Well, life got difficult again. Next week I'm going down to the Pazardjik area to teach the new volunteers a little bit about how to teach. That's not really the hard part. I just have to go to a couple of villages and give some pointers I've gained, have a couple of lunches and dinners with the new volunteers, no big deal. A lot of responsibilty, but that's nothing new. In fact, since I won't have to come up with lesson plans for kids wanting to pay less and less attention, I think the work will all even itself out.
The hard part is the problem that just sprang up for this weekend. This summer, in the beginning of July, there will be a boy's camp on the coast. At least, that's what a group of volunteers has so far led about 40 or so Bulgarian boys from around the country to believe. I'm in charge of logistics, which means I have to get a place for the guys to sleep and eat and make sure they get there. The last part isn't really a problem, they do most of the work themselves, they get reimbursed when they arrive at camp, and all I have to do is make sure somebody's at the bus station to meet them when they come into town.
The place is to stay has been a thorn in my side since November. For the last two years the camp has been in Balchik, a lovely city on the north side of Varna. However, due to a variety of factors including the falling dollar, boredom, and need for a change of scenery, we in the cadre running the camp decided to explore the whole coast, keeping our ears open for possibilities everywhere. We found a quiet sanitarium just outside of Sunny Beach that would provide cheap food, cheap accomodations and seemed to be nice enough. It was right on the coast, far enough away from the center of the resort to be away from distractions, and it has immense grounds.
The problem, then, has become their confusion. We signed a contract, I saw them write the dates in their big book, and now, a little over a month before the camp, they--in a phone call I made today--don't seem to have a clue about what's going on. Their director has either resigned or retired or left on vacation and he was the guy we were dealing with. He apparently took some of his papers with him, and they were desperately trying to get information I didn't have on me before I told them I would call them back tomorrow.
This must be worked out tomorrow, somehow, and it will get done, but I wish it would turn into one of those things that just kind of takes care of itself. Sigh. Work.
More whenever I get the chance, but don't expect to much over the weekend or next week, as I will be traveling and all.
Believe it or not, after yesterday's rant, there's still more junk that ought to be said. First, the death of a giant mosquito at my hands two seconds ago reminded me that they'd bombed for mosquitos here. Eddie noticed this is in final night of visiting Silistra last week and it seemed to have left him a bit worried. As far as effect goes, it has done two things: It's made the surviving mosquitos angrier and hungrier, and it has driven them indoors. This is not a scientific study of course, but I'm willing to state that my receiving over ten new bites in the last two days while keeping all the windows shut in my apartment is not a positive sign of mosquito control. The bombing has also left me less inclined to buy fresh fruits and vegetables for the next couple of months, but that's a side effect really.
Also, I had the opportunity to watch a couple of old movies over the weekend. I finally got to see "Lost in Translation." It was just as I expected: great, but probably not worth all the worry Bulgaria put me through about its coming here. I'm going to agree with the conventional wisdom that someone living abroad (or someone who has lived abroad before) would get a little more out of it. Sometimes it seems like these long periods of silence I go through sometimes just serve to puncuate great moments that would seem mundane under more American contexts.
Like a conversation with another American in a bar, for example. You walk into a bar in America, and there they are, Americans. The bar is filled to the gills with Americans. If one of them comes up and talks to you, well, that's just par for the course and you can do whatever you please with them. However, if you're at most bars in a foreign country and are visited by an American, you might be more inclined to listen to what that American has to say, just to hear someone speaking in a good, strong American dialect. Especially if that American is Scarlett Johansson.
I may not have loads of expereince in the idea, just over a year, but it's seemed to me that meeting another person, in another country, puts the two people on a similar level, whatever they've done in their lives, whoever they've met or married, or whatever, they're at the exact same spot in life there in Sofia, Tokyo, wherever. I think "Lost in Translation" gets that across well, and I think that's its accomplishment, nailing the Americans abroad vibe. The whole sexual tension thing so many people discuss is there, too. But that's really secondary.
