The stage has been set and the party marking Vlade’s farewell from professional basketball is about to start.
Unlike many famous sportists who just make a farewell game and maybe donate some amount of money to their favorite charity upon their retirement, Divac has something else in mind.
He has decided to use all the hype around this event to promote a cause much bigger than a simple donation – so big infact that the outcome is still unclear. Basically the plan is to buy the abbandoned houses at the countryside and give them to refugee families in Serbia with worst living conditions. There are tens of thousands refugees in Serbia, from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo – 7.850 of them living in unthinkably bad conditions that demand urgent solution. At the same time, the countryside is dying and there are more and more abandoned houses that need refurbishing, while the villages also need tennants.
So the plan is perfect in theory. How it will go in real life is left to be seen. The problem is that, even if an average refugee family takes a house offered to them, they will still remain unemployed – like many other non-refugees in Serbia. Therefore, nobody is sure if they are going to accept the gift, even at the cost of remaining at their current whereabouts, which are mostly in poor shape – often a school gym or a simple barrack. Current locations of refugee camps are still, near the towns and cities, which gives bigger chances of finding work in comparison to living on a countryside. I am an optimist in this case and I believe that this project has good chances of success.
In any case, good thing in all this is that the question of refugees is once again in the center of attention thanks to Divac.
There are also speculations that Divac is going to use some of this publicity to his own benefit: namely, there are rumors that he wants to run for President on following elections, probably at the end of this year. Somehow I don’t believe the rumors this time, but hey, if there’s one thing you can be sure about when Serbia is concerned, it’s that you can’t be sure about anything.
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