A Broken Bosnia -- World Vision Raises Millions From Its Federal Way Campus. More And More Of The Money Goes Toward Healing The Wounds Of War.

THE SMALL WHITEWASHED schoolhouse sits in a narrow valley of central Bosnia where winter darkness creeps between the steep, forested mountains by late afternoon. As you drive a short distance north, images of accumulated grievances pile up with each passing kilometer.

On a cliff, the limestone walls of a 400-year-old Turkish fortress guard charred skeletons of houses demolished by mortar fire. Graveyards contain makeshift wooden crosses fashioned hurriedly for the war dead. Parks and road medians are planted in cabbages; land mines still litter the farms. At the valley's end, in the wrecked frontline town of Maglaj, a shopkeeper has painted bright pink and blue flowers around each bullet hole in his door.

Building the schoolhouse in Begov Han, a tiny village swollen with Muslim refugees, was among the first Bosnian projects of World Vision.

On the ledgers of the giant Christian relief-and-development organization, which raises more than $300 million a year from its American headquarters in Federal Way for aid projects in 100 countries, it was a modest piece of work. Four classrooms accommodate 320 metalwork and textile students, all Muslims forced from their nearby hometown of Zepce by Catholic Croat forces - "ethnically cleansed," in the now-familiar vocabulary of war carried nightly on CNN.

World Vision is now lending the school money to build a commercial metal shop. There's an important twist: The shop, as envisioned by the teachers, will lure Croat students to once again train side-by-side with their Muslim counterparts. That's a task of reconciliation as ambitious and fragile, in its own way, as the peace being enforced by 60,000 American and European troops.

The male teachers were held in brutal prison camps, where, in this most intimate of wars, their jailers included Croat colleagues who once taught across the hall from them.

And their new school in Begov Han isn't much of a school. Each class gets one textbook. Asked about their salaries, a teacher joked: "It's a military secret." The secret is $60 a month, barely enough for three cartons of cigarettes in a country where smoking is an obsession.

The shop class - which had eight computers and 36 drafting tables in the old school in Zepce - looks like a 19th-century blacksmithery. A constant din comes from the room as students pound out anvils, hacksaws and funnels from scrap metal. There is no power equipment, only three table vises for 31 students.

Like the school, where she has taught for 17 years, Nedzida Jabakovic was spared little by the war. It claimed her home, her classroom, her Croat friends and her husband. Occupational therapy is what she calls the metal-shop scheme.

"The only way for us to live together again is to work again," she says. "Even the little children tell me they want to work. Should I be proud or sad? I can't decide."

The World Bank estimates $5 billion is needed in the next three years to begin rebuilding roads, bridges, hospitals and thousands of other little pieces, like the Begov Han school, that once were Bosnia.

As aid organizations like World Vision increasingly find themselves cleaning up the wreckage of war, rather than simply poverty or natural disaster, the school also illustrates a challenge to the nature of relief work: How do you rebuild not only buildings, but the social architecture of communities where neighbors have turned against neighbors?

In Bosnia, there are no blueprints.

EVEN IN FEDERAL WAY, even among his own troops, Bob Seiple confides, Bosnia isn't an easy sell.

The auditorium of World Vision's new $12 million American headquarters in South King County is packed with employees gathered for Christmas chapel. From a podium decorated with poinsettias, Seiple, the head of World Vision USA since 1987, throws Bosnia up against their faith:

The unjust peace that left Serb aggressors who besieged Sarajevo and operated nightmarish death camps in possession of half the country. The systematic rapes and ethnic cleansing of entire villages. The initial silence -shared, he says, in too many churches - toward genocide that took more than 200,000 civilian lives.

"If God somehow can't be allowed to work in Bosnia, it's not the God we want to serve in this country, either," Seiple tells them. His talk is filled with passion, realpolitik, hope and salesmanship. It is part sermon, part corporate motivational seminar.

