Came to the Balkans for the Music, Stayed for the Flooding

Photos by Aleksandra Pavlovic

I left to study abroad in Madrid on May 15th with the original intent of attending the MAD music festival in Belgrade, Serbia and visiting family before flying back home to Chicago. What I was completely unaware of was that instead of attending the music festival, I would be a first-hand witness to a natural disaster that hasn’t happened in Serbia or in Bosnia and Herzegovina since the beginning of modern record keeping. The floods in the Balkan region began on May 16th and are still destroying parts of Serbia today more than 96 hours later.

I could enumerate many of the horrid aspects of the flood straightforwardly: out of five pumps being used to try and manage the Drina, the flooding river in my small town of Bijeljina, three pumps were defective and two were working at half-capacity. The electricity in Bijeljina was shot on the 16th, long before the water had reached a height of three meters. Thousands from cities and villages nearby have had to evacuate their homes, while some of their hometowns are currently portrayed as having “disappeared” by the media.

What is much more difficult to communicate, however, is the silence that makes the entire tragedy proliferate in its apocolypticality. When an emergency situation happens in Chicago, help can be guaranteed at the most within the hour. In Bijeljina, while waters were swiftly rising, the assistance was as bleak as it could get. In my part of town, there was absolutely no form of communication available; after the batteries from our cellphones gave out, we received updates by standing on our patio and asking our neighbors questions, despite most of them knowing as little about what was going on as we did. When the flooding became heavier, I watched one canoe pass by and waited for others, only for none to come. I waited for the sounds of a helicopter to fly overhead, but didn’t hear any. My uncle laughed at me when I told him the assistance I was anticipating, because “We’re not in Chicago. This isn’t America.” After asking my aunt how we were planning on evacuating if need be, looking down from our patio she told me that once the waters swallowed our car, we would find a boat and row to the safest city. Keeping the absence of boats in mind, I translated her words as “grab a sturdy surface, jump, and hope for the best.”

I am dumbstruck at how lucky my family and I were that the Drina pulled back and that we came out of this tragedy unharmed. One villager from an affected area nearby described the moment he was loading a tractor in an attempt to rescue his cattle, saying, “I had to choose between our calves and our pigs. The pigs were standing by in dead silence, as if they were about to burst into tears.” The loss has been tragic on a monumental scale, and my hopes are that rescue efforts in areas still suffering are multiplying rapidly, saving the lives of those looking ahead at an unforeseeable future.

I managed to take the photos below in Bijeljina with my iPhone before its battery went out. They capture the Drina and public efforts to contain it in its early stages of flooding and the predominant areas where my family communicated with neighbors, searched for signs of aid and came up with options for evacuation. Considering that other towns are still awaiting their first or even next flood wave to hit, it’s safe to say that Bijeljina had it very lucky, despite the tragic and outstanding damages, both psychological and material.