The Hastor Foundation can boast of diligent, ambitious, and successful scholarship holders who achieve notable results in the field of education and science. The Foundation’s team consists of young people who contribute to its work, improving it with their knowledge and skills. It is precisely these values and commitment to volunteer engagement within the Hastor Foundation that give scholarship holders the title of Scholarship Holder of the Month. Read below about the scholarship holder who won the title this month!
Abela Rastoder from Sarajevo is a third-year student at the Faculty of Law, University of Sarajevo, and within her field she is a demonstrator of three subjects in the field of Intellectual Property Law. She has been a scholarship holder of the Hastor Foundation for a year but claims that her sense of belonging to the Foundation is far above this figure. For her, this is just the beginning of her beautiful and inspiring story in the role of a Hastor Foundation scholarship holder. Given that she has different interests by nature and likes to acquire knowledge in different fields, law school came as a kind of compromise.
This compromise grew into great love and commitment by reviving the Latin saying about law as “the art of the goodness and fairness.”
She has achieved numerous successes during her high school years and previous college education. As a student of the Third Gymnasium in Sarajevo, she won awards at foreign language competitions, music, and sports competitions, as well as creative writing, and is pleased to point out Matica hrvatska’s recognition in Sarajevo for her literary work.
On this occasion, she published her work in the “Collection of Prose and Poetry of Sarajevo High School Students”. She also prides herself on winning first place in the Cantonal competition in French. Her greatest success so far, however, is winning first place in the competition in media law for southern and eastern Europe, where she and three other colleagues represented the Faculty of Law of the University of Sarajevo in December 2021.
By winning the regional competition, we qualified for the world competition at Oxford, which will be held in April and will include the world’s best universities in this field. As part of that, we started drafting written submissions to the Court, after which a three-day competition in oral rounds was held. We played in five matches and won in all five, and the working language of the competition was English. In order to participate, we had to step out of our comfort zone and had to have months of preparation, discipline and interaction with the team and mentors. We are proud of this historic success, as no law school in Bosnia and Herzegovina has achieved sucah result. We have left behind prestigious universities, and some of them are: University of Vienna, Lomonosov University of Moscow, ELTE University of Budapest, University of Bucharest, University of Ljubljana … In addition to team success, I won third place in the category of best speakers.
Her inspiring story with the Foundation begins with the day of writing the motivation letter as part of the application for the scholarship competition in January last year. Then, encouraged by winning the second competition in the trial simulation for students from Bosnia and Herzegovina, she indicated her desire to participate in a higher-level competition – the regional competition.
Today, having been chosen as the Scholarship Holder of the Month, I proudly point out that my plan was successful, and the Foundation followed my path to that achievement.
In addition to her studies and volunteer work at the Foundation, Abela is also active in the non-governmental sector. She is the Vice President of the Trial Simulation Sector on the Board of Directors of the European Law Students Association (ELSA Sarajevo), and recently the Association realized its most important project – the Human Rights Clinic.
Abela started her volunteer work within the Sports Association of the Deaf “Mladost”, where she worked on the socialization of people with hearing impairments for a period of three years through the celebration of Children’s Week. She also volunteers in the Association “KULT” – Educational and Leisure Centre for Youth “Papercilp”, operating in her local community. In addition to the above, she is a member of the Youth Club “Tignum”, a two-year program for young activists within the NGO CEI Nahla. She points out that this gives her the opportunity to participate in the design and implementation of numerous workshops and projects, and through the recent initiative FIRST – against racial and religious discrimination, she contributed to the preparation of a report on hate crimes published by the OSCE.
Through volunteerism, I try to be an active member of the community and spend my free time helping others. For me, volunteering is not just a synonym for focusing on a specific task or goal, but a continuous process of maturation, personal and professional development. This field of activity has so far helped me immensely in acquiring achieving further cooperation, which resulted from informal organized gatherings.
She uses her free time to study literature and foreign languages, and actively speaks four foreign languages - English, French, German and Spanish.
I am happy that the Foundation recognized my interest in this field and chose me to be a member of the German language translation team, where I work on translating various texts every month.
Although she’s been contributing to the Foundation by working in this sector for a while now, she says she is still in contact with students she has mentored before.
The greatest success is to be part of their maturation and to support them in the realization of ideas and goals.
She says it is a great privilege to be part of a family made up of young and hardworking people with whom she shares experiences in monthly meetings. She enjoys participating in volunteer activities at a very advanced and organized level, as well as expanding the circle of acquaintances and friends and reading about the extraordinary achievements of her fellow scholarship holders.
The role of the Foundation in my life goes far beyond financial aid. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the cyclical relations of support in the Foundation is immensely important, and scholarships provided for young people are an opportunity for continuous improvement and development based on the Foundation’s principles. We respond to the incentive by helping others through volunteer engagement. In the mission and work of the Foundation, I found everything I have been searching for for years. I urge the Foundation’s scholarship holders not to set demotivating restrictions on the way to achieving their goals and to be guided by the Foundation’s mission – education is the choice of winners!
Translated by: Ajša Đuherić