If a resume could stand as metaphor for how staggeringly complex the business of international relief has become, Seiple possesses that resume. He flew 300 Marine combat missions in Vietnam, then became a star Boise Cascade salesman. After a stint as athletic director and chief fund-raiser for an Ivy League university, Seiple became president of a small Baptist college and seminary.

World Vision's move last fall from Southern California to its forested campus in Federal Way capped a decade of dizzying growth. The evangelical organization is now among the world's largest global-aid organizations, in the same league as the much-better-known CARE and Catholic Relief Agencies.

The relocation, meant to save money by consolidating operations flung across 11 buildings and seven miles in Los Angeles, was a return to World Vision's Northwest roots.

The organization was founded 46 years ago in Portland by Bob Pierce, a preacher and sometimes war correspondent. Its initial mission was aiding Korean war orphans. During World Vision's first three decades, it gained a reputation for combining aid with Cold War conservatism and a tireless evangelism that included Billy Graham-style crusades in places such as Cambodia.

Then came the Ethiopian famine of 1984, which virtually remade the international relief industry and World Vision.

Television cameras brought images of starving kids into American living rooms and millions of dollars into the coffers of private relief agencies. World Vision nearly doubled its budget and staff over two years. The U.S. government began funneling more aid dollars through private organizations, magnifying their global influence.

By the late 1980s, for example, World Vision was spending nearly $80 million a year in Mozambique, making the organization one of the war-wracked African nation's largest employers, largest providers of transportation and largest sources of foreign exchange. "With the end of the Cold War, there was no longer strategic interest in a lot of these countries," says Frances Deng, a former Sudanese diplomat now with the Brookings Institute. "Many of them are sustained almost entirely by the international aid community."

At the other end of the pipeline, the growth of the relief industry has made competition for funding fierce.

Unlike CARE, which gets most of its money from government grants, World Vision raises 75 percent of its support privately. Few market mercy more successfully: $500,000 in checks, solicited by extensive direct mail and television promotions, flow into Federal Way each day.

The funding pressure, says Tom Weiss, a Brown University professor specializing in international aid, has also pushed organizations into more and more countries. "There are certain visible crises like Bosnia where organizations have to get their T-shirts out on the front line or lose donors," he says. "And it's harder for them to raise money for anything but emergencies."

Under Seiple's prodding, World Vision has also pushed the cautious political boundaries of relief organizations - sometimes running afoul of its own large donor base among conservative Christians.

When Seiple and a dozen fellow evangelicals breakfasted with President Clinton in 1993, it prompted an outcry from the Religious Right that Seiple believes cost the organization $200,000 in donations. Few aid organizations lobbied harder on Capitol Hill last year against cutbacks in foreign aid pushed by the new GOP majority in Congress.

Last December, World Vision took an even more unusual step for a relief group: It signed a public letter calling for U.S. military intervention in Bosnia.

RELIEF WORK CAN BE INSPIRING and rejuvenating. It is also all too often a world of bad choices grown worse.

On a gray afternoon in Federal Way, top World Vision managers - a group that includes a former head of the U.S. government's massive relief operations in Somalia, a former top aide to Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield and a UCLA professor - ponder those choices over turkey sandwiches and salad.

The meeting starts with a good-natured theological argument over the Nature of Evil and proceeds to complaints that the fund-raising ads for Bosnia are lame. There is hand-wringing about how Seiple's appearance with Hillary Clinton at a White House conference will play with conservative backers.

Murkier questions float around the table. If you provide food aid to North Korea, do you prop up the military rulers there? Do you wait until Bosnia disappears from the front pages before launching a publicity blitz about Sudan's savage civil war?

"More and more, we're dealing with places that preclude any ethical choices," says Seiple. "It's like having twins born and you can't feed both."

Ten years ago, relief emergencies for private-aid organizations meant famines or earthquakes.

World Vision still considers long-term economic development its speciality, projects as varied as digging thousands of wells in Ghana or training deaf people as dental technicians in Sri Lanka. There have been some impressive victories. In Ethiopia's Antsokia Valley, where once dead bodies blended into the barren terrain, reforestation, irrigation and school projects by World Vision and others have created an economic showcase.

