Last week we officially opened the new playground in our village! Since March we’ve been working on this project. From writing it, to waiting for the money and to building it all summer, it’s been a long process. I learned a lot more about the Bulgarian work ethic-“hubavi neshta ne stava barzo”-meaning good things don’t happen fast. Right. I think at least a few good things from Americans might’ve happened fast. But this is Bulgaria, and in the end, after all the months, the playground turned out awesome! It is beautiful and the kids love it and the parents love it too! We had a little opening ceremony and about 50 mothers put money together and got me a 14k gold bracelet and a beautiful bouquet of flowers! I was so shocked when they gave me the present! I didn’t expect anything and it was wonderful to feel so appreciated by them.
In about a week I’ll have been at my site for a year. And I feel good about the past year. And I feel so much more knowledgeable, like I actually know what I’m doing a little bit. But most of that new knowledge is concerning the seasonal routine and way of life in the village. It truly takes a full year to understand all the work these people do. They have to plant their fields to have food for the winter. They have to dig up everything and store it to have food for the winter. They have to conserve hundreds of jars of vegetables, fruits and juices to have food for the winter. And they have to chop lots and lots of wood to have heating for the winter. A lot of things hinge on the winter!
And speaking of winter, it’s already started coming! They say it’s going to be longer and colder this year-yikes! But yesterday about 15 kids from the school came and helped me and my landlady chop and arrange all my wood for winter. Done. And I’m so happy! And I hope that none of you ever have to chop wood, it’s not fun.
Also, my best friend here left. She was a Peace Corps volunteer and came a year before me, so she left last week. She’s in America and she’s already told me how crazy it seems there now and how the people are so weird. I guess I’ll have that to look forward to! I’m coming home in December for a little visit, so I hope to see a lot of you then!
I’ve recently had a few complaints about the lack of updates on my blog. I apologize and considering winter is about to start up again in the Rhodopes, I’m sure there’ll be more frequent updates.
In the past couple of months I’ve had some of my hardest times yet and some of my best. Great things that happened are that my mother and sister came to visit! My mother came to Bulgaria and got to see life through my eyes for a week. It definitely helped her understand a lot more about my village and I can genuinely say she had a good time despite the fact that the overall theme for the week was physical injury. My mother ended up with a black toe, a bruised heel, getting sick at her stomach for about a day and in the end we had to make a trip to the hospital to have her arm stitched up! She recovered quickly from everything and stayed in good spirits, but it just got kinda ridiculous towards the end of the week! After a week in Bulgaria, my sister joined us for a week in Istanbul! Istanbul is fantastic! I encourage everyone to go at least once! We didn’t have any problems with the Turkish people (most of them even hit on my married sister-but not in a scary way, in a funny way), there is soooo much to see there, and our hotel was awesome and inexpensive! If you ever need advice about going to Istanbul, just email me!
I also passed the one year mark in Bulgaria at the end of July! I couldn’t believe I’d already been here for a year! It went by so fast! I still have about 13 months left here, but I know they’ll pass in the blink of an eye.
In my last post I wrote about how our mayor’s office had received funding for a project that we wrote to build a children’s playground. I’m happy to say that we are almost finished! It has been a rough process and for a while there I thought we would never finish. But the past month we’ve made a lot of progress and I’m excited about the end result. All the playground equipment and the fence are bright colors and it just makes me cheery to look at it! The kids are excited and already play there even though we aren’t finished, and we’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from parents and other adults in the village. I’m really proud of the project and so happy that it will be here for many years after I’ve gone.
There’ve also been some harder times. During the summer work slows down a lot in general for most volunteers and, in my village, everyone concentrates more on planting and gathering hay (which I did-not the funnest thing to do!). After the school year ended my work load drastically declined and the days here slowed down to millenniums! That was a bit rough. But luckily my work has picked up again and we start school in about two weeks.
In about a month we will have our mid-service conference for Peace Corps (because they count your time from when you arrive at your site as an official volunteer, which was in October), and I can’t wait to see all of the volunteers together again and to look forward to the second year here in Bulgaria!
Winter is officially over. Yep. Over. It only took 5 whole months. In Texas I think winter is about 3 weeks. Volunteers always told me that winter here was long, but around January and February I thought, it wasn't too bad, I had survived. And then came the snow in March and it just started getting annoying. Finally, there isn't any more snow and we've started planting our potatoes.
