Thanks to the staff and volunteers of the Association “Luciano Lama” from Italy, and especially to families in Italy, a total of 17,500 children from BiH stayed in that country for the past 25 years since the Association was established.
Children from the entire country went in groups of about 400 of them twice a year in Sicily and other regions of Italy to spend some time with the Italian family that would host them. Although everything is ensured to these children, they left much more to those families in which they stayed.
The founder and president of this association, Giuseppe Castellano, a great fighter for peace, solidarity, and tolerance, promoted a book called “the Garden of welcoming”, and he told the most interesting stories in these 25 years in it.
“The question that I often get from those who read the book is whether all the stories in it are true. I claim that they really are, many of them I have experienced myself, and some were told by participants in this project. Some of them are tragic, some tragicomic, but each story tells the truth,” said Castellano.
The focus, explained the author, was always on the children because they are the future generations that should build the society that is based on the peace and tolerance, and he also noted that BiH would be much more prosperous country if the international community invested in some other kind of projects instead of investing in army that kept the peace in BiH for the past 15 years.
The Embassy of Italy in BiH is helping this project for more than 20 years, and they organize workshops to prepare children for the trip before departure of children. It was also noted that all of this would not be possible without the dedication of institutions and organizations from these two friendly countries.
(Source: Radiosarajevo.ba)
