Alaskan Bulgarian

I Need a Judgement Call Here

Okay. Here's the scene: Sunday morning I was with two other volunteers in Pernik (a dirty, polluted mining city near Sofia) when, with my hands full, a two leva bill fell out of my hands and into a nearby garbage bin. One of the volunteers I was with, Tom, pointed it out to me. Two leva has the value of about two dollars, depending on what you're buying. It'll get you four or five candy bars, for example.

Now, without a word and with the dexterity of a surgeon, I reached into the can, not touching anything else within the can, and pulled out the bill with my index and middle fingers. I put the bill back into my wallet where it belonged and went on with the day. Tom and Christen, however, used the whole scene as the story of the day. It was described in horrific detail at the lunch table and told later at Peace Corps Headquarters as if I had wiped my face with the money. Granted, they kept exaggerating the thing, using it as a joke, but was it even worth that? Sometimes we scrap and dig for things to talk about in Bulgaria, but can't a person reach into a garbage bin to get his money back? Is that not allowed?

In Seinfeld, George Costanza was once castigated for reaching into a garbage bin for a half-eaten eclair. That I can understand. It was food, it was in garbage, it was, for all intents and purposes, inedible and should have been avoided. But money should usually be seen as filthy anyway, shouldn't it? I mean, do you ever really know where that fiver has been? What if the last person to have that bill was disgusting and short a napkin, kleenex, or--God forbid--toilet paper? In my opinion, all money should be treated as if it were infected unless it came crisp from the bank. The garbage bin, it seems, is a bill's natural home and the only thing I should have been chided for would be taking it out of its natural environment. And I'll tell you right now that no particular cubic meter of air in Pernik was any cleaner than the air inside that garbage can. I might as well have been breathing garbage bin air the whole time in that city. My hand within the cylinder was in no greater danger there than it was anywhere else in the city.

I think saving the bill was a particularly heroic effort to prevent money from falling out of circulation. Christen and Tom thought differently. In my opinion, they're just fancy. But I could be wrong.

The weather was gorgeous today, as it was all weekend. Highs in the fifties, a little wind, and lots of sun. Phil might as well still be looking for his shadow. In Bulgaria, it's spring. My tutor tells me that this is bad news. Good weather in February probably means that there will be a late frost in March or April and the harvest will be horrible as a result. As a means for cheering me up after this bad news, and to celebrate her son's birthday, she gave me another bottle of homemade wine. That's three bottles I have sitting in my rapidly expanging liquor cabinet back home. I've probably talked about Hemingway way too much during my lessons. It's really the only explanation.

Finally, today I got an e-mail for Peace Corps that ran like this:

This is to remind you that the office will be closed for Presidents'
day,
Monday, Feb. 16th.

Also, please be informed that the following PCVs ended their PC
service:

- CED - as of Jan. 16th;
- TEFL - Jan. 29th;
- ENV - Feb. 2nd;
- TEFL - Feb. 4th;
- CED - Feb. 5th.

Have a nice week!

The names of the ET'd ("ET" is PC for "Early Termination") ran after their job descriptions. They're all people who I won't be seeing anymore in Bulgaria, and probably, for the the rest of my life. Four of them I hadn't met before they left, not much to think on there. But the Jan. 29th TEFL was my roommate in Chicago and Strelcha and a good friend. I take it he just didn't think he had that much to do in Bulgaria anymore.

In a way, it takes a lot of courage to leave early, and most do so silently. People I talked to this weekend had seen him the day before he left and he hadn't said a word. A person leaving early has to have a lot of faith in their life back home and probably wants to avoid all counsel but their best friends'. A casual friend tends to treat a possible ET as a suicidal ideation, since their knowledge of the guy's life is limited to the months since that time when we born into Bulgaria, screaming and crying, by Lufthansa Air.

The B-13s, my group of 42 volunteers, has now reached the Bulgaria average of 10% attrition. Winter has taken its toll, and it really hasn't been all that bad if you look back on it the right way. If we move along at this pace, we'll lose about 5 more by the real end of service. I doubt that many will go, but the 10% already gone are missed enough already. Every ET is one less person on whom to vent the bad times and share the good. But, in a way, it's pretty selfish to miss them, isn't it? I mean, it's their life after all, and if it can be improved in America, more power to them. It's just that Peace Corps, in a strange and small way, seems to be two years of life within a life, and ending that small life early seems such a waste sometimes.

Oh well, have a nice week! I'll be back with more tomorrow. I've been awfully lazy lately and have to get back on the wagon.

Posted by Rob at February 9, 2004 07:01 PM