Asim Latic from Velika Kladusa, who owns a catering facility, is providing meals for migrants for three months now, and his team prepares up to 500 meals a day.
Asim closed the restaurant for citizens in February and “changed its purpose” for the needs of migrants, whose number in Kladusa is increasing every day.
At least 400 migrants eat here on a daily basis, many of them are asking for refills, and they love beans soup and rice the most, stated Asim.
They are funded exclusively by donations of citizens and through the help of Pomozi.ba.
“We are good people, we want to help everyone,” said Asim who gathered his friends who are cooking for migrants every day and they are working for free. They are carefully recording each and every portion and they prepared about 22,000 meals so far. One of Asim’s chefs said that Bosnians are good people in general.
Migrants are happy with the food and the way Asim and his friends take care of them and cook for them, and they come out of Asim’s restaurant happy and satisfied.
He stayed in touch with many of them and he is happy to hear from them from their final destinations in Germany, France, Italy.
“These people need help, it is not okay to let them live without the basic hygienic conditions. Many people from Kladusa bring food and clothing for children and mothers, and they are doing everything they can in order to help them.
More than 12,000 migrants have entered BiH since the beginning of this year, the country’s Security Minister Dragan Mektic revealed earlier.
With current accommodation facilities in Sarajevo and Mostar, some 130 kilometers southwest of the capital, and four additional ones to be opened in the northern BiH, Mektic said he believed they are enough to accommodate the current number of migrants.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants passed through the so-called “Balkan route” in 2015, trying to reach Western Europe. BiH was then not part of that route. However, migrants have turned to BiH in recent months, trying to avoid more heavily-guarded routes and borders in the Balkans.