Jelena, a twenty-something law student from Bijeljina, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereon: Bosnia), told me one day in 2009 that if she ever got pregnant, she would ask Amela for help during the delivery. Amela was a medical doctor and her acquaintance living in Tuzla, a Bosnian town located less than an hour's drive away from Bijeljina across the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (that is, the internal Bosnian administrative border). Jelena's personal relationship with Amela was forged during several seminars on civil society and peace building they attended together. Discussing her lack of enthusiasm for Bosnian public healthcare, Jelena half-jokingly said: ‘Naturally, I'll go to see Amela, I don't want these people here in Bijeljina to mutilate me.’ Jelena did not really think there was a danger of being ‘mutilated’ during the future potential delivery, but she was convinced that a personal relationship with a medical doctor was a ‘must’ (moranje) in order to access decent healthcare. If something went wrong, Jelena said, Amela would do everything she could to help her because they were friends. This personal relationship carried more weight for Jelena than the fact that she and Amela lived in different Bosnian entities, that they belonged to different ethnonational groups, or that Jelena would most probably have to pay, officially, for the service out of her own pocket, because her official healthcare insurance did not cover procedures in Tuzla. It went almost without saying that she would also give a gift to Amela, as a token of gratitude and as a mark of their friendship.

Most people during my fieldwork in Bijeljina, conducted in 2009–10, similarly claimed that a personal relationship with doctors (as well as with social workers, municipal officials, state bureaucrats and so forth) was the most important thing for getting anything done with a degree of quality. It seemed that whenever people in Bijeljina needed to access a public service (a healthcare treatment, social welfare provision, an official document, a job and so on) they followed institutional procedures and utilised personalised relations.