Watching and analyzing the "Lost in Translation" DVD in the apartment of someone with a State Department fellowship who'd loaned it to one of the weekend's football organizers while she was out of town came after watching and analyzing "Blazing Saddles." We all sat around, watching, chuckling occasionally, and asking each other what the big deal was about "Blazing Saddles." There was no particular moment in the movie where anyone in the room actually laughed out loud and heartily at something in the movie.
This was the third time I'd seen it the whole way through and I still did not see one thing that struck me as out-an-out funny. Amusing, yes, the whoe movie is very amusing. Almost like watching one of my students go turn into a class clown. He tries to entertain, and I may grin for a moment before I punish him, but I've seen it all before and it wasn't terribly funny the first time. "Young Frankenstein" works for me mostly because Marty Feldman as Igor cracks me up every time I watch it, but there's nothing like that in Saddles. The farting scene? I'm sure in the 70s that was just the funniest, pushed envelope stuff ever filmed, but now it's just a bunch of farts. None of the characters really make me laugh, nothing really works in the movie. All the guys in the room watching it had a nice chat about how none of us really found it funny and how we deal with people who do watch it and find it hilarious.
I will say that it is amusing to watch, unlike angry, indoor-living mosquitos, which aren't amusing at all. The one that may have just bitten my thumb before meeting his untimely doom was particularly unamusing. But nobody ever said the Circle of Life was full of fun.
It seems like every weekend I go out of town a new horror is visited on my TV or the area around it. Nobody is responsible for these tragedies, they just seem to happen. One time the Cartoon Network on my cable service went entirely French. Another time, the cable was gone completely until the next day. Sometimes there's an odd blue spot in the upper-right corner of the screen that tints the area around it. This time, I arrived home around midnight, turned on the TV to see how the Lakers had done (Although I'd strangely predicted the historic loss in a dream the night before. Sometimes I'm like that SNL Christopher Walken character who grabs people and gives them trivial predictions about their lives. I can see the future, but what I see means very, very little to the world as a whole and me in particluar), and discovered that the TV wasn't working at all. Not a thing, not a sound, not a little red "power" light, not a glimmer of hope.
I know of two possible ways to fix this problem and tried both. Experimenting with the plug and various sockets had no effect. And whacking the TV with the palm of my hand at various angles and strengths didn't do much either. So it sits there now, a paperweight with a blank screen collecting dust. It never gave me one hint of its sudden demise before I left. Now I'm left with the frustating choice of trying to get the thing repaired, buying a new TV, or devoting myself to a healthy life of writing, reading, and watching the occasional movie on my DVD player. I'm leaning very heavily toward being one of those guys who doesn't have a TV. Those guys are pretty cool, and seem to get a lot of reading done. I'll have a TV, of course--since the paperweight belongs to the school, but it will just sit blankly in the corner staring at me while I lay on the couch reading, ignoring it.
Anyway, it's been a good solid week since my last post, and much of varying interest has happened. I picked up a new sitemate who will arrive permanently in July. He visited Silistra for a few days last week and seemed to enjoy himself, although, like me a year ago, he has no apartment at the moment to speak of. He does, however, have a very nice school to work at whose devotion to him (their first volunteer) is so obsessive it's cute.
They doted after him all week and seemed especially curious about how familiar I was with Bulgarian, the city, and the country. They wanted to make sure that he would have an American he could rely on in the city. It was vaguely adorable. I had things to do last week myself, of course. I went to my second book-launching party in Silistra. Book-launching parties are a lot like weddings celebrating only one person. Everyone of importance gets to make a speech, cheesy music is played, and people drink champagne. As in weddings, poems are often incorporated into the speeches, only these poems are the ones written by the author whose book is being launched. Usually, a good half of the book gets read aloud by the time the bulk of the party is over.
Fortunately, I have yet to see any dancing at a book-launching. There's always one guy who gives a good, funny speech and whose material is used over again by each person making a succeeding speech. All of this in Bulgarian. It's all worth it, of course. I get to congratulate the author on a book well-published, I have a couple of laughs, and there's always snacks and drinks. But as the whole affair is always in Bulgarian it leaves me exhausted by the end of the party. I met the new sitemate for the first time shortly after the book-launching and he, Jody (the present sitemate), and I shared a few drinks. That was Wednesday, Thursday we bumped into each other and I met his new school director, and Friday we both had to leave the city.
