Bulgaria II. - CMDR COE

October 2015

Rumen and Saul volunteered for the Crisis Management and Disaster Response Centre of Excellence what is a branch of NATO, stationed in Sofia, Bulgaria. The Centre′s aim is to pool expertise in order to improve interoperability, development and enhancement of NATO standards in building capacities for crisis management and disaster response; to provide assistance for the effective use of joint experience and capabilities of NATO, Nations, Partners and international organizations in the field of crisis management and disaster response; to provide education and training of military personnel, government officials and civilians, and organizational structures in the field of crisis management and disaster response.

We chose this project because we could relate the UWC mission and values to the concepts of this NATO course since it teaches you how to prevent and if needed respond, to a natural or manmade disaster. We believe that these skills could be applied in many difficult situations that have become a daily reality of our world, such as the Syrian refugee crisis.

 We succeeded in creating a project that took place outside of school in a distant foreign country. We worked for an organization that keeps the community safe. As we committed to our project week we improved our organization skills as we had to make contact with people in another country who we had never met and had to meet deadlines to have everything finished on time and we had to find a place of temporary residence which was close to the NATO centre of Excellence to minimize transport costs. I had never been to Bulgaria before, so I was experiencing the culture for the first time. I enjoy seeing new parts of the world, so I was very excited that we would go to Bulgaria. The language barrier was not a problem as I was with Rumen, and I discovered many new things, such as typical Bulgarian food and the Alexander Nevsky Church. One of the key skills that we learned from NATO, was the risk matrix.  The Risk matrix is used in risk assessment to differentiate the size of the threat and ways to tackle it. This risk matrix is used by NATO to assess the levels of risk a country is facing. However, the concept can be applied to the risk assessment of almost anything, a valuable skill we now possess.

Overall, our project week was a great success. We explored parts of Bulgaria Rumen had not been to either, so it was full of new experiences for both of us. When working in the centre, we were not given any training in the field of crisis management in a country. We applied many skills that we had both learned in Geography HL, and used these skills as stepping stones to understand and interpret crisis management. We highly recommend people to go to Bulgaria or Eastern Europe in general, as it is so different from Western Europe and will be a great chance to discover a different side of the world.