Message Magazine Online - Vol. 55, No. 02, Summer 2007

In This Issue

• Children of the World
  Angela Shuff
• Canadian Editorial
  David Smith
• The Original Six
  Ross Riggs
• Children A High Priority To God
  Jim Cook
• My Father's Refuge
  L.W. and P.K.
• Family At The House Of Laughter
  N.H.
• Your Final Gift For Children
  Spencer Jackson
• Seeing The Blind With Compassion
  Joan Smitz with Angela Shuff
• The Life Of An MK
  Danielle Devore
• CLIPS
  
• A Little Child Shall Lead Them
  Bill Commons
• Children's Corner
• Too Big To Hear God's Call?
  Michael G. Loftis

The Original Six

Ross Riggs, Bosnia

Centuries of hatred and lies have divided Bosnia more than any map might show. The war between 1992 and 1996 took the lives of Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats alike. Serbians laid siege to Sarajevo for over three years and, in northern Bosnia, Serbs attacked Muslim and Croat towns in order to open a military corridor from Belgrade to Banja Luka. And across the country, ethnic cleansing—the euphemism for murder, rape, and torture—raged against Muslims and Roman Catholic Croats. In the end, the onslaught displaced two million civilians and left tens of thousands dead.

But the clearest picture of the damage done comes through the eyes of the children forced to live through that bloody time. The war stole away their families, their childhood, and, for many, their future. In 1995, Bradley Collins, a Canadian hockey player, first felt God’s call to ministry in Bosnia. Upon arriving in 2002, he was shocked by the number of children spending their days roaming the streets, many playing with sticks and pretending they were guns. Bradley envisioned replacing those “guns” with hockey sticks. In this country where it is illegal to share the gospel with any child under the age of eighteen, Bradley planned to use hockey as a platform for sharing the love of Christ and building relationships with youth.

This ministry began with hockey clubs in Sarajevo and has grown to become the Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) Sports Foundation, an ABWE Canada project that is supported by local churches in Canada and the United States. Their prayer is that God will use the BiH Sports Foundation to help plant a local church in Sarajevo, where currently there is none.

At the end of the war, refugee housing and opportunities for better living conditions brought many people to Sarajevo, including the boys who would be part of Bradley’s first hockey club. Six of the original boys are now leaders in the program: Adel, Haris, Dino, Penja, Lema, and Mici. These boys were born and raised in the middle of the battle, refugees in the first years of their lives. As teenagers, they hung out on the streets from eight in the morning until night, often going home just long enough to get something to eat. For them, hockey interrupted their nightmares of the unforgotten war. These are the stories of those original six.

Adel

Adel lived through two wars. One launched bombs near his house; the other raged between his parents at home. His father was a soldier, and he moved their home several times, always just ahead of the front lines of battle. Adel couldn’t consistently go to school. “When the siren would go off,” he says, “we would run to the bomb shelter. I was afraid, you know. As a kid you just want to play.”

When Adel was about thirteen, his parents’ marriage ended, and he became involved in fistfights and stealing on the streets. He remembers seeing a poster about a new hockey club, and when he found out the camp was free, he went thinking he could steal something.

Adel has now become a faithful leader of the Ilizda hockey club in Sarajevo, but the years have not been easy. A little over a year ago, his mother’s boyfriend, the third since her divorce, chased him down the driveway with an axe, threatening to kill him. Adel ran straight to Bradley’s house where he has lived ever since. “God only knows where I would be if I had not met Brad,” says Adel.

Haris

As a young boy, Haris lived with his parents in Hrasnici where continual shots and bombs hit the buildings near his home. Now the sound of war continues to echo in his mind. Eventually, Haris’ family moved to Sarajevo, close to where the hockey camp first began. He quickly rounded up his friends and went to investigate this new sport. Even though he has made many new friends from playing hockey these past seven years, he remains very aware of his old friends who are still into trouble on the street. He says they have little hope and most have been in trouble with the law.

Dino

Dino lived as a small boy in the town of Gorazde, a city targeted during the war. Many bodies of the people of Gorazde are still missing. The military armament is now rusting on the hillside as a monument to the madness that was Bosnia in the 1990s. Dino most vividly remembers his hunger pangs—a hunger so intense that, as a child, he ate the wallboard of his home. Serbian forces would airdrop food into the town and wait for either the hungriest or the bravest to venture out where the snipers’ bullets would find them.

After the siege ended, Dino’s family moved to a refugee area just outside of Sarajevo. One day Dino was hanging out in front of the school where Bradley first began the hockey program, and he and his friends decided to play too. Dino has remained with the team, becoming one of its most trusted leaders. He thinks that his friends who didn’t stay with the hockey program are most likely running drugs to keep ahead of hunger or to advance themselves with local mafia.

Penja

Penja’s family lived in Sarajevo, and he was about four years old when the war broke out and his father became a soldier. “I just remember that in the night we could go home, but at dawn we had to go to a tunnel,” Penja says.

