Calgary man searches for group of women who helped him emigrate to Canada 3 decades ago

The Calgary man said he doesn't remember much about the five or six men and women who helped him, asides from that they were in their twenties and had a guitar.

Ivo Ceko was a member of a military police unit that was guarding a hotel in a town in central Bosnia when he met a group of young Canadians and Americans in the summer of 1994.

His English wasn’t very good back then, and they couldn’t speak fluent Croatian — but they managed to exchange some sentences.

“We chat, we laugh,” he recalled in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t expect anything from that (meeting).”

When a young woman in the group told Ceko that she was travelling home to Canada and asked if she could bring him anything back, he jokingly responded: “Get me a passport.”

“’Really, you want to get out from here?”’ he remembered her asking. “I say, ‘who wouldn’t?’ It was a desperate situation.”

Three weeks later, the man in his thirties received a brown envelope. Inside were blank Canadian immigration forms and a pair of socks. He filled out the paperwork, applied for a visa and arrived in Canada in March 1997.

Now, nearly three decades later, Ceko is looking to reconnect with the group to tell them how grateful he and his family are for what they did.

“I just want to find them and say thank you and, you know, hug them and maybe have a drink with them,” Ceko said from Calgary.