Increasingly, though, its money and attention is absorbed by the avalanche of man-made violence in places like Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia.

The number of wars triggering humanitarian disasters stood at 20 in 1995, compared with four a decade ago, according to a U.S. government study. World Vision, which has seen 23 field workers killed during Seiple's tenure, is working in most of those places.

Front lines are incredibly expensive places to operate. Supplies come in by airlift. Workers need flak jackets, radios and the other paraphernalia of war. And the traditional image of neutrality, central to relief work, isn't easy to maintain.

World Vision - like the U.S. military and NATO - was late getting to Bosnia. It didn't set up major operations until last summer.

For Richard Venegoni, head of World Vision operations in Bosnia, there is never an answer for the question Bosnians repeatedly ask: Where were the West and Christian groups four years ago?

"Two hundred and fifty thousand people - most of them civilians and most of them Muslims - were murdered to a great extent by people from two sides who call themselves Christians," says Venegoni. "The kind of genocide we said would never be allowed to happen again in Europe after the Holocaust. It's sad and personally embarrassing."

THE FINAL WEEK IN FEBRUARY, according to an in-house report, was a busy one in Bosnia: World Vision purchased 33 tons of fresh vegetables for public kitchens; bought 130 bed sheets from a women's collective for distribution to the elderly; passed out 130 tons of coal, 2,886 packets of shampoo, 12 cartons of soap and 962 toothbrushes at seven refugee centers; winterized 20 bombed-out apartments in Sarajevo.

In a hillside village not far from Sarajevo, a World Vision worker handed out 6,880 German marks, a stack of cash, to an exuberant ex-Bosnian Army officer. Banking perished with the war. The officer was borrowing the money to restart his mushroom farm. Located in an abandoned underground coal mine, the farm had sheltered 200 people during the war.

And Warren Dale, a World Vision therapist, showed up at the school in Begov Han with 365 winter coats that had taken a circuitous route to Bosnia. They were counterfeit athletic jackets, some bearing Dallas Cowboys or Chicago Bulls logos, that had been seized by U.S. custom agents in Los Angeles and later donated to World Vision.

Dale is normally responsible for the softer currency of relief work - training local teachers and others in trauma counseling and conflict resolution. Unlike most of World Vision's expatriate staff, Dale isn't a relief professional. The lean Californian first arrived in Bosnia at the war's peak in 1993, after raising money among friends back home for the chance to apply expertise gleaned from his work with Vietnam vets, rape victims and inner-city students.

Dale's first meeting with the faculty of the Begov Han school took place last October in the tiny staff room. A dozen teachers crowded around the single table, chain-smoking and drinking strong coffee. What ways do your students need help?, Dale asked through an interpreter. The teachers ignored the question. Instead they began sharing their own stories.

Among the first to talk was Nezir Bijedic. He told of how Croat guards beat him with a Koran, taunting him to pray. Like many Muslims in Bosnia, Bijedic had rarely set foot in a mosque. Faced with insult, he vowed to learn how to to pray properly. "We called ourselves Bosnians. Not Bosnian Muslims," he says. "They forced us to choose an identity."

It is difficult to place Bijedic in the stories he tells. With his stylish haircut, new denim shirt and pressed slacks, the 28-year-old teacher looks as though he could have stepped out of a Dockers ad - rather than eight months in a Croat prison camp.

Croats held him with several hundred men in a small grain warehouse outside of Zepce. Later, they were transferred to a barn, where the lucky found sleeping space in feeding troughs. The rest slept on a concrete floor, surviving on bread and water or food scrounged from garbage.

Seven times, Bijedic drew the deadly work of digging trenches on the front line, serving essentially as a human shield for Croat soldiers. Sometimes, Bijedic recalled with a wry smile, the man picking prisoners for those details was a Croat teacher. Dozens of fellow prisoners died that way.