Potatoes. In America we buy them from a store in a dirty bag and there is a little bit of soil still left on them and that is why it is important to always wash them. Now I can tell you that I have smelled the manure, led the horse, and planted the small "planting" potatoes that are all part of that beautiful process that leads to the dirty bag of potatoes in the supermarket. Two days and 8 planted fields later, we will eat next winter. Yeah, that's what we did all weekend (and there are still about 5 more fields), but it was great! The entire village was there plowing and planting their potatoes for next year. At the end of both days I took a shower, two aspirin and I went to bed early.
Other recent events... My landlord's daughter had a baby! A beautiful baby girl named Deriya. I even got to go to the hospital to pick her up with the family. And a few weeks ago we had a baby shower. Baby showers here are different. The night before the baby shower family, close friends and neighbors come to the house and cook the food-all night long. All night they mix, in shifts, this soup-like substance called "bulgoor," which is special to our village, in these huge cauldrons over fires outside. Inside they prepare the freshly-slaughtered sheep's meat and make enough salad and bean soup for all the women in the village. And the next day, after not having slept all night, they serve the food while pretty much the entire village comes and goes throughout the day. And I was able to be a part of the entire process! I did cheat and sleep for about two hours, so I guess I'm just not as hardcore as the old ladies, but it was a great experience and I am so happy that I was able to do it.
Also, we wrote a project proposal in the mayor's office where I work and we found out that we are going to receive the money for the project! I was so happy! The project is for a children's playground in the village, and we've already started building it. The village is excited about the new playground and there are so many good ideas that are coming from it. The kids in the school are learning how to make mosaics that they are going to put down in the cement and they will be in charge of painting the wooden fence around the playground and lots of other things. I'm so excited!
Besides planting the potato fields, the "working season" has begun. From now until October there will be pretty much nonstop work in the village. Soon we will plant the beans, onions, tomatoes, lettuce, strawberries, raspberries and lots of other fruits and vegetables. And then everything will have to be collected at the end of the season and stored for the winter. It is an awesome process and I can't wait to see it all and be be a part of it all. I'm afraid I'm going to hate the fruits and vegetables back in the States because now I've actually tasted fresh and it has totally spoiled me!
**The winter here was actually one of the mildest they've ever had, unfortunately my Texas blood still found it quite cold!
So before I knew it the year was over! Yikes! I’ve officially been in Bulgaria for over 5 months! Which may not seem like a long time to you, but it really is.
Man, so much has happened. I mean, the holiday season is crazy in general, but then I added another holiday to celebrate this year: Biram. Ahh, Biram. It was lovely. Biram is a Muslim holiday (so it’s only celebrated in Muslim parts of the country) that takes place every year during December or January (the date changes depending on the lunar calendar or religious calendar or something like that). And basically all the families and people who work outside the village return home for 4 days, literally making the village double over the weekend, and they kill a lamb in the backyard and eat “korban,” a traditional Bulgarian dish made from lamb. Luckily, I was busy the morning they killed the lamb so I “missed” seeing that, but don’t worry, since then I’ve been able to witness the massacring of a baby cow in the backyard for New Year’s and I even helped cut up some of the insides. So the younger kids in the family go visit their older parents and relatives and eat korban and they read, or rather sing, this hour long rhythmic chant in Turkish. I sat in on the reading for a while and it was absolutely beautiful. Two people lead and then the others join in at certain points if they know the reading. I was also able to wear a traditional Muslim headscarf and help serve the korban meal at the house where I live. My landlords had all of their relatives over for korban and I was honored to be invited to help.
The rest of December was pretty busy with activities for Christmas in the kindergarten and the school. For Christmas I traveled to the northern part of Bulgaria to celebrate with a bunch of volunteers from my group and it was awesome! We even cooked Mexican food or something like it for Christmas Day dinner. And then for New Year’s I was back in the village. In Bulgaria on New Year’s they shoot off fireworks, so there I was in the tiny center of my tiny village and right across the street the men were shooting off what looked like WMDs (weapons of mass destruction) into the air right over our mosque. I was a little more than nervous, especially when a few didn’t go straight up but rather sideways! Luckily, no one was injured and we were able to blissfully carry on our horo dancing into the wee hours of the morning.
This whole month has been rather sad for me since it’s my first Christmas away from my family, but everyone in the village, and especially my landlords and their family really have taken me in. I am seriously starting to feel like the 4th child of my landlords and I spend time with their family and relatives he way I would back home. And that has been such an awesome support.
**So I know it’s been a while and I really haven’ updated, but I just got internet in my house and so maybe now I’ll update this thing a little more frequently.
