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.