One Last Hoo-Ha

On Thurdsay school starts for real, and thus will end this summer. As most teaching volunteers will not have time to make it to Sofia during the school year, a huge amount of us made the trip this past weekend. While it was fun, I came home much more exhausted, and much poorer.

Last Wednesday we had a regional meeting in Yambol with the four of us in our region (which covers the Thracian Plain from Starra Zagora in the center of the country to the Black Sea coast, and from the Starra Planina -- the mountain range that divides the country into North and South -- to the Greek and Turkish border.) It is a huge region, and as there are only four of us we realized how isolated we really are. Kellen, the volunteer who lives right on the sea a few km. north of Turkey, got stranded and ended up staying the night at my apartment. He was my first volunteer guest, so that was nice.

Then on Thursday my counterpart took me to a meeting in Yambol that all foreign language teachers in this region have to attend. It is put on my the regional ministry of education, and was very very boring. She fell asleep, and we left about halfway through.

Friday I woke up at 3 a.m. to catch a 3:45 a.m. bus to Sofia. Rumor has it there will be an 8 a.m. bus come October, but as of now this is my only option as the train tracks in the west were very badly damaged during the floods this summer. Needless to say, I was exhausted when I arrived at 9 a.m. in the capital. I checked into my hostel, went up to the Peace Corps office, and got all kinds of goodies such as a smoke detector, a bike helmet, some cough medicine for the winter and some type of powdery goop to clean my water filter. It felt like Christmas.

In the afternoon I was met by Eric (my nearest volunteer) and two other volunteers and we ate lunch at this pretty good Indian food place. During lunch someone brought up the notion of eating dinner at Pizza Hut, and that immediately became the drive of our day. After another trip to the PC office, we went to the National Cultural Center to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (6 leva admittance, and admittance in Plovdiv is 3 leva. Sofia is outrageously expensive for people on Bulgarian wages...) Oh, what a good movie it was. One particularly amusing incident happened when Johnny Depp made a pun on the words "heir" and "hair." We were the only people in the theater to laugh, and then we realized that the joke probably did not translate into Bulgarian. Everyone was staring at us after that. After the movie we did indeed eat Pizza Hut for dinner, and it was everything I thought it could be!

On Saturday a huge group of volunteers went to the outskirts of the city to work on the first Habitat For Humanity building project in the Balkans. It is a small apartment complex that is in its final stages. For most of the day I was relegated to leveling the rocky yards, carting away the biggest rocks and helping mix cement for the terraces. My specific task in the cement-making was carrying buckets of water around and pouring it on the ingredients as the guys mixed them up with shovels. Then I had to run a stick down the poured goop to make it smooth on top while drying. I was pretty exhausted when the day was over, but it was really cool to meet the families who will be living in the apartments. One of the little boys was my assistant, and I have never seen a kid work so hard. When we complimented him on his diligence he said, "Imam golyama rabota..." "I have big work..." which in Bulgarian means work that is personally important to someone. He was maybe 10 years old.

That night we were all too tired to do much of anything except eat dinner at the hostel with all the Aussies and Brits, and wander around aimlessly. Sunday eveyone started to head for home, but my bus was late so I took a walk to one of the big parts and happened upon an Avon rally for breast cancer awareness. I also happened upon the changing of the guard at the president's office, which I didn't even know happens...Go figure. My bus was at 3 p.m., so I made it home by 8 and crashed.

Now I am back at school helping the cleaning process. Three days to go...