The Rhodopes

**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.

PST Life

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…

Week 6

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.

Zdraveyte from Bulgaria!

I’ve been living in Bulgaria for the past three weeks and it has been great! All of the volunteers spent a week up at a mountain resort getting to know each other, the PC staff, and a bit of the language. We were then broken up into 7 different satellite groups of 4 or 5 people each and we’ve been living at those sites for the past two weeks.

I live in a beautiful village (and I want to highlight village, it is not a town or a city, it is a village) at the foot of the Rila Mountains that is known for its waterfalls and lakes. It is incredibly beautiful and incredibly small! Which has taken some getting used to considering that I am from one of the largest areas in America. But over the past week and a half I have discovered so many wonderful things about this place, such as the fresh fruit that the people pick right out of their huge gardens in their backyards, or the fact that my road is the road that the cows and horses take out every morning to the pastures and the one they take back every night through the village to who knows where. I mean, I am from Texas, but I am from the city! I’ve never been in this much direct contact with animals.

We have language training almost every week day and HUB sessions almost every week where all the volunteers get together and train together all day. I feel like I’m already back in college-so all my friends who have one semester left, I am right there with you! Unfortunately I have already had a few minor health problems, which is to be expected, but I also sprained my ankle a couple of days ago and it is quickly becoming quite an inconvenience! We’ve hiked a fair amount and done plenty of outdoorsy things, and I was fine through all of this, but then I sprain my ankle stepping off a bus! I am such a klutz. This past Friday was a religious holiday and there was be a big celebration in my town complete with xopo (horo in English), which is traditional Bulgarian dancing and something that I am quickly starting to love, but since I hurt my ankle I wasn’t really able to dance. The town holiday was a fun, almost like a very mini fair in the states-there was even cotton candy! And some of us went to a “chalga” concert a few nights ago. Chalga is like their pop music here-like Britney Spears back in the old days, but with even more skin. It was….interesting and cultural.

I live with a great host family. My host “mother” is actually a year younger than me and 7 months pregnant with a girl! She is so cute and sweet and knows some English, so we help each other and get by and communicate pretty well most days. Her husband is a little bit older, and his family lives right down our street and her family lives not far down the main road. She is due in October or November, but I will probably already have moved to my permanent site before she gives birth, so she has invited me to come back in December to see the baby.

Of course I miss everyone and some days I get a bit homesick, but I really am happy here and have loved it so far. I’ll try my best to post more and not let this much time go by, but the Internet is a bit spotty where I am living.

The pictures I've put up are of the view of the town and the mountains from my window, the house that I am living at, and my host "mother" and me at a monastery during the first weekend.

The Last Night

I've been in D.C. for a couple of days now and I've just finished up Staging. Tomorrow we leave for Bulgaria! It was hard leaving friends and family, but ever since I got here, its really been great! The people are cool and the training is fun, mostly a lot of group activities and discussion. I even got to meet up with a friend and see some of downtown and all of the beautiful monuments lit up at night. Now we are all re-packing our bags and making last minute calls before we take off. We've also been informed that we won't be able to access the internet or a phone to call the US during at least the first week, if not longer, in order to tell someone back home that we've made it safely. So if you don't hear from me for a while, its actually a good thing!

Before I leave, I want to thank everyone who has supported me throughout this whole process. You have no idea how much your words of encouragement and prayers meant to me and how they have helped me get here. Please just continue to pray for our group as we begin to train and integrate into the culture. I know all of us have anxiety about learning the language, as well as many other aspects of what we are about to walk into. However, I am certain that both the good times and bad times will shape this adventure into a wonderful experience for all of us.

I can't wait to talk to you all from the other side of the world! Goodnight.

4 weeks, 2 days

As of today (the 25th) it is one month until I leave for Washington, D.C.! Isn't that crazy? All of this planning and time and thinking is finally coming to an actual experience! I'm am so excited, but as some of you know, scared.

