In October 1991 the future looked bright for 26-year-old Tajma Kapic-Braamark. A newly graduated journalist, she also ran a music shop in her home town in Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Now living and working in Dublin, she reflects on the good times. "I was doing all the usual things, visiting Italy to buy clothes, spending summers on the Adriatic Sea. Life wasn't so bad," she smiles.
Things rapidly deteriorated. On her 27th birthday she joined the Croatian army and launched her journalistic career by penning morale-boosting reports from the front line on the bloody siege which had erupted in Mostar. A Muslim, she served side by side with Croats against the Serb forces which had surrounded their town.
"The war woke an anger inside me. Mostar was, it is, everything to me," she says.
She and her husband, a Norwegian aid worker, help co-ordinate the Cradle charity which for the past six years has been bringing aid to the children of Mostar. Her connection with the charity began in the city early in 1993. "My sister left the city for Sweden, my parents were refugees in Croatia. I went to Sweden also, but couldn't stay there. I felt so helpless," she says.
She returned to Mostar, and became an aid worker distributing vital supplies to very young children. Determined to protect their family home, her father, an electrical engineer, moved into the house he had built in Pocitelj on the outskirts of the city.
The siege of the city by the Serbs was over but tensions were building between the Croat and Muslim communities all over Bosnia. On April 9th 1993 "all hell broke loose" in Mostar.
As war between the former allies raged, Ms Kapic-Braamark began hearing worrying reports that people in Pocitelj had been rounded up and sent to concentration camps. A friend who managed to visit the Kapic family home brought bad news. "My father had disappeared. They might as well have told me that he was dead," she says.
Later the truth emerged. Her father, a diabetic, had been sent to a camp but was released after some months. "All these men - over 60 - were put on to a bus and told they were going home. But they were dumped in the middle of the night and told to walk. The soldiers fired shots after them. They walked all night. When morning came they were in a village on the east side of Mostar called Blagai - a group of exhausted, starving men in a village already full of them," she said.
Cradle had arranged her move to Dublin and from there she helped organise one of the first aid trucks sent by non-governmental agencies to the east side of Mostar. She sent her father a small parcel of shoes, tee-shirts, trousers, some mosquito spray and a jar of coffee. "He is in Norway now and will still only wear Dunnes Stores shoes," she laughs.
She met her husband, Sven Braamark, while visiting her sister in Sweden. "Together with Cradle he helped smuggle my father out and across to Norway where my mother was. One thing led to another and Sven asked me to marry him. I said `yes'," she says.
January marked a new chapter in the couple's lives. They moved from Norway where they had made their home to run the Cradle office. Cradle founder Jadzia Kaminska and aid worker Paul Gillett had already left to start a series of arts and crafts workshops in the still bitterly divided city of Mostar.
"It was strange, Jadzia was leaving for my home town and I was going to hers", says Ms KapicBraamark, now 33. "In each phase of my life Cradle has played an enormous part", she says.
The Cradle office is busy: "We are preparing Friends of Cradle, a fund-raising project where people make a small monthly contribution to support our long-term projects in Mostar. Already Jadzia and Paul work with 450 children from all ethnic communities each week.
"I still get angry", she says. "But when I do I think of the work we are doing for children, all children, in my home town. That makes me more positive. To continue this we need a lot of support."
If you are interested in becoming a "Friend of Cradle" or in supporting its work in any way, you can do so by phoning 01-6795242.