This is a true story.

My great-grandfather's name was Uroš. He was born in Banja Luka, in what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina. He was not a captain, not an officer. He was an ordinary man who spent most of his life working on ships.

He spoke six or seven languages. He read extensively. He kept journals of his travels — notebooks filled with observations, faces, conversations from ports around the world. Over decades at sea, he visited ports on nearly every continent, worked side by side with people from dozens of countries, shared meals with strangers whose names he could barely pronounce.

And he noticed something.

When things got hard — when a storm came in, when someone fell ill, when a man received bad news from home — people would close in on themselves and begin repeating certain words. Quietly. In prayer. As if those words, spoken enough times and with enough faith, could change the course of things.

Uroš began asking what they were saying.

The answers came in many languages. Different sounds, different scripts, different rhythms. Different faiths, different gods, different rituals. But when he asked what those words meant — the meaning was always the same.

The sailor who crossed himself and whispered in prayer wanted the same thing as the sailor who knelt facing east. The same as the one who believed in nothing but the sea — and yet repeated someone's name as if it were the only prayer he had left.

And many of them believed in something that particularly fascinated Uroš. They believed that when the same wish is spoken in many languages — in as many languages as possible — its power grows. As if each language that speaks that same wish adds new energy, a new voice, a new people standing behind it.

And then Uroš understood something that never left him for the rest of his life.

It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter where you come from, what faith you belong to, or what language you speak. We all bleed the same, dream the same, and want the same.

Happiness. Health. Love.

And if that is true — and Uroš believed it was — then those three words, spoken in every language that man speaks, carry the greatest possible power. Because behind them stands all of humanity.

So he began collecting them.

Three Pencils

In every port, in every country, he would ask — sailors, dock workers, merchants, locals — to write those three words in their own language, in their own hand. He was not a researcher. He had no system. He simply asked, and people gave.

To keep track of which word meant what, he carried three pencils of different colors.

Yellow for happiness. Green for health. Red for love.

Year after year, port after port, page after yellowed page — the collection grew. In the end, he had written down the same three wishes in more than forty languages.

---

After years at sea, Uroš settled in Metz, a city in northeastern France.

The Courtyard in Metz

No one knows exactly how it began. Perhaps he said the right thing to a neighbor at the right moment. Perhaps someone saw his collection and passed the word along. But slowly, without any announcement and without any explanation — people began to come.

They came carrying burdens they didn't know where to set down. They came because of a sick mother. A son who had left and stopped writing. A marriage quietly falling apart. A business failing. A fear with no name. But they also came in joy — young couples who wanted happiness, health, and love to be the first gift of their life together. They came, those who were building a home and wanted those three words woven into the very foundation. Parents came for their children, children for their parents, friends for friends.

Everyone had their own reason. But the reason always led to the same three things.

Uroš received them. He listened. And then he would do something simple — he would speak certain words. And ask the person to repeat them. Out loud. Several times. In their own language, but also in languages they didn't understand.

It was not therapy as anyone would recognize it. It was not prayer in the usual sense. But people left lighter than they had arrived. And they came back. And they brought others.

He became known — though no one could say exactly why or how he helped. He had no title. He charged nothing. He promised no miracles. He said only that a person sometimes needs something to hold onto. And that those three words — spoken with faith, in as many languages as possible — carry the strength of all who have ever spoken them before.

For those who could not come — because they were ill, or far away, or had no one to bring them — Uroš did something else.

He would take a small piece of sheet metal. And with an awl or an old ship's compass, he would engrave the words from his collection. Happiness. Health. Love. In several languages. Rough, by hand, without ornament.

He sent those pieces of metal through family, friends, mothers — to be carried to those they were meant for. As a message. As a reminder. As something that could be held in the hand when things were hardest.

He never sold them. Not once.

He returned to Banja Luka in his later years. And there, people came to his courtyard. For conversation. For the collection. For that same strange comfort.

He lived to one hundred.

---

I never met him. I grew up listening to my grandfather talk about his father — about storms, ports, three pencils, scratched pieces of metal. I thought they were family stories. The kind that grow bigger than they were with the years.

Then one day, a woman knocked on my door. She had recently bought a house in the neighborhood and found an old box in the basement.

She said the box belonged to someone named Uroš — who shares my last name. That there had been dozens of boxes, but that over time nearly everything had disappeared — only this little remained.

The Box

I opened it at the kitchen table.

Inside were his journals. Books. Dictionaries of foreign words. And a few small things I didn't understand at first.

And that was the first time in my life I realized that the stories about great-grandfather Uroš were not legend.

They were true.

All of them.

I sat for a long time at that table. I leafed through the journals. I looked at handwriting in languages I don't know. And somewhere between those pages, I made a decision.

Seventy Years Later

I will continue in his footsteps.

Seventy years later.

Uroš engraved words with an awl or compass onto pieces of sheet metal and sent them to people who could not come to him. I do it with laser engraving on metal cards — and send them to people around the world I will never meet.

The form has changed. The point has not.

It doesn't matter who you are. It doesn't matter where you come from. We all bleed the same, dream the same, and want the same.

Say them out loud. In your own language. Or in every language you see on the card.

Uroš would say that is exactly the whole point.

Happiness. Health. Love.

 

 

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