Trip Back home to Banjaluka

Trip back home

Wherever you go, come back home. Strangely or not – home being where the heart is – I have two homes. One that was built for me and one that I built. I have built my home here in England since 1993, but heart always takes me back to my home in Banjaluka, Bosnia, where I was born back in 1973. I left when I was nearly nineteen, on my own, and those first years were turbulent as I did not leave by choice but necessity as war was starting in Bosnia.

But, I do not want to talk about the war and those unsettling times. Everyone has their story how war found them and where they ended and how they felt. And everyone’s story is heartbreaking if you care to truly listen and forget about yourself for a moment, some more than others when you factor in families they lost, including everything they lost that they have built over the years, if not decades for themselves and their families or inherited from ancestors.

Everyone dealt with personal loss in their own way. But, all I know is that, thankfully, we live in better times right now (well, different times, and bad times still happen to someone else right now somewhere on Earth) and memories of my happy and beautiful childhood are bright and shiny as they ever where. I am so grateful to be born in this beautiful part of the world, it made me who I am today with all the good as well as all the bad and ugly.