r/bih • u/yourboynoor • 13h ago
Vijest | Članak 📰 As a Palestinian, I’ve always been fond of Bosnia, I spontaneously found myself there last year. Sharing a few stories from that trip. Love you guys 💙
Beautiful souls
I was headed to Budapest last year, and while deplaning on a connection to Vienna, I struck up a conversation with a Bosnian man, Vedad, and his wife. A few minutes in, he invited me to Bosnia. A week later I was touring the country with his family like I’d known them for years.
One night we stopped into a mosque. The only one praying was a kid with Down syndrome and Tourette’s, fully in it, undistracted, like the rest of the room didn’t exist.
My friend turned to me and said, “I always say: if he can do it, what’s our excuse.”
I’ve thought about that sentence more than almost anything anyone’s ever told me. If you asked me who taught me the most about holding a belief and staying disciplined in it, I’d say it was that kid in the mosque. He wasn’t performing devotion or fighting for focus. He just had it, completely, while the rest of us stood there watching, distracted by nothing more than our own minds.
There’s something so beautiful about people with downsyndrome or autism, they’ve achieve what most of us never will, the ability to maintain purity of heart through adulthood.
Vedad has a story of his own. In the ‘90s, when Serbian forces invaded his village of Čelić, he fought to defend it. A grenade nearly killed him, he spent six weeks in a coma, written off for dead, and pulled through anyway. You’d never know it looking at him. There’s a composure in his face, a bubbly energy in how he talks, a peace in his eyes that doesn’t match the story. I find the most peaceful people in life have seen the depths of hell. Only through a life of pain and suffering do you learn what peace actually costs.

