By making friends, traveling to different historic sites (like memorials, churches, and fortresses), and reading history books, I am learning about how communities in the region remember their past. The community needs to talk about what happened in the past, but this is hard when the history is complex and people don't agree on facts.
People were hurt, physically and emotionally, and that pain is passed on to the next generations. This means that even though the war happened over thirty years ago, the memory and trauma stay with children your age. Some examples of how memories of the past continue on are through families telling stories, museums, and what is taught in school.
However, the memory of doing bad things in the past is hard for people and governments to admit sometimes. For example, in the United States, we don’t always talk openly about how we unfairly treated and harmed Native Americans. In Serbia, this happens too. The government and most people only talk about ways Serbian people were hurt in the past, and not about the way Serbian people hurt others too. While both are true, it is important to talk openly about the pain of the other side when trying to heal from the past and move forward.
“Youth Initiative for Human Rights” (YIHR) is an organization with offices around the Western Balkans, that works with people my age to talk about what happened during the war. They bring together people from all five of the different countries that used to be Yugoslavia to learn from one another.