It is actually 4 weeks and 2 days until I leave for Washington, and 2 days after that I leave for Bulgaria. It is 1 day until I go to Abilene, (where I will see many of the people that are important for the last time before I go), 8 days until Jenna comes to visit, about 3 weeks until Matt comes home, and then we will have about 9 days to hang out together before I leave. I feel like all of a sudden my life has turned into a bunch of numbers converted into days and weeks, waiting until I leave. But those numbers are going to be filled with so much change-so much, that I am hesitant to approach them. Hesitant to live through them.

But I know they will come and they will be great! This is what this time in my life is about; endings and beginnings. How could I not go forward?

And I'm scared to leave because it is going to be so different. When I interviewed for the Peace Corps, my recruiter told me about this one girl who was in her group to go to Honduras and didn't even make it past pre-departure! She went home before the group even left the States! When I first heard that story I thought that girl was crazy! How could she put so much time and effort into this and then turn back without even trying? Now that I'm here, I can sort of see her point of view. It is scary. But what else is life than a series of scary moments? Isn't it those moments that make us who we are? Because even though we are so scared, we go forwad because we know we will be fine-much more, we will succeed-because God is with us and guiding us.

Disclaimer: I usually don't really talk much to people about what God is to me. I prefer to show them, for me, thats just easier. So this post feels sort of awkward to put out for all the world to see, but it's how I feel right now, and I think that is important for me to share.

*Also, I'm aware that this post is full of some cliche sayings. Get over it.

Progress...

So I got my Staging Kit from the Peace Corps! The Staging Kit has some final forms for me to fill out, a booklet to give to my family about how to deal with me being over there, a booklet about cultural adjustment for me, and all of my flight and pre-departure information.

They actually moved my departure date back by a week, so I will be leaving at the end of July instead of mid-July. I guess that's cool...more time to spend with my friends and family. And I found out that my pre-departure location is Washington, D.C., which is also exciting because I've never been to D.C. before! I know it's a long shot, but maybe I can sightsee around a bit at night after all the orientation stuff...maybe not.

The booklet that I have to read for cultural assimilation is kind of scary! It talks about adjusting to the training and the culture and the work, etc., but it gives so many examples of what might happen and what I might feel like at such and such time, and most of the examples are things that I have never even thought of. I mean I've thought about adjusting to the culture some, but I've mostly thought about missing my family and friends, since homesickness was something that I had a little bit of when I studied abroad in Oxford....for only four months! But since I've already been through that, then I'll know what to expect and how to deal with it, and I guess I'm just happy that I'm informed about all the other situations through this booklet. I'd rather have information than be taken by surprise.

I'm spending more time with the language and now know the alphabet and some basic phrases. The alphabet was quite confusing at first because they have many of the same letters as the English language, and some are even pronounced the same, but then there are English letters that have different English sounds. For example: H is pronounced like N, X is pronounced like H, P is R, and C is S! And then there are the craziest symbols that usually sound like more than one letter such as ch, ts, sh, sht...crazy. But I definitely have it down!

An Introduction

First off, I want to introduce myself in case anyone who is reading this doesn't know who I am.

My name is Sarah, I'm 22 years old, and I just graduated from Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas with a degree in Marketing. I'm leaving for Bulgaria with the Peace Corps in July for 27 months to be a Community and Organizational Development Volunteer and I'm so excited/nervous/stressed about it! It's been a long process thats taken me over a year...a year of thinking, praying, talking with returned volunteers, and talking with friends and family. I suspect that I've talked to a majority of you who are reading this blog about this decision and I want to thank you for listening and for all your advice and support.

Hopefully this blog will stay up-to-date with information and pictures of my time in Bulgaria, but I don't make any promises!

So far this summer I've been learning the Bulgarian alphabet and basic words, which is craziness! Tonight I was reading one of the lessons that Peace Corps sent me and it says that Bulgarian is an easy language to learn for English speakers, which got my hopes up a little....but then I actually started looking at the letters, which are quite frightening! And then I downloaded tonight's evening news cast from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, which definitely scared me! Luckily I don't have much planned this summer except for getting ready to leave, so I've got plenty of time.