Our guest blogger this week is Brits in Bosnia. Her blog about moving to Bosnia with her husband, two children aged under four, and a dog is hugely amusing and makes compelling reading. It might give you itchy feet. It might also make you see blogs in a new light, particularly if you don’t ‘get’ them.  We hope you enjoy reading – let us, and Brits in Bosnia, know what you think.

Moving to Bosnia with two small boys under the age of four and a dog, was undoubtedly one of the most unexpected moves we have made. Everyone thought we were quite mad. They told us that not only was Bosnia an ex-communist state, with some serious need for development, it was an ex-conflict zone strewn with landmines and gun-toting mafia bosses.

Strictly speaking they were not wrong. Bosnia does have many issues as it recovers from the conflict that so devastated it between 1992 and 1995. But this is like saying that England is a land of red telephone boxes, Bobbies and cream teas. The stereotypes are there for a reason, but they do not necessarily accurately reflect the life in the majority of the country. Bosnia is not so different to England. It is European. A Saturday night out in Tuzla (the predominantly Muslim city in which we live) involves beer, live music and a surprisingly glamorous clientele. There are epic meat-fests of barbeques and swimming in the local lakes during the summer and tobogganing and skiing on Olympic standard slopes in the winter (Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics).

We’d been living in England for the previous four years and had itchy feet. English life was lovely, very lovely actually, but both of us had lived abroad before and wanted to do so again. We knew that if we didn’t move now, we would blink and it would be 10 years later and we would still be in England, doing the same thing that we had always done. We were lucky to have flexibility; my husband is self-employed, he writes software and sells it on the internet for a living, all he needs is an internet connection. I have degrees in Development and Human Rights and wanted to use this time when the boys were young to continue my studies on a part-time basis, which is easily done abroad with good internet access and regular Skype phone calls to my supervisor.

Although unusual, the move to Bosnia was not a total leap into the unknown for us. We had lived there, before children, in 2003/4. We knew how harsh the winters could be, we knew how terrific the summers were. We also knew that Bosnia was a good place for children, there are adequate hospitals here, not too many hideous diseases and the school system works. More importantly, we knew people, people who could help us find somewhere suitable to live, help us if we had any problems and assist us in our never ending battle with Bosnian bureaucracy. We have been welcomed here, people have us over for coffee and rostilj (meat orientated barbeques), they have shown us how to make plum brandy (distilled from the brilliantly named ‘happy machine’) and shower us with Balkan hospitality.

We arrived when the boys were aged three years, and 18 months. One year on, we are still enjoying ourselves. The boys are just starting to speak Bosnian (the path to bi-lingualism for children is not necessarily as fast or as smooth as many people assume). The research for my PhD which focuses upon reconciliation in post-conflict societies is going well and is enhanced by being able to spend a considerable length of time here, rather than jetting in and out as most other researchers need to do. My husband’s software development company is starting to flourish having had the time and financial breathing space it needed to grow, which we simply couldn’t afford back in Britain.

There have been difficulties of course. I still don’t have a mothers’ network in place that I can turn to at 3.30pm on a rainy Tuesday afternoon. Although the boys are in nursery every morning, their afternoons are spent with me, myself and I. With few functioning playgrounds, not a whiff of a decent play centre and very little in the way of playgroups, toddler music classes or anything in fact, I can find it very lonely. On a Monday morning the week stretches ahead, scarily activityless and without any respite. Some weeks this is unbelievably daunting. Other weeks just seem to fly by. Either way, the childcare aspect of our expat experience can seem relentless.

I started blogging about our move at Brits in Bosnia  just before we left the UK in July 2008. Originally I started the blog with the knowledge that I must write a 100,000 word thesis in the (relatively) near future and I wanted to keep writing about something, anything and this seemed a good way to do it. Keeping friends and family updated was an extra bonus. However, I found that blogging evolved into something far more important for me. Without a mothers’ support network in place, I found that the community of bloggers with similar aged children to mine became my community where I could share tales of potty training and fussy eating. It was also refreshing to find other expat Mums (and there’s an entire blogging network dedicated to them at Expat Mums Blog) who could identify with the specific issues that surround being a mother in a country that isn’t your own. Then people started to contact me through the blog, both other expats in Bosnia but also expat Bosnians as well as a few who live locally, which has provided a richness of experience about Bosnia that I hadn’t fully appreciated.

So, would we do it again? Absolutely. Despite all the difficulties, the lonely days, the battles with bureaucracy, the ‘what are we doing, I’ll never understand this country’ moments, we wouldn’t have not had the experience for anything. The boys have realised that there are languages and cultures that are not the same as ours and that each has its merits. They understand that it is ok to be different and it is ok for people to be different to them.

As for us adults? We feel alive. Everything here is a bit less sanitised, a bit more in your face. The vegetables may conceal the odd maggot but they don’t look like plastic children’s toys either, and they were grown down the road. Bosnia can, and frequently does, drive us mad, but it has provided a wealth of experience and adventures that we will be talking about for years.

I wrote an email to a friend the other day; she lives down the road here in Tuzla, but is in America for the summer. “Not much has changed since you deserted us for a sensible country,” I wrote, “ the weird guy who adopts strays has taken to wandering around with raw bones for the dogs shoved down the back of his trousers and the random Imam from the mosque next door keeps giving me plums and perfume. Do you think it would be a sin to turn the plum glut of a dedicated Muslim’s orchard into plum vodka?”. That isn’t something I’d ever have written if we’d stayed in England. Whilst the perfume gives me a headache and Stray Dog Man is getting progressively madder, we enjoy watching the very real life of a country that can be so very maddening but peculiarly human.