By the third meeting with Dale, Bijedic showed up with a proposal for World Vision drafted by the teachers.

They wanted to build a commercial metal shop in the back of the school, where they could produce hinges, stove pipes, window frames and other housing fixtures. In theory, the market for such goods in Bosnia is limitless. Profits would buy books and supplies, as well as pay teachers living wages. Students would be trained in usable skills. "It's hard to find a motive for the kids," Bijedic says. "At this moment, they have nothing. And when they finish school, they can expect nothing. We get worried that these kids are too dependent on humanitarian aid."

In a small folder, Bijedic carries around a list of what the shop needs. Much of it is astonishingly basic: screwdrivers, squares, rulers, welding equipment, micrometers. He pulls out a German power-tool catalog and points to a grinder that he particularly fancies.

"There is an extraordinary bond among these teachers," says Dale. "They've decided the school isn't going to die."

EVEN THE SMALL GOAL of training Croat and Muslim students together in a metal shop is mired in Bosnia's cruel new geography.

In this valley, the town of Zepce - once half Muslim, 40 percent Croat, the rest Serb - was a fulcrum for fighting that sent thousands of people from their homes. Local Muslims and Croats fought side-by-side against the Serb army during the first year of the war. But on a warm June morning in 1993, the Croats turned their artillery on Muslim homes. By the end of a six-day fight, they had made an unholy alliance with their other enemy. At Croat request, Serb tanks joined in pounding the Muslim neighborhoods.

On the second day of the shelling, Nedzida Jabakovic and her family were ethnically cleansed by a small act of betrayal.

Jabakovic gossiped daily over cups of thick Turkish coffee with her Croat Catholic neighbor. Together their families celebrated Christmas and Bajram, the feast that follows the Muslim Holy month of Ramadan. She taught her friend's children at the local school. So the day after Croat troops began shelling Zepce in 1993, Jabakovic thought her friend was inquiring about their safety when she phoned to see if the family was home.

Minutes later, Croat soldiers arrived at Jabakovic's door.

She and her two children, along with 16 others, were held in a two-room house with no running water for four months. Jabakovic's husband, a watchmaker and judo champion, was sent to one of the Croats' more notorious prison camps. Word filtered back that he had been shot. She never saw him again. She never got a chance to bury him.

With her bitterness, Jabakovic carries more leavening memories of her imprisonment. An elderly Serb women smuggled them oil and flour hidden in a load of hay. She recalls asking a Catholic Croat neighbor to fetch her fresh clothes. Along with dresses, shirts and pants, he brought her a set of cheap Muslim prayer beads from her house. She now prizes the plastic, rose-colored beads.

Bijedic, her fellow teacher, nods as he overhears the story. "That is why we believe we can go back," he says. He makes a scissors motion with his fingers. "We don't cut all ties."

But in towns like Zepce, questions of who will return home - and who will go to school with whom - don't rest with ordinary people like Jabakovic. Those decisions are often made by politicians whose power depends on keeping ethnic divisions inflamed.

Just a 15-minute drive from Begov Han, Zepce remains under Croat military control. Residents use Croatian money and Croatia car licenses. Croat refugees from villages overrun by Serbs or the Bosnian army live in the wrecked flats once occupied by Muslims. Of 4,000 Muslim residents of Zepce, only about 600 remain. No one seems sure how many hundreds died.

Just a few days after a 1994 peace deal between the Croats and Muslims, someone blew up the last remaining mosque in Zepce. "It was to remind us that this is still their town," said Jabakovic, "that peace wouldn't change that."

For relief groups, the first steps toward reconciliation have been a crude affirmative action. For example, aid grants often require reserving a portion of rebuilt housing in Muslim-controlled towns for returning Croats or Serbs.

World Vision helped women refugees start a linen factory that employs Muslims, Croats and Serbs. It supports an "Ecology Club," where a doctor brought together 160 kids to harvest local medicinal herbs for the sick. Dale, a volleyball junkie, helped revive a multi-ethnic league by outfitting teams with new balls, nets, gym bags, tennis shoes, warm-ups donated by Macy's and knee pads from a West Coast medical company.

