a note: because of issues with the web connection here, dates are off on most of these posts

We crossed this bridge four times yesterday. The first time, nervously. So much security, so many rumors and stories of danger filling our heads. Tales of protests, riots, grenades, gunshots.

Then nothing. We were across and no one seemed to have noticed us.

By evening, as we prepared for our first workshop with residents of North Mitrovica, one of our Albanian organizers who lives in the South, told us that tonight would be her first time to the North since the war. She lives only a few kilometers a way, and 10 years have passed since she crossed the bridge. She seemed nervous. Or was she excited? Impossible to tell the difference.

She drove us to the south side and parked on the sidewalk. We asked if it was okay to park there. She and our Serb organizer for the group laughed. “Parking here is the least illegal thing you can do here. We don’t worry about that.”

We waited for a Serb to come to the bridge in his car, then climbed in, and were driven a few minutes to the building where our workshop would take place

And so it began. Several days of collecting issues from one side of the river, and ferrying them across to the other for responses. And vice-versa. After four days of this, a participant in the South questioned us, “Why aren’t we talking directly? We need to bring the Serbs to the South.”

I was floored. After all of the fears and misunderstandings, I never dared to think our two groups would choose to forgo their buffer. One woman said she is considering digging her family’s remains up from the graveyard in which they site on the other side of the river, so that she can feel safe to visit her family’s graves. A man spoke of being stoned by people on the other side of the river when he last visited it. Another person said she owns property on the other side of the river, but cannot use it because she is afraid.

But here we were. The North/Serbs accepted the invitation (there was some joke about how, in the Balkans, once someone is a guest, even if they are your enemy, you treat them with great Balkan hospitality). One of our Serb participants had not crossed the river since 1999, when the war began, but since the others were okay to go, she would come along.

Back at my hotel, I looked at webpages about the conflict until I was sick with trepidation, and slept fitfully waiting for the day to come together.

Ghana ThinkTank Mitrovicë/a is supported by CEC ArtsLink and SUNY Purchase College.