Since I needed to go to Sofia for the weekend, we both took the same bus to the big city so I could show him the way home to Batak, where he's living during training. On the bus, about a half hour into the ride, his counterpart called my mobile phone (the emegency number they requested he give them) and asked to be handed over to him. I gave him the phone and his counterpart asked him if he had remembered to pick up his passport at the hotel. He said he had. He told them he'd see them in July and hung up.
"I'm not a kid," he told me. "I wish they'd realize that..."
After a moment's pause, he dove into his bag to make sure he had remembered to pick up his passport and, after finding it, leaned back into his chair with a sigh. He's a pretty darn good guy.
While in Sofia, I gave him and a couple of other B-15s (The new volunteers) a scattered tour of the city and had a sport-filled weekend. Saturday, I played in a flag football tournament organized by a couple of highly football-dedicated volunteers. The tournament was on a field turned concrete by a lack of grass and rain. The dry dirt left just about everyone with skinned knees and one of the organizers, Alex, with more red on his body than white. Two volunteers hurt their knees badly and one will have to go home a month before completion of service because he landed wrong. I was submarined on a pass that was thrown too high and whapped the back of my head on the ground before hopping up and giving my head a good rub. That was the worst of it for me and it earned a good, loud "ooh" from the spectators and a pass interference call that put us in the red zone before Jeff threw an interception to give the other team the ball in the end zone. So I got off pretty lucky, even though our team lost both games we played.
I went into the weekend believing that the main event would be basketball on Sunday. After a poll of the basketball-playing regulars (The Peace Corps CD and AO, a few volunteers, and a couple of embassy guys and marines) I got the impression that we'd have a huge game with about 20 guys playing alternating games of full-court ball. After Saturday, all that hype turned into five guys playing two-on-two, with one guy sitting in a chair. It was great two-on-two, but everyone who didn't play because of football soreness should be ashamed of themselves.
So I leave a healthy weekend to come upon a lazy week spent celebrating the graduating class of Language School-Peyo Yavarov and teaching only two days of classes. Today is the day of Cyrril and Methodius, where it's the custom of most, if not all, Slavic countries to celebrate the alphabet made possible by the work of those two brothers. Most of the time is spent celebrating schools in general and graduating classes in particular. I went to the show at Silistra's theater this morning to watch the graduating class receive their awards and give a final bow before their teachers, parents, and friends. Most schools here, near as I can tell, don't do the cap and gown thing, so most of the students were dressed in their homecoming best.
The program ran like something scarily similar to the Oscars. It started with a couple of songs played over the speakers and a few opening words from some of the students. Then, on a big screen on the right side of the stage, each award was shown in order with photos of the five or six nominees superimposed tastefully over a changing picture of flowers. The presenters were the teachers of each of the disciplines for which awards were given. The girl, Anna, whose book had been launched the week before won several awards. I think everybody expects big things out of Anna.
Between the awards some of the other students of the school sang and danced. One girl sang "I Will Survive," which seems to have become a mandatory hymn at all celebratory gatherings. For better or worse, I suppose. Later, the classes were each presented and gave a final group bow to Evanescence's "My Immortal." Outside, I congratulated as many of the students as possible in the drizzling rain before rushing home to eat lunch from the haul I'd brought back from Sofia.
From Anchorage many weeks ago, Dad sent me a package containing some very special things. Most valuable among these were a couple of bags of "Honey Bunches of Oats" cereal and Alaskan smoked salmon. It took several packets of the cookies that were also in the package to keep me from diving into the salmon when I arrived home on a full stomach last night. I fortunately waited until lunch today and ate about 6 sandwiches of the only great fish I've had in over a year. I poured the remaining half of the salmon from its airtight bag into my best container, put it in the fridge, then cut the bag open and licked the inside clean. I really, really, really, very much missed Alaskan salmon.
