OneWorld.net (U.S.)

More than ten years have passed since the first meeting of the citizens of Brescia and Zavidovici. The year was 1993, and under the Bosnian skies, the war was spilling blood all over the motley patchwork of coexistence carried by the Bosnian men and women for ages. The meeting represented the belief that it was possible to create peace where there is war.

Over the past ten years, that path widened in order to accept the hundreds, possibly thousands of persons that travel between here and there, to meet, listen and create Peace. We intertwined our relations, implemented projects to reconstruct the territories destroyed by war; tried to reshape and give new essence to the dialogue between the peoples; we did it for ourselves, too, to continue our belief in a better world, we did it with them, to share and establish new forms of cooperation between individuals living in different territories.

The meeting gave birth to new loves: our love for Bosnia grew, we established new friendships and relationships that continue to last with time. In our work to renew the bridges, we rely on the council given by Ivo Andric, or the vision presented in the "Game of Dreams" by Jiri Wolker (Czech poet who died young in 1924) "in the world without misery, without greed,/ people walked as simple as children,/ as brave as mountaineers, as wise as engineers,/ who made bridges of poetry and sounds,/ and above all of reinforced cement,/ to connect one country with another,/ one heart with the other." The bridges are used by men and women who go to each other to talk, to understand and love each other.

Instead of the "Ugly times of History" (great title for the passionate collection of manuscripts by Guido Puletti, tended by Cincia Garolla), sad over the defenseless bodies of the innocent men and women, we tried to oppose it by dedicating out time to collecting stories, creating new relations, finding new ways of coexistence and solidarity to fight the current and future wars.

The Days of LDA, which will take place in Zavidovici won’t be a celebration; it is not ours to evaluate the accomplishments of the past years. They should be a "simple" moment of these meetings. It may be used as a meeting point for all those that supported, in different manner, the activities and projects implemented in Zavidovici and in other places. We think that it would be important to used these days to propose new point for further discussion on the subject of intercultural citizenship. It is characteristic for the activities of our association in different forms, through the belief that "creation of peace comes as a dimension of mutual exchange, cooperative activities, without the use of models already completed, but through continued "co-education" between men and women developed through this experience".