On Saturday, the 14th of July, the seventh meeting of college student scholarship holders in 2018 was held on ASA-Prevent Group’s premises. Despite the fact that the students are used to these monthly meetings since they have been held for several years and are therefore common, the July meeting was indeed a special one. It was marked by great and significant life achievements, both of some of the scholarship holders, but also of the key figure of the Hastor Foundation, the person whose contribution to the evolution of the Foundation and to everything that it nowadays represents is of greatest significance – teacher Ramo Hastor.
The main part of this meeting was, therefore, devoted to the publishing of the book titled “Uci, pisi…” (“Learn, write…”), written by Ramo Hastor, who has been the teacher and volunteer of the Hastor Foundation from the beginning. The present scholarship holders were visibly shocked and pleasantly surprised by this event, and a sense of pride and admiration filled the entire room. Once the teacher had presented his achievement and said a few words about the book and the primary goal in publishing it, he read several parts of the book to those who were present, and the elated students then gave their comments on it. It wasn’t difficult to notice, though, that the teacher’s sentence: “I dedicate this book to you” made the greatest impression on the scholarship holders.
The book “Uci, pisi…” is a mosaic made by joining together the pieces from teacher’s life, his childhood and youth, the periods of him growing up and maturing, but also an emotional testimony about the establishment and the enduring and complex path of the development and progress of the Hastor Foundation. Therefore, this book, by integrating the emotional and rational dimension of life, effectively presents the main points in the evolution of the Foundation itself, which has grown from the number of three hundred scholarship holders to a family of more than 1.800 scholarship holders coming from 110 municipalities across B-H, who are connected by devotion and commitment, and all thanks to this man, primarily, along with many other devoted volunteers.
The scholarship holders delightedly asked the teacher where they can find the book so they could buy and read it, to which he answered as follows: “I didn’t write the book to earn money. I wrote it to leave something behind me. I really have it only if I give it as a gift. Everything you give will once surely come your way!”
Although those who were present were still under a strong impression due to this event, significant both for the teacher and the entire Foundation, including its scholarship holders, they proceeded with the meeting, the second part of which was reserved for students Amila Mekic and Belma Gutic. These scholarship holders, together with younger scholarship holders of the Foundation, spent 21 unforgettable days in the Netherlands as a part of the project the Foundation has been carrying out together with the Stichting Kinderhulp Bosnie Organization for many years now. Amila and Belma spoke about their experiences and the impressions of the children they accompanied there. Due to this great project, more than 1.900 children had the opportunity to visit the Netherlands. Apart from this, students Dzulisa Otuzbir and Delila Veispahic spent their summer semesters in Portugal and Poland, respectively, participating in the ERASMUS Student Exchange Programme, so they also shared their unforgettable college and life experiences, describing the potential obstacles and prejudices they encountered at the beginning of their journeys, which in the end proved to be unjustified, and the student exchange programme was a wonderful experience for them.
However, the experiences and successes of the scholarship holders did not stop there. Two college student scholarship holders of the Foundation, Lejla Ramic and Anisa Ruhotina, were chosen for the position of the teaching assistant at the Faculty of Law in Sarajevo. Lejla decided to share her emotions and talk about her long-standing fight and persistence, trying to describe to the scholarship holders the way in which she managed to make the dream she had ever since she enrolled into this faculty come true. These young successful girls have shown that true matters and one’s own dreams are really worth fighting for, no matter how unattainable and distant they may seem at times. Our success is solely in our hands, because we are the only ones responsible for it. We are the ones who set the barriers and boundaries for ourselves, but we are also the ones who break them down with a strong will, and lasting and enduring work and devotion.
Amina Vatreš