Two weeks ago I moved to my permanent site! I had about 5 bags (only one huge one and then 4 smaller ones) and I had to trek them through three buses and about 7 hours of traveling. It kinda sucked. But I finally made it to site and it’s been great! I live in the middle of the mountains, literally up in the mountain, and there is only one bus that leaves my town (at 7:30am) and one bus that returns to the town (at 5:30pm), and there are no buses on the weekends. So traveling is a bit of a challenge. I’ve started learning when all the worker vans come and go to work in the day and been sure to make friends with people who have cars!
And the people here are wonderful! They just want to take care of me. They are even a little too overprotective sometimes. But I’d rather have that than the other option. Everyone is curious about me and most people know my every move and talk about it with their friends. I’ll meet someone and they’ll know stuff I did the week before in the village, or if I have a coffee with someone, people ask me about it later--I just think it’s a bit weird. And I live on the third floor of a house with a grandmother and grandfather who live on the first floor and they are just awesome! They cook for me all the time, even when I tell them I am cooking, and they went on a 10 day vacation to the capital to see their family this past week and they call me like every night to make sure I’m ok and even made one of their daughters stay here overnight until I finally convinced her I was ok in the house by myself!
Also, this is a Turkish community so everyone here speaks Bulgarian and Turkish fluently and they go back and forth in their conversations. They of course want me to learn Bulgarian, but they are much more excited about me learning Turkish. I don’t know why. Every time they start teaching me I have to tell them to hold off and maybe when I finally know Bulgarian I’ll attempt to take on Turkish. Nevertheless, I already know some Turkish words and when I throw them out it’s like they are marveling at a baby who is taking its first steps!
I’ve started helping the English teacher in the school teach a bit in the mornings and I’ve worked some in the kindergarten as well. In Bulgaria the kindergarten is kind of like a daycare and is a completely separate building from the school where kids from the ages of about 4 to 6 go during the day. The challenge for me is that the kids in this kindergarten only know Turkish and it is actually the job of the teachers there to teach them enough Bulgarian so they can get by in school. Apparently Turkish is a lot easier than Bulgarian so all the families here pretty much speak Turkish at home all the time. So on top of them learning Bulgarian every day, here I come with my little English lessons! This week I’m going to start going to a neighboring town once a week to teach English in their kindergarten too.
Overall, I’m so happy with my site! But believe me, there are definitely times when I miss the States, even the most random things, like the local television reporters in the Dallas area, and the people on tv in Abilene constantly referring to “the Big Country.” Hmm…maybe I just miss tv…but I totally got to watch an episode of Conan O’Brien the other day! The old people downstairs have satellite with about a million channels! I’m pretty sure they only watch like 3 of them.
Disclaimer:This post was written about two weeks ago and I am just now getting the chance to put it on my blog, some information is outdated.
The PC Staff all told us that training was intense, and intense is a strong word, so maybe that isn’t the right word, but it is definitely something! And I feel like a wimp because I know that I took on like three times this load in college, but things are harder here because everything is different. I can’t go home at the end of the day and just be with people who really know who I am-because there is no one here who does. And I can barely communicate to the majority of the people here to tell them about me. So when there is a “busy” day, sometimes it seems much more draining than a “very busy” day in the States. That all sounds pretty bad-like every day here is just sucking the life out of me or something-but its really just all so new.
But the busy days are balanced with lots of fun stuff that I could never do in the States. Like last weekend I hiked up to the Seven Lakes in the Rila Mountains. It was the most beautiful site I’ve ever seen! The hike was a bit treacherous, and the weather changed like every 5 minutes from bright and sunny to cloudy and raining, but at the end, standing at the top of the mountain and overlooking all of the lakes, I knew it was worth it! It was amazing and beautiful, or krasiv as the Bulgarians say.
I also got my site assignment a couple of weeks ago and spent a few days at the site! I will be living in a small village in the Rhodope Mountains in southern Bulgaria for the next two years! About 700 people live in the village, everyone is Turkish Bulgarian and there is a very large Muslim population. I’m a little confused about the exact origins of the people because with all the history and the different minority groups here, the people could be from different places. For example: they could be one group of people who are Bulgarian Muslims. Or they could be from one minority group called Roma, but speak Turkish as their mother tongue. Or they could be part of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria. Yeah. I’ll find out. All I know is that every single person in the village, and in most of the villages around, speak both Bulgarian and Turkish fluently. And they expect me to start learning some Turkish after about 6 months, when they say I will be “fluent” in Bulgarian-right.
