Significant changes have taken place in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH)‘s Law on Foster Care, and one of the areas where positive developments are being recorded is the Herzegovina-Neretva Canton.
One of the positive examples is the Barbaric family from Mostar, which went through the entire process and adopted two children.
Starting her story, Ozrenka Barbaric states that she and her husband knew even before they got married that she probably wouldn’t be able to get pregnant and have her biological child.
”That desire to have a child existed regardless of that fact. We talked a lot and we didn’t want to start any method, so we started thinking about adoption as a way to become parents,” said Ozrenka.
”It all starts with writing an affirmative letter, sending it to all the centers and then calling, calling, calling until something starts to happen. It didn’t even matter to us whether it will bemale or female, what was child’s biological origin, nationality, age of the child, and even if he had some medical, congenitaldisorders. We wrote everything that it is not important to us. I somehow believed in my heart that our child would find us and that’s how it happened,” stated Ozrenka.
They were called, she says, very shortly after they sent their applications, some four to five months.
”They said they had a little girl who was born prematurely. She was nine days old then, she was in an incubator because she was born weighing less than a kilogram and a half, they were fighting for her life. She is a child who would first go to foster care, and if the conditions are met, then to adoption. And that’s how our story began, from struggles, daily calls, and the Center for Social Work where the child from the hospital was. When she was two months old, she was ready to leave the incubator and we came to get her,” said Ozrenka.
When you have one child, says Ozrenka, then you want more, at least that’s how it was with them, although they thought that process would probably be more difficult.
For almost two years, they were foster parents to their second child, the boy, until the conditions for his adoption were met.
