Child's Play
by Donna Diermann Soper
Photographs by Karla Christensen

As the car left the city of Split, Croatia, and headed north along the coast of the Adriatic Sea, Karla Christensen began wondering if her far-flung impressions of the country once known as Yugoslavia were misguided.

The area was plush, with a beautiful landscape and Mediterranean climate, and her thoughts turned toward the exciting humanitarian aid project she had been hired to manage: rebuilding playgrounds for the children who were made victims of the war in Bosnia, which had ended two years earlier, in 1995.

Her fantasy of a Mediterranean paradise was short-lived, however, as the car released its hug on the coast and turned eastward toward the city of Sarajevo. Nothing--not even the frequent images that had flashed across her television screen in the United States--could have prepared her for the reality that was to unfold before her eyes.

"We got about a half-hour away from the coast in Croatia, and I looked around and I said, 'Why is every single home destroyed?' There was no one living there. It was completely deserted for tens of miles," Christensen says. "It was all rubble; all you saw was the foundations of the homes."

It was dark by the time the car arrived in Sarajevo, so it wasn't until the next morning that Christensen was able to witness firsthand the devastation in this once densely populated city.

"A friend of mine picked me up the next day and took me to the front line of Sarajevo, which was near the airport," she says. "Adjacent to the airport there were four- and five-story buildings that were gutted with grenade holes. What affected me most, though, were the ribbons that were wrapped around 80 percent of these apartment buildings. They said mina, which means "mines." Not only were these buildings destroyed, but mines were placed in what was left of them so that no one could return.

"After two years, I went back to that place and a lot of those buildings had been restored by international aid organizations," she says. "But that was my first impression of Bosnia. It was horrific."

Answering the Call

Tall and lean and sporting a few more curls than she had during college at Tulane, Christensen exudes a peacefulness and contentment that belie the physically and spiritually depressed area of the world from which she returned this past March. She speaks slowly and cautiously, sipping her coffee as she chooses just the right word to describe a particular experience or scene. There is an underlying pride in her voice as she reveals how a 34-year-old woman came to lead a project that ultimately built 250 playgrounds in Bosnia. But there's also a tension--one that is triggered by certain memories and gives the impression that even after a two-year stay, she continues to be shocked by what little the war left behind.

Her tale begins more than a decade ago when the U.S. Peace Corps opened her eyes to the world of play.

Within a year of her 1987 graduation from Newcomb, Christensen found herself the owner and operator of a small but thriving catering business in New York City. Despite the moxie and effort it took for a native Louisianan to successfully delve into the food business in a city that's not especially friendly to outsiders, Christensen says she was not happy. She felt a calling toward international work that had begun during her college years.

A sophomore transfer student from Emory University, Christensen says her first taste of life beyond U.S. borders occurred when she spent a summer in Ecuador working with cottage industries. "We visited the women there and assisted them in some of their projects."

Later, at Newcomb, she majored in international relations and took advantage of another international opportunity: participating in the Tulane-Newcomb Junior Year Abroad program in Florence, Italy. Though she was accepted into the master's program at Columbia University's School of International Affairs, Christensen says she decided not to go, and thus, the catering business.

"While the catering business was exciting, I knew that was not what I really wanted to do," she says. "I had already applied for the Peace Corps, so I just re-enacted my file. I was accepted and sent to Costa Rica from 1989 to '91, and that is where I started to build playgrounds."

Christensen was placed in a program called Women in Development and sent to a very remote town of 2,000 people called Paso Canoas, which sits on the border of Costa Rica and Panama.

"This was a very dangerous time to be in Central America because it was during the regime of Gen. Manuel Noriega in Panama," she says. "My Panamanian friends, who were part of the opposition, had their homes burned by Noriega's soldiers."

Despite the threat to her own safety as an American citizen, Christensen was undaunted in her mission and was soon called upon to assist in a project that would become her life's work for the next decade.

"There was an interesting men's group in Paso Canoas called 20/30," she says. "One day, the group came to me and asked what I thought about building a playground for a nearby kindergarten. I said, 'I would love to, but I've never built one before.' So they said, 'Why don't we just try.' "

That was enough to enlist Christensen, and she was off to San Jose to research books on building playgrounds. "My first book was called Playgrounds for Free, and it showed you how to put together tires, telephone poles and aluminum pipes, among other things, to build a playground," she says.

"When I returned, the men and I began designing funky pieces of play equipment. We built our first playground and it was so successful that another school wanted one, and another, and we ended up building six in different villages."

The best part of building the playgrounds was that they became community projects, she says. Nearly all of the labor and materials were donated, with the most expensive playground costing $30.

"The beauty of these projects was that the Costa Ricans found a need in their communities, and together we were able to fulfill that need," Christensen says. "They didn't wait for the government to help them, and the government didn't interfere with their projects."

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