Report

I arrived in the Belgrade airport on a sweltering day at the end of May.  I was met at the airport by a very nice Serbian who spoke very little English with a lot of gusto, his name was Dragan and he became my friend and colleague throughout my time in Serbia.

I was in Belgrade to work with the International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) on a project involving small farmers in southern Serbia.  What I found was an extremely complicated country struggling to cope with its loss of international prominence and a decade of ethnically fueled violence.

Driving back from the airport we passed gleaming brand new shopping centers and office buildings as well as the shelled out remnants of the Chinese embassy and the former office building of the army.  The tram that I rode to work everyday passed along a street between two shells of government buildings.  Both of them within two blocks of the nuclear fallout shelter labeled “U.S. Embassy”.

Most of the city was very grey. The buildings were bland and seemed to be held together by nationalism and soviet era engineering prowess.  However, the downtown was lovely, full of old buildings and a massive fortress that towers on a hill overlooking the convergence of two of Europe’s most important rivers, the Sava and the Danube.

People dress very well, though few have much spending money.  Many pass a lot of time in Cafes and Clubs, though unemployment is extremely high.  The city of Belgrade, and to a lesser degree, the entire country of Serbia, is a bizarre study in contrast.  At the end of three months I was just barely beginning to understand how deeply engrained many contradictory notions are in its people.

As for my job, I normally felt unproductive and lost.  Even though almost everyone in the office spoke English very well, many office conversations (especially water-cooler type informal conversations) unfolded in the Slavic machine-gun tempo of Serbo-Croatian.  So yes, I was completely lost when this happened.

The most valuable thing that I could contribute to the office was proofreading of grant proposals and adding some economic perspective to the projects proposed. I was also able to work with Dragan on some social-capital projects related to the diffusion of innovations on small farms throughout Serbia.

To put my relative uselessness into perspective, I almost had a graduate degree in Economics and I spent about three weeks punching holes in papers related to the Kosovo legal aid project.  I was unable to read any of the documents or contribute in any other way since they were in Serbo-Croatian, so I punched holes in the papers and filed them in binders.

The people I worked with at IOCC were outstanding.  They were always very nice and helpful.  They helped me find an apartment, took me out to dinners and showed me around the city.

I went with Dragan on about ten IOCC trips into Serbia to visit small farms and cooperatives.  These trips were wonderful from the adventure aspect of traveling in a white Land Rover with UN plates through the mountain ranges in southern Serbia.  However, from a functional standpoint I felt more like window dressing.  I have already said that my friend could not speak much English and many of the issues he needed to discuss with the farmers were complicated and detailed. It would have been very hard to translate without an extensive knowledge of both English and Serbo-Croatian.

I had a great time.  I learned a great deal about a very complicated part of the world, to which, I had no previous exposure.  If the other agricultural economics person working for IOCC would have been fluent in both English and Serbo-Croatian or if I had at least a rough knowledge of Russian or Serbo-Croatian, I think my summer would have been a lot more valuable to IOCC as an organization.  A related problem might have been the small size of  IOCC in Serbia.  They could not spare the manpower for one of the excellent English speakers to go with my colleague and I around the small farms in Serbia and act as a translator for me.

The take home message is, if you are reading this because you are considering the World Citizenship Program, it is a fantastic opportunity and you should definitely apply to the program.  However, before you decide to go to a particular country, especially if you do not speak the language of that country, be sure that sufficient translators will be available to facilitate your work, otherwise you will end up punching holes in legal documents for three weeks.

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