After living and working for almost two years in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Esther Garcia Fransioli says that one of the most valuable lessons she has learned is how to better handle sensitive situations that often emerge in this post-conflict country.  Numerous development issues and extremely complex political circumstances make her work as the UN Women Youth and Gender Officer all the more challenging, but also better equipped for any future endeavor she might choose. 

Esther spent most of her life in Madrid, but she considers herself to be a real citizen of the world. Born in a family of Swiss mother and Spanish father, she attended international schools and learned to speak five languages. During her childhood and adolescence, she was using three languages to communicate every day (German at school, Italian and Spanish at home). With those influences soon came a love for travelling and observation of social circumstances in a particular community.

“I started to volunteer at age of 16, helping children at risk of social exclusion with their homework. This was my first experience with volunteering, and 15 years later I am still doing it,” Esther recalls her first experience when working with socially vulnerable groups, which is now her specialty.

During her undergraduate studies of psychology, Esther volunteered in a remote small community in Peru working with children from 3 to 5 years old and organizing adult education for their parents. After this, she went to Guatemala where she worked with children and their families making a living off collecting and sorting out garbage at the waste disposal sites.  Though she described this as the hardest experience in her life, Esther spent a year working with generally illiterate children and youth living in extreme poverty and not attending school. She taught many of them to read and write and organized educational trainings for rural women.

“When I came back, I decided to do master in international development. While studying, I worked for Save the Children, and then I found a position with Doctors of The World in Mauritania in Africa. There I coordinated a raising awareness campaign on sexual and reproductive health. This was great experience. I was working in the second-largest city in the country and we had to work with such a big number of different groups, from kids to sex workers, women, teachers, etc,” says Esther describing her West African experience.

In Madrid, she had more opportunity to work with survivors of gender-based violence as she took over a role in a local shelter. Apart from dealing with women, Esther says that she was glad to have had opportunity to work with children too, often overlooked victims of this type of violence.

In summer 2009, Esther was asked to join the United Nations Volunteers as the Youth and Gender Officer for the then UNIFEM (now renamed to UN Women). “I was thrilled when I was informed of my selection,” she says about her current position, adding at the time she knew little about Sarajevo other than what she saw in news during the 1992-1995 war.

In August she was already at her new post with the UNIFEM which was relying on Esther’s experience with youth, grassroots organizations and gender issues to ensure that its programmes in BiH were youth-focused.  She established partnerships with youth organizations and got involved in projects seeking to raise public awareness about the gender-based violence.  Currently, she is working on a joint UN Women, UN Volunteers and UNFPA initiative to develop a peer methodology to fight GBV.

“I am very happy with this experience, and I am very happy living here.  I like Sarajevo a lot, and I like Bosnia.  I go out with friends, I have been traveling around the region, it is good place to do things I like, such as skiing,” says Esther admitting however that sometimes she is still surprised about the extent to which complex politics is such a big part of just every issue in BiH. Youth and gender not excluded.

“I got a lot of support from UNV office in Sarajevo since the very beginning and I feel like a part of UNV family. I like that,” she concludes.