Croatia

Croatia is both a setting for the narrator’s encounters with women displaced by war and a focus of practical work to address its consequences. The account links time spent interviewing Bosnian refugees with support for a women’s center in Zagreb, whose planned crisis services and training extend assistance beyond Croatia to women in other war-affected places.

Interviews with refugees

In 1994, with support from Lauren Lloyd, the narrator spent two months in Croatia and Pakistan interviewing Bosnian women refugees. The interviews were part of time spent with the women in camps, cafés, and refugee centers: the work involved not only asking questions but also being alongside the people whose experiences the book sought to hear. The narrator later returned to Bosnia twice, indicating that the encounter was not treated as a single, finished visit.

The women’s accounts are situated within a broader effort to listen across differences rather than assume one uniform female experience. In describing the interviews that became monologues, the narrator names participants of different ages, relationships, occupations, ethnic and racial backgrounds, and sexual orientations. The refugee interviews belong to this wider practice of making space for women’s testimony, while the setting of camps and refugee centers marks the distinct circumstances in which some of that testimony was gathered.

Support for women affected by war

The book also describes work in Croatia with the Center for Women War Victims. Through this support, the organization was to open the first rape crisis center in the former Yugoslavia. The stated purpose was not limited to establishing a service in Zagreb: the center would also train women in Kosova and Chechnya to work with women raped and traumatized during war. Croatia therefore appears as a base for a planned network of care and training, linking local organizational support to needs across borders.

This institutional work complements the narrator’s encounters with refugees. Interviews make women’s experiences heard; the proposed crisis center and training address what survivors may need beyond the act of telling. The book presents these as connected forms of response without claiming that either can undo the violence or resolve its wider causes.

A place of continuing commitment

The account gives Croatia a role in the book’s movement between personal testimony and organized action. The narrator’s two-month stay created a direct context for meeting Bosnian women refugees, and subsequent returns to Bosnia suggest an ongoing connection to the region. Separately, support for the Center for Women War Victims is described through a concrete intended outcome: opening a crisis center and preparing women in other affected communities to assist survivors.

Croatia’s significance in this account lies in that conjunction. It is a place where women displaced by war were interviewed and where an organization supported by the narrator’s work was expected to expand survivor services. The emphasis remains on women’s accounts and on practical forms of solidarity, rather than presenting the region as a backdrop detached from the people living through war’s consequences.