What a night, Friday. I needed a day to separate myself from it a little bit. And then yesterday the bigger news hits: Villagers out near Lake Sreburna are starting to see a lot of dead birds. There's nothing confirmed yet, of course. But there are confirmed deadly cases of bird flu in Romania and Turkey. Near the Danube Delta in Romania, the end of the very same river that runs across Silistra, Romanian officials have culled just about every bird in at least two towns. I hate things that make me integrate new words into my vocabulary, like "cull." I instantly knew what "cull" meant when I saw it. I've probably seen it before, many times. But now bird upon bird is being culled barely 100 km from where I live and I have to use it in general conversation.
I'm reading Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" at the moment, and it puts this whole flu thing in perspective. Nearly every virus we humans have came from the animals we've domesticated. Pigs gave us the last great flu pandemic almost a century ago. Now it looks like it might come from birds if things don't go our way. A virus doesn't need much to figure out that it would be easier to spread itself among humans than birds. With humans you get off the migratory pathways. The world is a migratory pathway when you're a virus in the human bloodstream. And applying Diamond's theses about the success of germs in killing off most of the natives in the New World to possible future encounters, one thing is clear that makes this whole flu thing a little more appealing: Each of these pandemics gives us one more leg up on those alien invaders, whenever they may come. They may have small pox, they may have swine flu, yet if those don't work, we'll still be able to take down their mothership with bird flu, or die trying. So we have that to look forward to...
Anyway, Friday night out at Sreburna 13 students from 12B and I were in a little set of bungalows where the only source of income seems to be these little 12th class parties. Every 12th grade class seems to have a party near the beginning of the year to spark off a good, long year of doing nothing but talking about parties in class. These parties are condoned and more or less made possible by the school and a chaperone is sent along. I did one my first year and the worst that happened was a kid drank too much and threw up in a toilet. That was largely deemed a success by everyone I talked to. This party, though still apparently a success, was a wee bit different.
As mentioned, alcohol was involved, and a lot of it. This year, I noticed the level of it was higher than it had been two years ago. There was about a bottle of hard liquor for each student in the room. There was vodka, tequila, rakiya, the works. We got to the bungalows by bus at about 6:30 in the afternoon, got everything into the small, apartment-sized gathering hall by 7:00, and everybody was on the way to Loopyville by 7:30. My job, as I saw it, in those first hours, was to not look like a cop, while still letting everyone know that they might want to slow down. In retrospect, I probably should have been a little more persuasive.
By 8:30, there were two kinds of students, some were whacky, having fun, dancing, and doing good-natured drunk things. But a few, near my corner of the room, were getting more and more sullen, especially one, who will be called Yavor to protect his name from local gossip hounds. Yavor kept telling me that he wasn't drunk, and that he could handle anything, and all of his friends said that I didn't have to worry about him, even though he kept getting more an more sullen.
At about 9:00, around the time another teacher--Vanya--showed up to see how things were going, deliver a gift of red wine, and congratulate the kids on being in 12th grade, Yavor was out in the rain sobbing about not getting enough love from his girl. Vanya and I worked together to get him inside and I suggested (for the first time out of hundreds of times) that he get to bed. I must be nuts because, until about 2 AM when he himself suggested he knock off, no one else in the hotel seemed to agree that sleep was the best policy for the kid.
A half-hour later, Yavor and his girl were out on the balcony discussing things with Vanya nearby while I stayed inside accomplishing what was then my goal--to keep the unshielded fire in the hearth and the students throwing masses of wood into it from burning the place down. Suddenly, I heard a slam and glass shattering, and I stood up to see Yavor storming through the room after throwing the door shut. I forced him to lay down on a couch in the main room and walked over to the door and balcony where his girl, one of my better students, said "We'll pay for the window" in a voice that was barely audible. Vanya was talking with other students on the balcony. I cleared the loose glass from the window in the door and cleaned up what was on the ground. Then went back to the main room to convince Yavor to go to bed while watching him to make sure he didn't do anything stupid.
Fifteen minutes of that and another of my better students noticed that I was having any fun. She came up to me, asked me to dance, and because I didn't want to look like a jerk, I accepted. I noticed a moment later that Yavor had begun to dance with his girl. So this good student and I chatted for a while and near the end of the song, something caught my eye. A split second in my brain went something like this: Knife. Hand. Yavor. Bad. S--t. That last bit was audible and I gently spun the girl I was dancing with out of my arms and took a step over to where Yavor's best friend was trying to pry the knife out of his hand as Yavor's girl was pleading with him. One finger at a time, I separated the knife from Yavor's hand and he stormed out of the room while I made sure everyone was okay. Yavor's friend had a small cigarette burn on his hand where Yavor had grazed him with his cigarette.
At this point I didn't care about anyone's protest and was about to call either the police or a taxi company, when I remembered another of the night's little problems: The bungalows were far enough from civilization that cell phones weren't working and there were no phone lines running to the rooms we were in. So I was stuck in some horror movie while everyone else at the party was telling me that everything was okay, and that, yes, while Yavor would be in a hospital or jail at that point in America, in Bulgaria these things get handled internally. In the family, in a way. Some agreed with my opinion that that attitude was insane and that they were all just as loony as Yavor is while drunk.
Somehow, between another girl sobbing over her much older, knee-breaking boyfriend possibly not loving her back, and another knife-holding incident out of Yavor (that I stopped--again. I mean really, I thought I was there as a chaperone, but if I hadn't been there, I swear to God lives may have been lost.) things managed to calm down by 1 in the morning and by 2 most of the class and Vanya were asleep in their rooms. I doused the fire at 3, was the last one in bed, and I made sure I was up at 7:30 to catch the first bus out of that place. Before I left, the owner of the bungalows and Vanya both talked about what good kids this class is made of. When I was slow responding to the owner, she told me that the last class that came through broke all of her glasses and more than a few windows. So I did better than whoever watched that group. Yay. Vanya also confirmed that the night had been great. Still, Ave Maria was running through my head all that morning until I went back to sleep sometime around noon.
And so after decompressing for a day, we arrive at Sunday night, where Star Wars is on TV and Obi Wan's about to tell Luke about the dangers of Sand People. Time for a little escapism before another week with the hard-drinking, knife-wielding little hellions.
Posted by Rob at October 16, 2005 08:46 PM