Casualties of War in Croatia, Bosnia, and America

Abstract Early in 1993, inspired by a speech Elie Wiesel gave at the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, Nan Dale went to Croatia, hoping to find some way to help kids who were collateral damage of the ugly war in the former Yugoslavia. Once there, she witnessed traumatized youth marauding through a refugee camp and learned that there were few people in the region trained to help. At the invitation of a local grassroots organization and the backing of the International Rescue Committee, she returned a few months later with a team of experts, most from CV, to help train local staff to work with tormented adolescents in the camps. Dale and her staff were shocked to discover what children of that war could teach them about the children they worked with every day. Those lessons involve a profound and terrible difference between the refugee teens in Croatia and the kids they worked with in New York.