Salome Abuladze is one of NACRES’ volunteer firefighter from Borjomi. She joined our community firefighters programme initiated by the project Capacity building of local community for wildfire risk reduction in Borjomi municipality. This was a joint project between NACRES and Samtskhe-Javakheti Media Centre (SJMC) which was supported by the Polish Solidarity Fund in 2018-2019. In 2020-2021, the programme was continued with the assistance of USAID.

Our volunteer forest fire fighters attended specialised training and some also participated in a study tour to Poland; they worked with public schools in the Borjomi area, focussing on wild fire prevention and safe evacuation in case of fire. They even produced two excellent short educational videos შენ შეგიძლია გადაარჩინო! (You can save it!) and ნუ გადაწვავ ტყეს! (Don't put fire to the forest!).

Here’s Salome’s story:

“I am Salome Abuladze, a volunteer firefighter from Borjomi. Living in Borjomi municipality you realize that the area is one of the fire risky areas in whole Georgia. I always wanted to take part in preventing or fighting fire.

I was very happy to get a chance of becoming a volunteer firefighter under the project, Capacity building of local community for wildfire risk reduction in Borjomi municipality’’.

Participation in the project was a great experience for me. The project was very relevant and necessary not only form me, but for the whole community, as it reflected all the challenges and risks connected to forest fire in Borjomi and in our country.

Within the project we got essential knowledge and information on firefighting. Shared best practices on national and international level, that helped us to develop our skills, we learned how to behave in nature, what measures to take to prevent fire or help local community in case of wild fire.

Our group of volunteer firefighters got substantial knowledge, our awareness on environment protection was raised, approaches changed and improved. Apart this we got some basic firefighting equipment.

After the project I with the group members often do awareness raising activities in our communities, share knowledge and experience to our friends and colleagues, as a result we believe we save people and forest from fire. Now I realize that being a volunteer firefighter gives you an honour to save Nature and unique natural heritage we are lucky to have.

I am always proud of having a status of Volunteer Firefighter, and I want to express my gratitude to NACRES team for giving me this opportunity.