Alaskan Bulgarian

ROUSKA TROUPA!

Oh, the games kids play these days. I was at the orphange this morning, hanging out with the kids because Debbie, the former sitemateby myself, especially with the games they want to play.

Rouska Troupa, Russian troop, or something like that, is a simple game. One person lies down on the ground, preferably soft ground, and everyone in the immediate area piles on. It's the job of the person on the ground to stand up again without making any specific attempts to throw anybody off. Fifteen 6-10 year-olds makes this a whole lot of fun (the older kids at the orphange had better things to do, thank God). It's probably one of the better full-body workouts I've ever had.

Not a wrestler by nature or trade, I had to improvise. I started with push-ups, getting that crucial inch or two between my chest and the ground (the kids seem to know to lay off the head, it's apparently a very good unspoken rule of Rouska troupa). Then, the key was to get my arms fully extended on the ground then bend up until I was properly kneeling. Once kneeling, I waited for a very important pause. I always had some collection of kids clingling to back, neck, arms, etc, but the key was waiting for a gap in the random tackling that occured. I could take a hit to the side from any of the kids if I was properly balanced on both knees, but if I was trying to stand up, the whole pile went over on its side again, square one. So when I detected some relief, my right leg shot out and grabbed whatever foothold it could.

Critical point, that one. Bringing the whole process up to standing was pure strength that was once or twice interrupted by a well-placed tackle to the body. I "won" four or five times, and every time wound up giving the one or two kids who wouldn't let go a piggy back ride before letting them down gently.

While I was taking a pochivka, some of the kids tried playing it without me. It didn't quite work as well. They must wait for some big guy who happens to be a good sport to come along and give them a good match-up.

Switching gears, GO LAKERS! The Spurs are dogmeat if the Lakers can just lay-off of themselves for stretches of two or three hours. And I'd like to see Gary Payton lick Tony Parker, just to quiet all the columnists knocking him, but that may be a longshot.

And one more switch, there's all kinds of talk over at Petya's site and Jeff's about racism here in Bulgaria. Having just had a bunch of Turks and Roma (plus a few Bulgarians) without parents piled on top of me, I think I can add something to all this.

Northeast Bulgaria is, in parts, predominantly Turkish. Silistra is solidly Bulgarian but the Turkish quarter is vast, largely ignored, and "the bad part of town." Despite all this, there are quite a few Turks in the heart of town, and Turks are some of the best students in my classes, a greater triumph as English is, in most cases, their third language (Turkish at home, Bulgarian outside). Turks are mostly set aside because of history and the inescapable facts that they are "dirty," "thieving," and "murderous." This is the kind of talk a person hears from anyone in town. The best businesspeople, the people most dying for change, any of them can and will knock Turks at the first opportunity, not so much to be cruel, in their minds, but to relay the facts as they see them. This isn't to say that all Bulgarians hate the Turks. There's some intermarriage, even, but popular opinion seems to swing toward the negative.

All that said, it's an entirely different set of circumstances when you're talking about the Roma, or Gypsies. The slurs are often the same. When a student I was talking to brought up his upcoming soccer match with the city's Roma school, he couldn't help mentioning how badly he wanted to beat them. "Kill" even came up. And why? "Dirty," "Theiving," etc. were the words he used. It's hard to deal with this stuff when it's naturally brought up in conversation, so all I could tell him to was cool it, and remember that everybody's a person.

Roma are also, in most cases, a lot worse off than the Turks as far as public funding goes. A donor wanting to build a business center to assist the Roma inthe heart of Burgas must first, for example, bring power and running water to the school he or she wants to install the business center in.

But the Roma are also a significantly larger problem for Bulgaria, as far as first impressions go. My sister was hardly in the country for an hour before a well-dressed Roma woman lifted her cell phone, and the tourist warning mentioned in the Sideshow is pretty standard stuff.

Then come the arguments that are a mixed bag of Roma nature and Bulgarian refusal to assist. The streets in any Roma quarter are invariably covered, sometimes literally paved, in garbage. Any park near the quarter looks more like landfill, and the homes are little more than plywood shacks. Roma who manage success in school very rarely stay in their city or even Bulgaria. So it gets increasingly difficult to find Roma qualified and willing to work as counselors or job hunters in their old neighborhoods, let alone create thriving businesses in the Roma quarters.

At the moment, there is a lot of money going toward this problem, much of it from the EU, a lot of it from UNDP, and I think this peeves Bulgarians a little as well. But as much as the country wants to believe that money for all will eventually assist the Roma, it's pretty clear that funds shot directly into these communities are having a hard enough time working without depending on Bulgarian mayors to properly disperse them.

I wouldn't hesitate to call most of the remarks I hear against Turks racism. It's Bulagria lingering on a past that should be left behind and brought out at the occasional film fesitval or art showing. 500 years of Turkish oppression should not mean that Bulgaria has the next 500 years to blame its problems on the remaining Turkish population.

As slightly more complicated as the Roma situation is, and with nationalism the way it is here, it's understandable that Bulgaria wants to help its own before focusing its full energy on a minority. It does after all, have daily mentionings of a 2007 induction into the EU to live up to. But at the same time, it's silly to actively discriminate against, insult, and keep down a group of people living within your country that exist on an entirely different--third world--standard of living.

All complicated stuff, and I've only been here a year, but some things just leap out here in Bulgaria, and this is one problem that needs to be discussed.

Posted by Rob at May 2, 2004 08:32 PM