For my job, I am assigned to work with the mayor’s office, but I will probably be working more with the cultural center, kindergarten and the school. I will be teaching a lot of English and, even though it is a small village, there are actually many cultural activities going on in the town, (such as traditional horo dancing, latin dancing (!), and theater plays) all driven by two of my colleagues, so I will be helping with those. I’ll also be doing a fair amount of translating, finding funding resources for the mayor’s projects, and maybe working on some tourism development. So a little bit of everything.
The town truly is built into the mountain and driving around the Rhodopes is probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life-every turn is your last! But the area is incredibly beautiful and there are many other villages and a few bigger towns not far away. And there are actually quite a few volunteers around me-at least 4 within an hour or so and 2 about twenty minutes away.
Other things…this past weekend we spent a day with the Roma. Roma are a minority group that is different in many respects from traditional Bulgarians-they even have their own language-and there are many efforts within the PC and other organizations to work on integrating the two cultures. The Roma have a completely different lifestyle from Bulgarians and there are prejudices on both sides against the other. Many PC volunteers work at Roma NGOs, and, in general, all of us will have contact with them and should understand their way of life.
I also helped my family harvest potatoes for the winter. I actually volunteered for it because I really wanted to help them out in the garden, but after three hours of digging in the potato trenches with dirt under my finger nails and bags and bags of potatoes, I realized just how easy it is to drive to the store and buy food in America. But I wouldn’t have given up that experience because it was awesome and afterwards I could tell that they respected and like me a little bit more. And these people do that much work for all of their vegetables. They stock up for the winter and they don’t want store-bought crap, they want what was fresh from their garden because it tastes so much better. I don’t know how I’m ever going to go back to buying fruit and vegetables in the store.
My family has another potato garden on the other side of town that still needs harvesting…
Tomorrow is a big milestone in my Peace Corps experience. Tomorrow morning we are told where our permanent sites will be for the next two years! I really can’t believe that it is already this time! I remember looking at the calendar during the first week and thinking that it would never come, but here it is. I am excited! I will actually have a little bit of concrete information about where I will be living and the work I will be doing while I am here in Bulgaria. But really it will only be a tiny piece of information, since the work I will be doing will probably still be a bit of a mystery, even after I’m at my site for a while. From what I’ve heard from a lot of other volunteers here, your work is very much determined by your own motivations and what you involve yourself in at your site. I even heard that one volunteer started very successful ballet lessons as a secondary project…something to think about, I mean I did dance for about ten years! It might actually come in handy that I basically tried out every sport and hobby growing up, never really devoting myself solely to one…now I might be able to teach one to people here!
This past week was pretty great. I feel like I’m integrating more into the community, and I even helped skin grilled peppers and grind tomatoes to preserve for the winter months. Our group started working on our community project, and we went to a couple of practices for the local folk band who performed this weekend at a nearby town. It was great watching them practice, and they started teaching us some horo dances and we’ve started hanging out with some of the people we met there. We are actually starting to branch out and have friends outside of our host families! I know that doesn’t sound like much, but when you can barely speak at the level of a 3rd grader, that is saying something!
This weekend some of the volunteers went together to the Rila Monastery and it was so incredibly beautiful! It was a long day because there are so many buses to catch, and they only go at certain times, so we had to get a taxi at 6 am to take us to a bus station to get to the monastery, but I think it was worth it. The monastery is over 1,000 years old, and it is still inhabited by a number of monks who keep it going every day, even with the crowds of tourists! It was also a bit cold up at the monastery, and pretty cool throughout the entire region where I live. It was nice to wear my zip-up, but if I’m already wearing a jacket in August, I don’t even want to think about what January is going to be like! We also hiked up to a much smaller monastery with a small cave. The cave has a narrow opening at one end, and they say that if you can pass through the hole to the other side, then you are not a sinner. We all made it through to the other side.
While we were up by the little monastery, there were mini shrines on the mountain for different people who have died. By every shrine there were hundreds of little folded pieces of paper stuck in the cracks and crevices of the rocks. One of our trainers was with us and she explained that people write their prayers down on little pieces of paper and leave them at the shrines. At first I thought it was kind of weird, but then when I really looked, it was actually quite beautiful to see all of those prayers. Each one put at that specific place for a specific reason with a specific prayer. After tomorrow’s announcement, I will spend the week at my site with my counterpart (a person from the host organization that helps us get acclimated at our sites) getting to know the people and the town where I will be working. I’m already starting to get knots in my stomach! So please just keep me in your thoughts and prayers during this never-ending time of transitioning.
