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!! 

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!