By the end to the ethnic conflict in Bosnia, nearly every citizen in and around Sarajevo was experiencing traumatic stress. No one knew when she or he might be the next victim of a sniper's bullet. The side walk was marked in red spots where people had been "picked off" and fallen slain. Everyone hurried along the streets, eager to get out of harm's way. Dr. Thoburn, with Tami Anderson-Englehorn of Seattle Pacific University, led a mental health support team to Bosnia in 1999 to train the professional staff of Medica 3 in traumatology. The team worked with refugees, a village of women and children who had lost all but the oldest and youngest of its men, and a village of ethnically cleansed dairy farmers driven from their ancestral homeland to squat in an uninhabited village outside Sarajevo.
While the female members of the team met with the village women in one of the farm houses, Dr. Thoburn and team member Chris Tobey sat outside with the men, smoking and trading stories. The farmers lamented their lost dairy cows and their lost homeland. These were easy losses to speak about initially, before sharing about the larger losses, their friends, parents and children. One man spoke simply without apparent emotion, telling how he had lost three of his four sons to sniper fire. His youngest had been beside him, lit a cigarette, which the sniper keyed in on. As he spoke, with his only remaining son beside him, tears spilled over his cheek bones and pooled in the deep crevices of his face. The other men nodded; they all had similar stories.
Dr. Thoburn worked with Medica 3's interpreter, Amer and the director, Serena, to do marriage counseling with one brave couple. Their openness and leadership gave permission to the rest of the villagers to begin to open up more fully and share their grief and fears for the future.
Child drawing of war torn Bosnia 
