[ENGLISH EPISODE] Neely Rifai-Antonova has been teaching since 2015. She started as a Kindergarten teacher and then moved to teaching English Language Arts and drama. She is half Syrian, half Indian and came to Bulgaria 6 years ago. Prior to that, she worked in Syria, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia.

She has a master’s degree in International Business Communications with specialty in Event Management. She worked as an event coordinator for a year and loved it, but missed teaching so much that she came back to it. She feels like she learned more about teaching in studying communication and event management than during her education studies. Currently she is pursuing her IB certification.

Neely is a public speaker who had the privilege to stand on a TEDxNBU red dot and has had the honor to be nominated for Human of the Year by the Helsinki Committee in 2017 for her work for Syrian refugees in Bulgaria through her initiative Beautiful Faces of Syria. She speaks 3 languages: English, Arabic, and Bulgarian quite fluently. She believes that every human being is a lifelong learner and it’s up to teachers to activate the curiosity in kids so they are always asking questions and absorbing knowledge.

This podcast is a project of znam.be. Production of www.procasters.co. Used music: Gold Coast by Scandinavianz | @scandinavianz, downloaded from www.free-stock-music.com. CC BY-SA 4.0