By Jeremy Herb
Inside Bay Area
FREMONT, Calif. — Fire Capt. Rick Bota arrived at the ceremony expecting to honor German Battalion Chief Ben Brockemuehl, who once was a student of Bota’s.
Instead, Bota was the one receiving accolades from his pupil.
Brockemuehl presented Bota with the German medal for International Cooperation within Fire Service, Germany’s second-highest award for foreigners in the fire service. Just 15 are handed out each year.
“I’m more than surprised, and extremely honored,” Bota said of the award, presented Saturday. “This is highly unexpected.”
Bota first met Brockemuehl more than 10 years ago, when Brockemuehl was a 17-year-old foreign exchange student at Mission High School in Fremont. Brockemuehl came to the fire station one day on his bike, asking to be shown around.
Bota helped the teen get into the Fremont Fire Explorers, a Boy Scouts program for teens interested in fire service that Bota directed at the time.
“He was a mentor, very helpful, doing things I justdidn’t expect,” Brockemuehl said. “He was always understanding of cultural problems. He helped me with language on the first day, training me with fire vocabulary.”
Brockemuehl kept coming back to the area -- and kept coming back to the fire department. For his high school senior thesis, Brockemuehl wrote about the differences between the Fremont Fire Department and German fire departments, following Bota’s suggestion.
“He came from Germany, just a kid on a bike,” Bota said. “We like to take on kids like that and mold them.”
Now, at 27, Brockemuehl is the German equivalent of a battalion chief in Germany’s Aichach-Friedberg County Fire Department, overseeing 14 fire houses and the youth fire explorer’s program. During the ceremony at the South Grimmer fire station, Brockemuehl joked that the German explorers program he’s in charge of has grown to 650 kids, larger than Fremont’s.
Bota said he was happy to see how far Brockemuehl has come.
“We expect kids that come into the explorers program to progress, but to see Ben’s success, especially internationally, is unbelievable,” Bota said.
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