Everyone who spent the war in BiH, especially in Sarajevo, knows the significance of the humanitarian organization Adra. Hard working volunteers of Adra still help the most endangered ones, not only with a pot of warm beans and packages.
“In the period from 1992 until 1995, Adra was the only humanitarian organization through which food entered BiH. It was organized on the basis of collection centers abroad, in Croatia, Serbia, Austria and Germany, from where people could send packages and letters to their family. Many have left Sarajevo without knowing what happened to their dearest ones,” recalled the Director Executive of Adra BiH, Božidar Mihajlović, an MA in theology whose life mission is the fight for social justice – to ease the suffering of the poor ones, fight for the rejected and oppressed ones, be the voice for those who have none.
This humanitarian organization was a synonym for hope and connectivity. When you are in war and your city is surrounded from all sides, the fact that someone cares about you and enables you to communicate with our family is certainly very important.
“Adra had its volunteers in Sarajevo. One of them, Sandra Tomašević, was killed while distributing mail. Apart from volunteers, Adra had an ambulance and pharmacy with free medicines that arrived in convoys. Volunteers drove trucks, delivered mail, food, packages, passed through barricades. They were shot at; they were putting their lives on the line…” Mihajlović said.
After the war, Adra was operating until 2000. Then the people dispersed and there have been no any activities for almost ten years.
“Since 2011, we have launched activities again. Symbolically, we started with a small soup kitchen financed by the volunteers for people from the streets, homeless people, beggars. The volunteers were preparing the food. One week it was my wife, the other week it was another volunteer. People heard about that pot of beans and started asking whether they can come as well. Now we have 60 users and in addition to providing food we also organize trips for those people from the streets, which is also a type of support,” Božidar says.
The volunteers have also launched a Health Club with three segments: the first one are lectures and workshops on healthy lifestyle, cooking, groceries, the second one are physical exercises, and the third segment is socializing through trips and traveling. That club counts around 120 members. For three years, Adra has also been organizing free courses of English and French language which were very well-attended. One of these courses resulted in the idea for the Let’s Do It project, which is now a major event.
In the meantime, BiH was hit by disastrous floods and all attention and activities were directed towards helping the afflicted.
“We have been working to the max for almost a year. With two small jeeps, we distributed necessities in the flooded cities, from street to street. Around 70 tons of food, hygiene necessities and waters ended in almost all flooded municipalities through our organization. We had four warehouses where we collected aid – in Sarajevo, Banja Luka, Bijeljina and Derventa. The goods were collected there, then sorted, packed and distributed. Many transporters did their part of the job for free. It was all voluntary-based. Some areas could be accessed only by boats, Bosanski Šamac for example. The army provided us with those boats and we delivered the packages to the people who were on the balconies,” Muhajlović says.
Adra is the patron of the poor, the hungry and the rejected, thus the volunteers strive to direct all their work in that direction. However, they add that humanitarian aid is not the best way of helping people. Instead, jobs should be provided for the people so that they could support themselves.
(Source: klix.ba)
