An interesting video about Dragan, a young man struggling to find himself in a post-war community.
He turned his life around through the “Be a Man Club”, part of Care International’s Young Men Initiative in the Balkans. This programme is trying to help youth find meaning and purpose, while also promoting gender equality and non-violent relationships.
War, it seems, doesn’t only affect the people in the present but also the generations that follow. All kinds of unhealthy ways of being emerge because of the trauma of war. In this video a young man is dealing with his own choices but also the choices of his father. The choices of our ancestors not only shape us as individuals but also the world we live in.
I found it very moving to see this young man talk about his father, a man who rejected him.
Dragan seems to allow himself to feel the pain of this rejection while also acknowledging in the silence (about minute 7:09) that he wishes things were different, but that his father will never change. Perhaps, he is in mourning that he will never feel loved by his father. The moment passes though and he goes on to talk about the possibility of change in his country. Why is it that he thinks his generation will be capable of change and his father isn’t? Perhaps the Be a Man Club has fostered the idea that Dragan needs to let the past go and perhaps his father didn’t have the resources that Dragan now has. Whatever the case may be Dragan is trying to be the man he wanted his father to be.
In the years to come what will Dragan discover about the man he wants to become and will that impact the wall he has put up between himself and his father?