In 'Aftermath,' she witnesses worn-torn Bosnia's slow steps toward peace

By Bella English, Globe Staff, 9/29/2003

Sara Terry would be the first to tell you that she never flew into Sarajevo on a military plane, was never shot at by snipers, never saw anyone killed during the Bosnian civil war, never feared for her life over there. For her, the war assignment began after the fighting had ended, when news reporters and photographers left Bosnia.

That's when she packed her cameras and notebooks and joined the Bosnians who were beginning to return to their war-torn villages and cities. The result is a project she calls "Aftermath: Bosnia's Long Road to Peace." She hopes it will culminate in the publication of a book and in exhibitions in Bosnia and the United States in 2005, to mark the 10th anniversary of the end of the war. Terry, a former Boston freelance writer who now lives in

Los Angeles, was in town recently for a slide show and lecture on her project. The fund-raiser was held at Sabur restaurant in Somerville, which is owned by a Bosnian refugee couple. The Boston area is home to 9,000 such refugees. "War is only half the story. It does not teach us about peace," says Terry, sitting in a Cambridge restaurant, eating salad and pushing her dark, shaggy hair out of her eyes. "It seems that everyone covers the same thing for about five minutes, and

then they go away. I think the story's still there, whether it's the World Trade Center widows who gave birth to children their husbands never met or Daniel Pearl's wife after he was killed. Those periods of life, even though they're full of great sorrow, is where I can learn lessons about how to be a better person. They help us be compassionate and remind us that others need our help. We learn from them how they have struggled through great trials." In 1996, Terry, a former Christian Science Monitor reporter and later a freelance writer (for publications including the Globe), had a smaller trial of her own. One of her closest friends was "going down a wrong path," as she puts it. Terry tried to reason with him, she says, using every kind of "passionate, reasoned explanation-slash-argument," but it didn't work. She was devastated. For the first time in her life, she felt that words had failed her.

"My whole life I've trusted words as a way to share, persuade, convince, and reveal. My family's joke is that I was born talking," says Terry, 48. "For someone whose whole life was rooted in words, it was a system shock. I just shut down. I stopped writing."

When she put down her notebook and pen, she picked up a camera. After taking a photography workshop, she decided that photojournalism was where she belonged: It was, she says, a form of communication "that washed away the failings of words."

But what to do? One day, after she and her husband moved to Los Angeles in 2000, she read a newspaper article about "Bosnian fatigue." It said that five years after the war ended, more Bosnians than ever wanted to return to their homes, while at the same time, the international community and donors were pulling out.

"I said, `That's it.' I had to go," she recalls. Terry had promised her musician husband that she would never cover a war, but she'd never said anything about its aftermath. She flew into Sarajevo, and within 24 hours she had found a translator and was sitting in a garden with war widows. She went to the country's first identification warehouse, lined with skeletons and personal effects. She attended the exhumation of a man who had been shot by his Serbian neighbors. She saw a widow identify her husband. She went to an area that had been a concentration camp.

Terry, who has been to Bosnia five times, has set up a nonprofit photography group and is now raising money to fund a larger, global "aftermath" project. She envisions sending photographers to various aftermath scenes around the world, to communities torn apart by racial violence or by war. "It's really got to be stuff no one else is covering," she says. She sighs. "If I had the money, I'd be in Afghanistan right now. It's time to be there." She'd like to go to Iraq, too -- but not until the war correspondents and photographers leave.

"I'm really glad they're brave enough to risk their lives to tell those stories," she says, "but I think the more important story is what comes after. It's where life begins again. My whole passion comes from being in a place that has been left behind -- by the media, by the world."

While other journalists from around the world have come to California recently to report on the recall election, Terry has chosen a different angle on her adopted state. She is doing a photo essay on a certain bus line that, in the course of its 90-minute route, takes the rider through tony Santa Monica, Koreatown, skid row, East Los Angeles, and Beverly Hills. "On this bus trip, you see people of every ethnicity, every culture," she says. "This is the real LA, and this is the story I'd rather tell."