MCA - The Early Years - 1993-1995

OXAB (initially known as MCA, Magdalen College Aid) was formed in 1993 in response to the growing need for aid to refugees in the former Yugoslavia. The first trips, were very different from the work OXAB do today, in that they were focused on moving aid from the UK to refugee camps, mostly in Croatia and Slovenia. This involved driving vanloads of aid across the continent, and rather than recruiting volunteers as we do today, most of the trips only involved the committee members.

Christopher McNall wrote up many of the trips from this time in 1994/95, when the first MCA website went online. You can read about their intrepid exploits by clicking here. Yoon Chung was also on the 1994 Croatia trip, and you can read about his trip from this link.

After the War - 1996-1998

Shortly after the Dayton Accords were signed, MCA was able to start moving into Bosnia-Herzegovina itself on a more regular basis. At this stage MCA was still a very small organisation, which did not recruit volunteers on a large scale as we do now. However, the ground-based aid trips ended, and the focus of the organisation gradually moved toward raising money and providing volunteer aid for refugees.

Slovenia 1995-1996
Gracanica and surrounding areas, 1996
Sarajevo 1997
Sarajevo 1998

MCAB goes Balkan-wide - 1999 onwards

Since 1999, with the effects of the Bosnian war slowly receding, MCA had to reinvent itself in order to stay relevant. Rather than operating with only a small group of dedicated volunteers, it was decided that it would be better to actively try to recruit many volunteers to help MCA on a less permanent basis. The decision was also made to move away from only helping children in refugee camps, toward working with disadvantaged children in Bosnia in general. While some refugee camp work persisted until 2001/2002, most refugee camps have now closed as people either return to their homes or build new lives in the nearby towns and cities. This led to contacts being established with orphanages and homes for disabled children across Bosnia, which had suffered terribly during the war as anarchy gripped the country, and priorities were elsewhere.

Also in 1999-2000, MCA was renamed MCAB, and efforts were made to extend the reach of MCAB beyond Bosnia. In 2001, the first preliminary visits were made to Bulgaria, investigating the possibilities of extending our work across the Balkan region. The first full-scale volunteer trips to Bulgaria in the Summer of 2001 were phenomenally successful, and included our first trips to centres for street children as well as orphanages. In 2003, MCAB helped a record 130 student volunteers from Oxford to visit Bosnia and Bulgaria, and we’ve received plenty of positive feedback about their work.

To read more about our work, please take a look at our Bosnia and Bulgaria pages, and look at the recent OXAB newsletters. If you think you could contribute to the work of OXAB, there’s a full guide to how you can on this page. If you want to know what we’re doing right now, you can join our mailing list by emailing us at info@oxab.org.uk or by checking out the news page.

Last updated: February 25th, 2008