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INTRODUCTION |
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WATER |
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FOOD |
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LIGHT |
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MENTAL HEALTH |
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HEATING |
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TRANSPORT |
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PETS |
Heating |
| ZIBA
HADZIHALILOVIC CITIZEN "ADVICE FOR SURVIVAL" We had no heating fuel. We all had apartments with gas, electric heating, and so on. However, now we had to learn to live without those things. Where can you get wood when all the trees are gone? Then we started to chop them in the yard. I wouldn't allow that. Since I am an agronomist by profession, I didn't allow the trees to be chopped down. So at least they were saved. So then we pulled up saplings in the yard and waited for the wind to knock down dead branches. And we took whatever we had in the house: paper, old clothes and shoes, and burned them. At first we did it in the open, in the stairway or out in the yard. Until we got ourselves little tin stoves that warmed us up a little bit. So much for heating. We dressed ourselves in winter clothes in 1992, and didn't take them off all winter long. That's how we slept, because there was shooting at night. We had to get up in the middle of the night and go down into the cellar. And so we never even took off our sweaters, coats, and so on. SEMSA MEHMEDOVIC TELECOMMUNICATIONS ENGINEER "ADVICE FOR SURVIVAL" Everything that could be burned was put in our oven. At the beginning I had some wood to make fire. My family had a few planks. But this reserve went very fast and after that I was forced to use my imagination to solve this problem. I personally sawed trees; I learned how to do it. I would make briquettes out of coal dust. We all had our own techniques. We had to find a way to prepare wood so that it could be burned. It is hard to remember everything those fires were made from. We used all kinds of thing that were not important to us. Books for example. Plastic bottles and everything else made from plastic. Plastic was very good to make fire but it smelled badly. We burned pieces of carpet, or sheets. Some people had to burn their wooden floors and furniture. Thank God, I was not so desperate. But once I burned a whole set of volumes by Sholokhov, I still remember - it was The Quiet Don. Nevertheless, whatever was burned, clothes or something else, sooner or later was gone. And we had to find something new. It was '95 and we had to organize heating during the whole summer, but we did not have anything to make fires with. It came to my mind that I could make fire from little branches. They were tiny, thin and small but I made little bundles wrapped together with old socks. I guessed that it was my original invention. But the result wasn't great. It took a lot of work to make such a bundle and it would burn up in a second. I made lots of those bundles with my son. That effort was not only useful for heating but also it was healthy for my mind. Because when I was doing something useful, I was all right, I felt O.K. I believe that this manual work saved my sanity. SMILJA GAVRIC CITIZEN "ADVICE FOR SURVIVAL" Well, drying our hair, that was always a challenge for us women to think of all sorts of ways to do it. We had only one burner in the house and the only place that was heated was the kitchen. It was an open fire, a burner with an open fire, and that was for cooking, for heating, for drying your hair, for everything. I had a tin lid, then I put it on the fire, so that it wouldn't be completely open and then of course you put your head as close as you can, and dry your hair. That was one way, and then when there was no gas, then you took one towel, then the next, then a third one, and you go out with your hair half damp, you never even thought, well that one could get inflammation of the brain. AZEM MEHMEDOVIC CITIZEN "ADVICE FOR SURVIVAL" When you remove a boiler, it has a coating around it and a cauldron inside. Between the coating and the cauldron there is glass wool. And then we removed the glass wool, and on the upper part of the boiler coating we drilled a hole to which we fitted a chimney. We couldn't do it inside our home, but we made a joint one on the staircase, so that we can use it, not only me, but the neighbors, too. So to open up the cauldron, to get a place in which to put the things, the most important thing was to bake bread, because there was no bread to be found. We baked bread in high pressure cookers, in all sorts of improvised pots, etc. And then we took a saw and sawed off the front part of the cauldron and we got the inner part, which is round. And then we put a wire fixture inside, so that we can put the things that we cooked, that is the pan, inside. Well, then we had to make a sort of handle, when it gets hot, that we could open it. And underneath we cut out another part, where we put a can where you make fire. In that can, the hot air goes between the coating and the cauldron and out through the chimney. And then we got what we wanted. But then, there was a small problem, who was going to light the fire first, because the one who lights it first has to use up the largest amount of logs. So we did it in shifts, one day me, the next day Gavro, the third time Sadija, the fourth time Dragan and so on. All in the entire neighborhood was getting along incredibly well. And that was then, when the fire was lit at 6 o'clock in the morning, the whole day till late at night and it burned. When we already started to get gas, we invented all sorts of burners. But those burners were made of a simple pipe with holes drilled through, so there was a lot of soot and in the morning we would wake up all black under the nose, because the soot was all over the place in fact. Then we started fitting little gas taps to that part, then a thermal element, then a small pilot-burner that kept the fire burning all the time, so that the gas doesn't have to be on all the time, it was like saving gas, but it was also protection, because there were explosions all over town as you know. Back to Top |
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