Volunteers running SAR course in Africa
SHIPPING: This week, the Danish Marine Home Guard is in Djibouti with its two strongest voluntary SAR instructors. They have been sent by the Navy to teach a team of navigators from several African countries in rescue and search at sea.
"We have students from the following countries' fleets: Rwanda, Kenya, Djibouti, Uganda, Comoros, Sudan, Burundi and Somalia", says BT Madsen, one of the volunteering instructors.
Now the Naval Home Guard’s volunteer SAR specialists, John Strøbæk and BT Madsen, are sitting in the heat almost 5.500 km from home in the West African country of Djibouti. Here they give their knowledge of search and rescue at sea on to a larger group of students.
The project has a high profile as both an EASF and NATO project and as part of the international goals of building capabilities, where education and training contributes to the local forces of being able to solve security problems and other sorts of issues.
"It is very satisfying that the knowledge we have as members of the Marine Guard, partly gained at our school on Slipshavn and partly from national and international courses which the Marine Guard has offered us, that the knowledge now bears so much fruit that we have been in high demand in the international maritime environment", says John Strøbæk.
John and BT are traveling as representatives of the Navy, and supported locally by Lieutenant Commander Hjalmer Traugott-Olsen from the Admiral Danish Fleet. It is not the first time that the Home Guard volunteers in Djibouti. In 2009, a volunteer from the Naval Home Guard Maritime Force Protection Force was in the country to teach local marines about port guarding with the Navy.
Source: MVH / Danish Marine Home Guard