Tomorrow, relaxation followed by my requested presence at the graduating class's prom. I'll have to wear a suit, something I haven't done in over a year, although, by my Peace Corps definition, a suit is my general teaching uniform of a button-down shirt and khakis with the necessary addition of a sport coat, tie, and loafers. We'll see how all that goes.
The week's gotten off to a solid start. Last night I saw "Gothika" (Or the much better Bulgarian translation "Готика." It's just more fun to say.) at one of Silistra's theaters. it was the rip-roaringly funniest horror movie I've seen in a long time. The new post-"Sixth Sense" horror world is a predictable and comical place. Scary things always happen when the music or sound tells you they're happening and ghosts that seek help always look for it by either scaring their helpers or beating the living crap out of them. I know when I need help, I usually like to sneak up behind someone and wait until they're just about to turn around before I grab them by the shoulder and scream in their face. It breaks the ice.
Also, and I'll put a spoiler watch here, just for kicks. But, also, when a woman kills her husband with an axe and did so beyond any doubt, it's nice to know that a jury would let that woman off the hook if her lawyer presented a clever story about being possessed. You know, as long as the man was an evil jerk, it's all cool. And let's release the stepdad-killing girl who says she sees satan. It's a vigilantism fire-sale! All criminals must go!
Seriously though, a moderately tense first half, a riotously funny second half, and the inexplicable presence of an olympic-sized swimming pool make it a pretty good flick. I can't say I wasn't entertained. I almost fell asleep during the standard-issue middle lull, but I was tired. I don't think you can fault the movie too badly for that. It's definitely worth a rental.
At the movie I ran into (for some reason I'm typing dyslexically today. The words are all coming out wrong, then I have to fix them. It's odd and it's never happened at a long stretch like this. Hmm. Might be possession. One never knows.) one of the more well-known but obnoxious English-speakers in town. He loves the Discovery Channel and likes watching movies, but Jody (the sitemate) and I don't like sitting next to him because he talks and really doesn't mind if the whole theater hears. Last night he wanted to know what "main prison" meant because the camera focused on it for no reason and for a couple of seconds. The odd thing is, he knows what prison means, so in whispers I had to explain what "main" means. I finally wound up with "basic" as a word he knew, although I should have been able to come up with the Bulgarian translation. It hasn't been a good Bulgarian week for me. I've been stuttering and bumbling quite a bit.
Anyway, at various times he also wanted to know if I believed in ghosts, what a psychiatric prison is ("Is it an asylum, or a prison?" That is an odd distinction if you have only one definition of asylum on your mind.), and who I thought was behind it all. I answered his translation questions out of some sense of duty, but I ended the other conversations after the questions.
It all made for a fun movie experience, I suppose. Good times, even if the title of the movie has nothing to do with anything.
Well, the way I see it everybody's allowed a few "d'oh"/"duh" moments in their life (I knew I've already had a few) so I more than humbly admit that CNN probably has a pretty good system there in listing the away team first when they roll the scores. For some odd reason I've gotten very used to seeing the winning team's score first and never pondered a reason why it could be otherwise. Thanks to everyone who enlightened me about my silliness.
So, the day after Derek Fisher (Or his German clone "Fischer," as World Sport has been spelling it this afternoon) saved the Lakers from another depressing game 5, I head into the weekend with a pretty tough week finished. For some reason I was frustrated through much of it, and had more than one discussion with my students about Bulgarian and American attitudes toward life. These talks have gotten to be more and more enlightening as we grow to understand each other and the eighth classes begin to understand more and more English.
I think the word "pessimism" was mentioned 12 or 13 times during the week as my students labeled more than a couple of things "stupid" and/or "dull." They all fully acknowledge that this is always a first reaction and that any activity I give them usually winds up being fun once I force them to do it. Usually I threaten a return to the workbook or textbook instead of doing whatever fun thing I had planned. That usually gets the job done.
