Tuzla, Bosnia, Tuesday June 8, 2004: Every day at Bosfam house begins with coffee. Marta Schaaf, who worked with Bosfam for AP last year, wrote movingly about the importance of these meetings, which are much more than just a coffee break. This is an opportunity for the Bosfam staff to share their fears and confidences with each other, and with strangers. Pia, Marta’s successor, tells me she didn’t drink coffee before coming here. Now she gets several cups a day and is on the verge of addiction.

Today’s coffee break is interrupted by Hajra Djozic, who’s just arrived from Srebrenica, where she now lives. Hajra is a long-time member of Bosfam, and one of their most skilled weavers. Two days ago the Srebrenica police came to the village where she lived before the war and started asking for her brother. He was killed in the 1995 massacre. This episode, adding insult to injury, has unnerved Hajra and she’s come to seek reassurance from her friends at Bosfam. She’ll return to Srebrenica later today.

As Hajra tells her story, tears start to well up in the eyes of Bula, another young women who works at Bosfam. Pia tells me that Bula routinely break down at the coffee meetings, and seems to be trapped in a deep and inconsolable sadness. She lost two brothers in the massacre, and has gone through two nasty divorces. Bula’s hands shake so much that she can’t work at a loom. She cleans, makes tea and smiles through her tears.

Coping with Sadness: Nura takes comfort from weaving
with other survivors in the Bosfam Tuzla center.

Beba Hadzic, the Bosfam director, nods, murmurs and comforts Haira. It’s at these meetings that one gets a real sense of Beba’s authority and her importance to the women. All her life, Beba has refused to be bullied. For ten years she headed the Srebrenica primary school. In 1991 the SDA (Muslim party) told her to join the party. She rejected any political affiliation, and was demoted.

Beba continued to work at the school until the beginning of the war, in the spring of 1992, when the first wave of Muslims was expelled from the town. Bosnian Serbs stripped everyone of their valuables before they left, and killed those who resisted, but Beba managed to retain her watch and her wedding ring. They are, she says, her most precious belongings.

Like many charismatic leaders, Beba exercises a dominant role at Bosfam. The organization is entirely too dependent on her, but at these coffee meetings one understands how important her strength is to these other traumatized women. Though sobered by Haira’s ordeal, they seem a little less fearful when they stand up to leave and wash out the thick Turkish coffee grinds.

Most aid programmers would never understand the importance of meetings like this, let alone put a dollar value on them. But this is the glue that holds women’s civil society together, and makes Bosfam a force to be reckoned with.