ZRAP Volunteering

Closing letter:

It was a really special day in Porin today,
we closed the project after almost 10 months of volunteering around Croatia.

We delivered the last donations from ZŠEM international students and we said goodbye to the great team of JRS SouthEast Europe, their staff accompanied us during these months and provided us with their best and friendly care.
We wish them good luck with their future challenges and we encourage them to keep the hard work going!

Also we had a special farewell with one of the asylum seekers. Shahkla, that is from the Kurdish region of Iraq, a place that she left because of the "terrible smell of blood, corpses and gunpowder", as she manifested us.

Despite her tragedy behind, she's definitely the most energized refugee in Porin. She is very known among the asylums seekers because of her dancing lessons or her makeup sessions with kids and women.

As a way to say goodbye, she gave me one picture of her to take back to Spain.

Fernando

This is Ahmed Ali, a Medicine student from Egypt that joined the project ZRAP Volunteering in associacion with JRS SouthEast Europe. This are his thoughts about this experience:

"I started volunteering for 2 years with refugees, beginning with Italian Red Cross and joining this project. I haven’t finished my medical school and nowadays I am doing my Erasmus studies in Croatia. Volunteering spirit inspired my life or you could say changed it and for others either.

You made a change on a vulnerable life, drawing a smile on children face who need someone to stand with. Nothing could better than invest in our humanity future. As young world nowadays needs us without these human-made fake borders. If we don’t have our role in the future leading in the best path, we will all lose! Even our humanity!"

War begun in 1991, when he was six years old in Obracovac, Croatia. He and his mother fled as refugees to Zadar after his grandfather was killed by Serbian officials and his father joined the conflict as a soldier of the Croatian Army.

There in Zadar at the Hotel Kolovare, reconverted in a refugee center by that time, he spent months playing with his ball. "He was kicking the ball all day long and he probably broke more windows than the soundwaves from the bombings," says one of the receptionists.

The chief of the youth football school of Zadar visited one day the hotel and met the family. "They were very poor. They had no money for shirts or shin guards. So I made a wooden ones because I knew that boy had potential and I took him to the football academy in Zadar, which at that time there were mornings where you could find grenades or caps of bullets on the field. Football was not the priority".

After Zadar, he signed with 16 years old for Dinamo Zagreb. But first, he had to leave for one year of military service in Bosnia. He played that season in Zrinjski FC and he was named the best player in the Bosnian tournament with only 18 years old.

His subsequent life is much more known. British Tottenham Hotspurs signed him after some successful seasons with Dinamo Zagreb and then joined Real Madrid where he was crowned as European Champion.

His name is Luka Modrić.