Playground Opening

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!

The One Year Marker

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!

Potatoes and Baby Showers

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!

Holidays in Bulgaria

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.