When Penja was fifteen, he heard about the hockey camp from his soccer buddies. “At first I just went to see what it was about,” he says. Now he has played hockey for seven years, and he is the captain of the Ilizda Club 2010. He believes that if it were not for hockey, he would possibly be using drugs, hospitalized, or even in jail.

Recently, Penja’s father told him that he would have to start working seven nights a week to help support the family—a mandate that would have ended his college hopes and hockey aspirations. Thankfully, the BiH Sports Foundation had an opening for an assistant to Bradley, and Penja took the position. His dreams are still on track as he serves the hockey clubs.

Lema

Lema was about four years old when his family lived in Visoko, near Sarajevo. He considers himself lucky, because there was not much fighting directly in his town, but he remembers that rockets often flew overhead and that his family only ate what they could grow. One of his uncles was killed in the fighting, and his father was an untrained medic in the military during the war.

After his first visit to the hockey club, Lema kept coming back because it was fun. He says that without the influence of the hockey club, he might be a “street punk.” “I give my heart to my friends at hockey,” says Lema. “I watch out for them, and they watch out for me.”

Mici

Mici spent the war years in Dubrava, a refugee camp where there were extrajudicial executions and cold-blooded murders reported by human rights watchers. His father and grandfather were murdered. Mici and his mother were released from the refugee camp, but while Mici was still a young boy, his mother abandoned him. His uncle stepped in to care for him, but it was not until his first contact with the Ilizda hockey club that he began to dream again of a future.

Mici was elevated quickly to the position of a leader in the club, and he is well-suited for helping the boys who are struggling with personal pain. He says that the club has been good for him. “It helps me a lot to become something better in life.”

This group of six boys, wielding hockey sticks rather than knives and guns, has now grown into three registered national hockey clubs in three cities: Sarajevo, Tuzla Bosnia, and Gorazde in the Republic of Serbia. In January 2007, members of these clubs—over 150 boys of all faiths and backgrounds—gathered on the ice in Sarajevo at the site of the 1984 Olympics. The stories of the original six reflect the lives of most of the boys who took to the ice this past January. Now that the BiH Sports Foundation has grown, these original six have been selected as team leaders and are being trained in leadership principles.

Adel, Haris, and Mici want to continue their education in hopes of becoming hockey coaches. Mici’s reasoning is simple: “I can help to move kids from the streets and help them like Bradley helped me.” Lema hopes to pursue an education and career in either computer graphics or computer-based forensic investigation. Dino and Penja want to grow older and become “good men.” Their definition of a good man comes from what they observe in Bradley.

Bradley sees his work as a kind of prison ministry, because most of these boys are held to their Muslim heritage by great pressure. “They are trapped by their culture, religion, and poverty,” he says. “With God’s direction, I must tear down the walls of fear and anger, prejudice and ignorance, before I can begin to rebuild.” So many Westerners have come and gone since the war, but when Bradley left for his first furlough in the spring of 2006, Lema says he had no doubt that Bradley would be back. “Bradley said he would never give up,” said Lema.

Bradley reflects back on his original decision to follow the Lord’s leading to Bosnia, a land so full of hurt and pain. “I had to come with the conviction that my life would be well spent if it was for only one young person.”

Titus, a new member of the leadership team, represents spiritual fruit from the hockey ministry in Bosnia. Titus comes from a home with a long history of domestic violence. Titus met Bradley, and at the age of ten he began playing hockey. But one evening in 2004, his father became angry at his mother for allowing him to spend so much time playing hockey with Bradley and the Christians, which meant he did not have enough time to go dumpster diving for salable junk that his father could use to buy alcohol. In a drunken rage, Titus’ father attacked his mother with an axe handle. Titus was also hurt when he stepped up to his mother’s defense. Titus’ father went to prison, breathing threats of death against the family and against Bradley.

Fifteen-year-old Titus now lives in a domestic violence shelter with his mother, but he continues to go to school and is directly responsible for leading the younger group for the Ilizda hockey club. While attending a Bible study in Brad’s home, he accepted Christ as his Savior. His dark brown eyes and wide smile betray the wonder and joy that he carries in his heart even in the midst of extreme persecution. He recently announced to the other boys that when he graduates from high school, he wants to formally study the Bible and then see where God might lead him.

Even now, as NATO and others decide the independence of Kosovo, threats of war loom large across the Balkans. The uneasy peace, provided by military outposts strewn across the land, thinly veils the intense hatred and bitterness that remains. Yet, in the midst of this, there is hope for the children and youth of Bosnia. It is the difference in their lives that is the true story of the BiH Sports Foundation, the work that the Holy Spirit is doing through Bradley and the army of prayer warriors and faithful supporting churches and individuals.

Lema was asked, “What one thing should those who read the Message know about the work in Bosnia?” After some thought he finally replied, “Hockey is everything for these kids; it is the only thing they’ve got.”

With almost an entire generation lost to war, the children truly are the hope for the Church in Bosnia. Christ said, “Let the little children come to Me” (Mark 10:14). It is our challenge to introduce them to Him. Please pray for the youth of Bosnia, and ask God how He might use you to help reach them.

For more information about this ministry email office@abwecanada.org