Even the most benign acts arouse suspicion, though.

Last December, Muslim students from near Zepce organized a party with their former Croat classmates. They ate sweets and drank coffee at a U.N. military base. A second get-together fell apart when the Croat kids didn't show up. No one needed an explanation.

"We try to build this in to all the things we're doing," says World Vision's Venegoni. "I'm not sure a lot of people want reconciliation yet. Remember, the Bosnians lost. Ethnic cleansing won."

FROM HIS CUBICLE IN the telemarketing section of the Federal Way headquarters, three floors below Seiple's office, Tom Wilber is explaining the mess in more concrete terms to a potential donor in Louisville.

"The elderly are freezing to death in Sarajevo," he tells her. "We consider those mindless deaths."

"I don't know anything about it," the lady responds. "Maybe that president of ours ought to be going over with the troops." Still, she promises to talk with her husband about a contribution.

His boss calls Wilber, a former paper salesman, a "prayer warrior." Once, he found himself praying over the phone with a donor whose nephew had just attacked his mother with an axe. Nothing so dramatic for the Louisville lady. Wilber offers her a prayer for the speedy recovery of her flu-stricken husband. "The idea is to open your ear to the heart of the donor," he says.

Wilber has more sophisticated tools at his disposal, too.

His computer screen pops up an extensive giving record for the Louisville woman and reminds him of the fine detail that she had been busy cooking the last time he called. This time, he calls before the dinner hour.

The Federal Way headquarters was built with lavish attention to the needs of high-tech marketing. There is a digital photo library with 600,000 images of children, used to promote the child sponsorships that bring in about half of World Vision's cash donations. Two dozen phone operators handle 30,000 calls a month. Many of them are Spanish-speaking, since nearly a third of World Vision's child sponsors are Hispanic.

World Vision executives didn't expect great success raising money for Bosnia. The rule of thumb around Federal Way is that Africa and other Third World nations sell better to donors than Eastern Europe. A personal fund-raising appeal to churches from Seiple, stressing the complexity of reconciliation work, had fallen flat.

But when U.S. troops entered Bosnia last winter, contributions from a direct-mail and telemarketing campaign soared beyond expectations. The total has reached $4.3 million so far.

WORLD VISION WILL SPEND more than $6 million in Bosnia this year - tangible acts designed to show Muslims, Croats and Serbs that peace is more profitable than combat.

Plans call for rebuilding more than 100 houses and apartments and repairing five schools. Start-up businesses will be seeded with special loan fund and seminars will teach the rudiments of capitalism.

Progress so far is tenuous.

Some construction projects are on hold, as U.S. and European governments dawdle over fulfilling pledges for reconstruction money. Many Bosnian Croats haven't yet given up their dream of carving their own mini-state out of places like Zepce, potentially leaving the multi-ethnic Bosnian federation envisioned by the Dayton peace accords in shambles. Half the pre-war population of 4.5 million remain refugees.

"Going home is a cryptic concept," says Dale. "This is a place where the people you were socializing with and working with one day sometimes wound up being the people who raped your wife or killed your husband."

Nedzida Jabakovic recently received two fresh pieces of hope. World Vision announced it would lend the teachers $23,000 for the metal shop. And Croat military leaders have stopped occupying her family home in Zepce.

The house was stripped of its furniture, curtains, wood floors and stove. Even the boiler was stolen. "Everything which means civilization is gone," says Jabakovic. "What I have left is walls."

Still, walls are a start. During a Muslim holiday later this month, Jabakovic will try staying in her old house for a few days. For the first time since the war, she will venture past the Croat soldiers still manning the checkpoints into Zepce. For relief groups like World Vision, the test is convincing ordinary Bosnians like Jabakovic that there is something worth moving back home for.

Jim Simon is a writer for Pacific Magazine. His e-mail address is jsim-new@seatimes.com. Harley Soltes is Pacific's photographer.