Anyway, it all built up to something yesterday when, at the end of the week, the kids were noisy and completely unwilling to do anything. I quickly told them what I wanted them to do over the weekend (further anathema for them) and then took the rest of the day to explain to them what I thought was wrong with the class and how they could improve. I'm halfway inclined to believe that Monday could be one of those "We're sorry, Mr. Young" days that lead to a quiet week, but I'm not keeping my hopes up too high.
Fortunately, the internet club is here, and I can relax by reading all about the Lakers and their lead-losing exploits and going through e-mail. Then maybe there will be a movie later. I'm not sure. Whatever I'll do, I know this: as long as I can talk things out, go home, regroup, and teach again, life is good. Hard, maybe. Interesting, yes. And definitely good.
Today I taught 3 classes for four hours beginning at 8. Not a hard day, the kids working diligently on the pages in their workbooks I had assigned them. Then I rushed home after taking caer of all the daily documentation in the teachers' room. I made it home at 12:15, well before the start of World Sport on CNN International. I had the TV tuned to CNN from the night before, so when I heard for the umpteenth time the horrid and depressing news that a contractor had been beheaded in Iraq, I flipped to another channel. I care about it, and I long to hear the news that the five hoods who did it have been caught and/or done away with. I just son't need to hear Ralitsa Vassileva tell me the same play-by-play about the gruesome footage every half hour.
For some reason, the cable was out on most of the channels. The satellite at the cable company had apparently failed to pick up most of its usual signal. CNN and a few others were the only ones left, the rest was static. I went back to CNN and a few seconds later, it too turned to static. I lay my head back on the couch pillow, closed my eyes, and waited for the static to go away. Five minutes later, the picture came back and they were on the stock market report.
I knew I couldn't count on the cable company to hold things steady through World Sport, so I watched the news ticker, which had just turned to sports. It scanned through all the international sports news that, with the coming of the NBA playoffs I've grown to hate (That fat Argentenian coke addict soccer player is doing better. YAY!), and finally reached the basketball scores. CNN has a weird way of showing scores. In my experience, the winning team usually comes up on the ticker first, but it seems completely random on CNN. I saw "San Antonio 90" come off the right side of the screen and I didn't panic, but didn't leap off the couch either. 90 points is a lot for San Antonio. Then I saw "LA Lakers 98" and I gave a little fist pump. They'd done it. My precious, precious Lakers had won game 4 and tied the series.
Honest to God, I imagined the game going down exactly as I later read it had happened. Kobe Bryant gets back from Colorado on time, everybody thinks he looks exhausted. Just drained. He has an OK start, lets Shaq do some work in the third, then takes over in the fourth quarter. Everybody cheers and talks about his poise under pressure, the amazing way he carries himself when his world seems to be falling apart around him. Karl Malone calls him the greatest thing since Michael Jordan fighting a cold. And the Lakers, playing on the other side of the world, devoid of any knowledge of the existence of some guy living in Bulgaria who adores them, have taken one more step toward a championship.
The cable cut out again before World Sport arrived and twenty minutes later, when the whole cable system was restored, the show was stuck on a live press conference where two people involved with the olympics in Athens assured us that despite all the pessism and hatin' they been feelin' lately, the games will arrive on time. My favorite quotes lately have come from the head of the committee in Athens who has been telling Euronews that even though the world is betting against Greece, they've won this "latest bet" (about getting the roof of the stadium in place) and will win the bet of the games coming on time. Greece reminds me of someone demanding that his friend lay down money on his surviving a fall from a three-story building. "Dude. I will so live through this! Will you give me twenty bucks if I do?" Nobody really wants Greece to fail, we just all want them to get the damn thing done on time so we have pretty pictures to look at in August. Like that pool in Barcelona. Now that was a venue. This isn't about overcoming odds, it's about coming through. I'm not sure if Athens understands the difference. [/massive digression]
So I came to the internet club with no image of the game but what existed in my head. Good enough really. I have no idea why being a fan is still such a priority here in Bulgaria. I mean, if I look at each individual player on the Lakers, there isn't a whole lot to like there. But the image of the Lakers. Of Kobe soaring and Shaq smashing and--going back to a time I never really knew--Magic running and Kareem hooking. That's what I love and what I remember here in Bulgaria.
