<div class="text-justify"> Many countries of Southeast Europe were part of only one country - Yugoslavia, the              country which celebrated multiple cultures and religions in a very peaceful and            collaborative way. More than twenty years ago, the same country was completely torn             by war and separated in multiple smaller countries due to plenty of economic and              political disagreements. I had a chance to be born in one of those smaller countries of                only three million people, Bosnia and Herzegovina - the country which was hurt the              most. Even in the country within itself, politicians separated people by their ethnicity and              religion. For example, we still have three presidents representing three main ethnicities            and religions - Bosniaks / Muslims, Croats / Catholics, and Serbs / Orthodox. This              separation made parents pressure their children to hang out with friends only of the              same religion and ethnicity. Before I started my high school education, I was attending a               Catholic school which was in the same building where Muslims were attending their             classes. However, the building was completely separated by walls and fences, we            would have had different free times in between classes so we would not have seen               ,other Muslim students. This separation was the main reason why I started questioning             religion and trying to figure out whether religion was supposed to be connecting people,              rather than separating them. That was when I figured out that I want to go study abroad                 and see the world through another lens.

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Reading religious texts and making friends who celebrate different religions in very            unique rituals made me learn a lot about myself and life. I was lucky to create holistic                 viewpoints which helped me to familiarise myself with religions from different           perspectives. As a Catholic, reading the Bible meant a lot to me since it was a starting                 point of a personal understanding of my own religion and its history. However, reading              other religious reading such as Quran also meant a lot to me since I was able to read                  about many similar events and stories, only represented in a slightly different way. That              opened my eyes and encouraged me to talk to people and try to understand how do                they look on the reads from the religions different than their own.
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When I was still in my primary school back home, I used to experience forces that I was                  not able to empirically explain. For example, I used to pray and ask for a certain grade                 in school, and even if I did not study much, I was mostly getting what I would have                  prayed for. Later on, I figured out that my teachers would have never actually given us                difficult papers to work on, and that my friends who did not pray also got the same                 grade. However, I know that many of my family members used to bring ‘holy water’ from                religious pilgrimages which was helping them to heal their wounds. With certain prayers             given by my grandmother, and with the special way of using the holy water and candles,                I managed to clean my face from acne. I was not able to explain or confirm whether this                  healing occurred because of my religious beliefs or because of minerals in this water,              but I tried not to question it too much because I was hoping that the same water will                  heal me again if I repeat my religious prayers.
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