Meet the Summer Interns: Picking Up the Pieces
Margaret Kettles' project, summer 2008
Years of war and ethnic tension in Bosnia have left thousands of its children institutionalized because their parents were either killed or left so traumatized by war that they could no longer care for their families. Margaret Kettles '11 has been awarded a Holocaust and Genocide Summer Internship to pursue volunteer work with these children.
 After a short training period in the capital city of Sarajevo, Margaret will travel to Mostar where for approximately six weeks she will be teaching English and diversity awareness at a local orphanage originally funded by the Egyptian government. Her placement there is facilitated by Training Workshops International and her internship funding will allow her to hire a translator and cover some of her in-country expenses.
Later in the summer Margaret will participate in workshops (aka "friendship camps") whose purpose is to teach diversity awareness to children. The workshops, sponsored by the New Jersey Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, will be held in schools around the region. Visit the friendship camps.
In her internship proposal, Margaret describes the friendship camps as seeking to "remove some of the damage done during the Bosnian genocide by bringing together Bosnian children from all three ethnic groups (Bosniak, Serb, and Croat) and teaching them diversity acceptance skills. This program is especially valuable because it is led not only by Americans, but by Bosnian young adults from each of the three ethnic groups. In some cases, our workshops represent the first positive contact Bosnian children have had with adults of a different ethnicity."
This will be Margaret's third trip to Bosnia to participate in this outreach. The International Development and Social Change major also plans to visit the Kozarac Peace Center and the Mothers of Srebrenica, sites of two former Serbian concentration camps.
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