, but we also went to Peru and made Llamas and Egypt and become Pharoahs! It has been a fun time! (with a little bit of educational input as well!) 

So, a little aside story - I make the "inserts" for the passports (like for Finland above) and we use an A3 size of blue paper that I have a LOT of from a donation maybe 15 years ago from somewhere. We fold it up and then use it as a little blue notebook to stick our "country inserts" into. We had a meeting for volunteers to give input into our program and they gave us feedback that maybe it would be good to use other colours other than blue as some of the kids didn't want blue.

Well, I searched high and low in Banja Luka and the only A3 paper they had was in white. There was NO coloured A3 paper in the city. I could order it online, but I didn't have the time... But I just think it is so amazing that we actually started doing these passports and notebooks out of the blue paper because it was something I already had - and it seems as if we will have to plan ahead if we want to continue using this same method in the future (when the blue paper runs out!) 

I always put a fun quote on the "name page". In February/March it was "Books are like a garden which you carry in your pocket" - Chinese proverb

And for their "trip around the world" it is Dr Suess: "The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go." 

Teenager Workshop run by volunteers!

We are so blessed to have wonderful local volunteers who want to help us with all of our activities. Each semester we have had a group of them run a different workshop. This semester, 3 of them ran a wonderful workshop for our teens, which was a mixture of sketches with discussion afterwards and then some fun educational activities. 

Volunteer Outing

 A little over a year ago, we asked our volunteers for suggestions of things that they would like to do. Suggestions included more fun activities like game nights and movie nights and also outings. We finally got it together to have an outing to Jajce in mid-November. It was such a fun day: 

We enjoyed each other's company (and choice of music) in each of the 3 cars, and then stopped along the way to take pics. Above on the overlook of the town with the fortress on the hill and below in from of the waterfall.

In Jajce, we enjoyed the traditional Bosnian food: Čevapi - skinless sausages with traditional bread. And then after getting a good shot at the tower (below) some wandered around the Old Town, while others enjoyed coffee!

I jokingly said that we took more time taking group shots than actually enjoying the sights, but that was also part of the fun! 

Children's Home visits in Summer and Children's Week

Over the summer, we do ministry a bit differently. Instead of running more educational type workshops, we have fun "Day Camps". This looks like going outside and hanging out - giving children different options: Below left: Lego Below right: football for those more active ones!

We always have to make a rainy day plan to move things inside... this is our group pic after a lovely afternoon despite the thunderstorms outside!

Now that they are back in school we had a fun workshop for Children's Week. The theme was "It is important to be a child, carefree and happy". We had activities and games all around the room and one of them was to write down what makes them happy or something they enjoy. And out of that we made the poster "Happiness tree". So fun! 

Soon we will start our weekly "Reading Club" visits. Once again we will travel "around the world" with the children - "visiting" a different country on a different continent each week.