A biodiesel factory in Bosnia?  It seems like just yesterday, but it was in 1995. That was the year I crossed the Sava River from Croatia, into Bosnia, and entered a country that would change my life forever.

Three different armies had killed hundreds of thousands of people, (including an ethnic cleansing campaign waged by Slobadan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic) casting the country into the dark after the power went out.  This was a world where people had to run down “Sniper Alley” to get fresh drinking water in Sarajevo, and rural farmers resorted to eating the bark off  trees.

A Nuclear reactor, near where I patrolled in my Hummer, sat silent and cold as enterprising people cut down dead power-lines to sell the copper in them. Families held off the cold winter by huddling around burning furniture and tires.

It’s now 13 years later and Bosnia is rebounding, and one of the signs of its new prosperity its new biodiesel factory, about to open near Banja Luka.

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