Tonight I'll watch World Sport and see 30 seconds of footage of the game narrated by a British chap who will sound like he hates this sport and would much rather be covering the cricket scandal in Zimbabwe. And I'll be content, even if 15 of those 30 seconds are occupied by seeing Kobe's back pleading not guilty in a Colorado courtroom. Peace Corps is the toughest job I'll ever love, after all, and I have to be content with what I get...
Today several petitions began circulating around the school where I work demanding a pullback on the death penalty sentence for the six medical workers in Libya.
For those not following the story, it goes something like this. In 1998, medical workers from Bulgaria and a Palestinian doctor arrived in Libya to treat pediatric patients. In 1999 they were detained on suspicion of infecting 426 Libyan kids with HIV. At trial there was testimony that kids had been infected before the arrival of the medical workers and that clinical conditions at the clinic were unacceptable long before the workers arrived. This testimony was ignored or considered too small and the six have been sentenced to death by firing squad.
Based on the facts presented in just about any newspaper account of the trial and evidence, the conviction and sentence are ridiculous. All Libyans involved were acquitted and most see the entire case as a political ploy from Libya. Three easy steps improve Libya's image: 1.)Give six foreigners a death sentence, 2.)Give clemency after international pressure, 3.)Become even more of the "good country" everybody seems to see Libya becoming.
Whatever the case is though, it has my students and the rest of Bulgaria scared and angry. Mostly angry. After half of my first class came in late because they were lighting candles and signing petitions, I asked everyone what they thought of the whole thing, to get them talking about something in English. Most of them gave arguments similar to those above about why the charges themselves were ridiculous. Some seemed confused by the whole situation and looked for some evidence from Libya to latch on to and argue against.
When I asked for possible solutions, I got the inevitable "The United States must help us!" from Gergana in the back of the room. Some of the reasons for this idea were more or less salient. "The U.S. helps everybody else. Now it can help Bulgaria," Deyan suggested. Zladko thought that because Bulgaria is in NATO now that was more than enough reason to help 5 medical workers in Libya. Then, all at once, everybody seemed to come up with the "trade" idea. Bulgaria has 500 soldiers in Karbala, so the U.S. should help them with their problems in Libya. Quid. Pro. Quo.
I thought for a moment about using this as an instructive example of how Bulgaria can help itself, but I realized that it didn't work that way. My students were right. Libya has no problem with Bulgaria and doesn't expect the ransom for these people to come out of Sofia. I think it's a little bit more than a happy coincidence that Qaddafi was in Brussels last week, and chances are his representatives will be there often in the months to come. Libya isn't going to deal with Bulgaria on this, it has bigger fish to fry. Which leaves the U.S. and the Europe to get these people out of a terrible situation. Hopefully, they'll come around and see their responsibility soon.
I decided to spend the long weekend in Silistra and Kate came up from Pleven to add another perspective to a weekend mostly spent relaxing as much as humanly possible. Needless to say, many movies were watched, music videos mocked, and news absorbed and discussed.
We also went to the circus. The Cirk Bolero is in town until Monday, and if there's anywhere you can get that old-timey circus atmosphere, it's at the Cirk Bolero. There was only one tent that covered a space the size of a football field, and there weren't many animals performing tricks (dogs, cats, and one very angry monkey), but during the show the tent shook with the wind and the acts came out into the ring and one by one showed us the things they'd mastered. There was some really good magic, balancing, and acrobatics, and some mediocre juggling, and the whole show really felt worth the five leva price tag for ringside seats.
Also in town for the weekend was "friendship runner" Stan Cottrell, who had apparently finished a friendship run across Bulgaria (He doesn't seem to have a homepage, but this Google search turned up some stuff on him) . We saw him give a press conference in the city center, wearing a a t-shirt and very short shorts. He was going to give a speech at a local church that night, but we had things to do.
In the final really odd event of the weekend, Kate and I came out of circus, talking loudly as Americans are apparently wont to do. We were walking through the center of town when another American came up and asked me if I knew where the ferryboats to Romania left the city. I gave him the best answer I could and after doing so he made the logical leap that an American living in and knowing a little about Silistra must be "Rob Taylor." I corrected him on the Taylor part, but it turned out that he was Ralph, a guy who had found the site a while ago while searching for possible retirement homes in eastern Europe. He'd sent an e-mail to me, I'd responded, and based on my vague and half-hearted recommendation, Ralph had decided to get to Silistra while visiting Bulgaria. He'd sent me an e-mail earlier that day that I hadn't gotten to yet.
Well, Ralph is from Kentucky, Kate's from Kentucky, and Ralph was interested in moving to northeast Bulgaria, so we found we all had things to talk about. We spent most of the evening after the circus at a cafe and a restaurant discussing life in general and having a good time. It's always nice having an outsider to talk with and bounce opinions off of. And Ralph was more than happy to hear them. He left town today and seems to have settled on Ruse (a larger city about 2 hours up the river from Silistra) as a place to call home 9 months out of the year.
People are beginning to discover Bulgaria, and I hope Bulgaria is beginning to realize it. Someday soon the common tourist may be able to use the bus station in Sofia without their head exploding. The country really deserves more people visiting and living here. I suppose it's all just a matter of time.
Short week--Over. Tomorrow is Georigiev Day, the day where all the Georgis of Bulgaria celebrate their fine name. So everybody gets a four day weekend. This marks the beginning of a series of short weeks before the end of school. When I graduated high school back in Sitka, I remember long, beautiful days of playing frisbee out on the school lawn, it was pretty relaxed in those final months. Here, the seniors are already finished and the rest of the school is backing slowly into the summer.
This morning was a graduation party of sorts for one of the senior classes. I suppose I was honored by it happening during my weekly two hours with them. It was all taped by a professional photographer who will follow the class around during all of their various celebrations in this final month. There was cake, and Capri Sun like "California" bag drinks. Always fun trying to get the straw into those things. I've learned to jam it into the bottom and chug. There's the least amount of trouble that way, if you try to go through the top you risk all kinds of things like splashing yourself, or stabbing clear through the bag. I noticed that the Bulgarian students were pretty set on getting the straw in through the top. There were a couple of stains as a result. Tragic.
After all the drinks were in hand, their class teacher (Basically their home room teacher for five years) gave a little speech through a few tears. She's the school's chemistry teacher, a pretty funny lady, and really sympathetic to my general cause. One of my favorites. After the speech, she gave everyone what seemed to be a yearbook, with the standard Bulgarian mug shots for yearbook photos. For anything the size of a yearbook or passport photo, most photographers in Bulgaria ask their subjects to stare directly into the camera and glower. Maybe two students got away with showing teeth in their photos. The rest looked like something you flip through at a police station.
The same thing happened to us volunteers when we had our ID photos taken. PC had us all line up and the photographer snapped us one by one. Two factors resulted in the worst set of photos ever taken, all of which were posted on a wall in Pazardjik for about two months. One, we got the usual anti-smile photographer. Two, the photos were taken at the end of our first week in Strelcha when we were just getting used to the country and were more than happy to comply with the guy's demands for frowns. As a result, on my PC ID I have one of the worst photos in a long line of bad ID photos for Rob.
So the mugshots were flipped through, quotes from various teachers were read aloud, and the class was merry. We all went outside for a class photo, which they insisted I be a part of, and then everybody just kind of went off and did their own thing, the class pretty much over. That's the way things are going for the seniors now. They've already taken their finals and the school will be lucky if we see one or two of them drop by next week. Graduation is at the end of May, a month before the rest of the school finishes. Needless to say, it doesn't really inspire the other classes to work like champions when the see an entire class leave. I'm prepared for a severe drop in focus. Summer is getting closer, the heat and humidity are setting in, and you can feel that everybody just wants the schoolyear to end.
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.