The end of March marked the coming of nice weather and the first stage of the Bulgarian National Spelling Bee. I’d been coaching a group of students for a couple months and they all performed wonderfully. The contest itself was a lot of fun, and being a judge was a blast. Our winner, Nichole, won’t be able to fit the second stage into her schedule, so the runner-up, Hristo, will be taking her place and advancing. I’m rooting for him: He’s a nerdy chess player, and, well, nerdy chess players are the best.

The beginning of April marked my twenty-fifth birthday. It was nice and relaxed. On Saturday, some volunteers came to Razgrad to watch the soccer game with me; and on Sunday, a few of us went to Vaune’s village of Kubrat to celebrate the birthdays of three pensioners who also had April birthdays.

Veliko, the old male pensioner, was once a watchmaker. He also had a century-old Singer sewing machine. It was driven by a hand crank and still in working condition; I loved it, as I do all mechanical things. I feel like I can understand them and them, me. For instance, when I look at a watch’s balance spring oscillating, regulating speed of the escapement’s levers, I see a bit into the workings of my own mind. I stare into the face of logic, and it is beautiful – for science and art are often, to me, the same thing.

Maybe that’s why Bulgaria never quite felt comfortable to me. For all its beautiful mountains, rivers, and plains, the underlying lack of order remained ringing quietly in the back of my mind. Nothing is ever pre-planned or on time or just right. The country itself was probably formed as a spur-of-the-moment thing on account of a couple guys eating banitsa in a house suddenly deciding to schlep together a constitution. Some people appreciate how wild and organic things are here; I have difficulty doing so.

The past few weeks have been good for work. I’ve been productive, and I’ll soon be starting up an English film club and an ultimate frisbee club. I think this sort of work reflects my change in focus as I live longer in this country and realize what it needs. When I first arrived, I tried focusing on very tangible things: EU projects, English teaching, etc. Now, about half of my work centers on cultural exposure. It’s more fun for me to do, but the main reason I do it is to slowly address Bulgaria’s elephant in the room: racism.

Bulgaria is racist. It is justified and it is rationalized. It is accepted. It is so normal that many people don’t even realize they are racist and will liberally prefix every hateful phrase filled with hateful words with, “I’m not racist, but…” as if that would make everything politically correct. I am tempted to respond, “I’m not trying to be offensive, but you’re an idiot” to wryly point out the stupidity of their qualification. Before I offend too many people – I’m saying that Bulgaria is racist like people say America is fat. Not nearly everyone, not even the majority of people in America, is obese; but it’s still very easy to find fat people. Same goes for racist people in Bulgaria.

Yesterday night, I attended a charity concert that was raising money for children. The theater was packed with people watching the song and dance performances that went on for two hours. The last piece was “We Are the World”. I found it so richly ironic that I refused to stand for the song along with the rest of the theater. And sure enough, as I was leaving the theater, a group of boys mockingly jeered at me for being Chinese. No one spoke up. The words “let us realize that a change can only come when we stand together as one” had scarcely stopped echoing when the people standing in affirmation suddenly went silent in witness of its fracture.

Where was I just moments ago? Did I just witness a sea of people masturbating together about how much they care about the world being one when they actually can’t muster the strength to speak a single word in its defense? The silence acknowledges that this is okay. The lack of acknowledgement acknowledges that this is okay. It is okay to find a person in a crowd and jeer at him because he was born with different skin and different eyes. It is okay because someone else nearby chuckles. It is okay because no one nearby so much as lifts an eyebrow in surprise, much less disapproval.

People will scorn what they fear, and fear what they do not know. As a volunteer of Chinese ethnicity, I believe I have an opportunity and the responsibility to make sure people know that they don’t need to fear. Razgrad is a town with about 30,000 people, but the hundreds of students I’ve interacted with now know that there is nothing to be afraid of. Ultimate frisbee has been a great tool for cultural ambassadorship, and I heard cries from many of the boys about how it was so yako (cool) to be playing a new sport with an American. I love these kids and I don’t want them growing up to be closeted, bigoted morons. Maybe years from now, one of them will see a racist jeering at an Asian person, and they will remember me – and they will speak out in another’s defense for my sake. That’s a long shot, but a deep hope that I harbor as I put together all of these positive activities with them.

Perhaps it is with that deep foresight that President Kennedy first started the Peace Corps. Someday, somewhere, when the people of a nation look towards violence upon others as a solution, maybe others will – for the sake of the diverse people they once knew – speak out in favor of peace, as they know that there are no “others” but just other human beings not entirely unlike themselves with whom they can cooperate in friendship.

The silver lining of my hardship is that it has helped me realize the value I bring to the program. A volunteer costs about $100,000 to deploy for two years; for that price, the US government could easily hire ten Bulgarian English teachers for the same period of time. But there is much more to building young people than improving English skills. These kids are more than just units of production, and the roots of peace are in empathy and mutual understanding. So yes – I’m glad I’m here. And if I could rewind time, I’d probably have at least a 20% chance of doing this again.

Daniel

This last week of March marked the beginning of my last three months in Bulgaria.

Over seventy volunteers attended the close-of-service conference in the town of Sliven. We spent three days discussing administrative responsibilities and re-integration into American life. We also said some final farewells to one another.

I’m not too sad. We’re a worldly bunch – globetrotters, explorers, and adventurers – and the notion that people on the other side of the country will be “too far” for friendship is silly to me. A nine hour train ride is a regular thing in Bulgaria; it takes half that time to fly from New York City to Los Angeles. And anyways, friendships die from lack of substance, not excess of distance.

Did I build anything with substance while I was here? We’ll see. People have spent two years in worse ways, and my time in Bulgaria has, at the very least, profoundly changed the direction of my life. The most sustainable project in which the Peace Corps engages is the building of young men and women as world citizens. You cannot experience a reality in which people not entirely unlike yourself permanently reside but have to subsist with a dearth of resources, then escape to a haven to forget the meaning of hunger, poverty, and lost opportunity.

At the organized dinner, our country director, Mikel, read a quote from William Faulker’s Nobel banquet speech that I liked.

It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.

It’s something to think about. I think it contributes great insight into what is important in maintaining our humanity in an era where everything is seemingly defined by metrics. A smart man or a strong man is a good thing because he can put his talents to work for the world; a good man is better because he will.

Perhaps Peace Corps director Aaron Williams had something similar in mind when he said that the program’s volunteers represent the best America has to offer. As flattering as it would be, we aren’t nearly the smartest, most talented, or most experienced group of people around. But we have soul, and that’s the best that humanity has to offer.

Daniel

I spent about two weeks writing and revising this month’s update.

Unfortunately, that update won’t be published here, or anywhere. A number of sensitive events have occured this month and I couldn’t find a way to adequately put into words how I currently feel.

I also need a bit of privacy.

Winter has been difficult. Eastern Europe experienced a deep freeze; my region temporarily fell to twenty-six degrees below zero. I am hoping for everything in general to improve as the weather becomes warmer.

Daniel

Last night, around midnight, I received an email from Martha Howard, the associate director of the William and Mary graduate accounting program. I use GMail, so the first dozen or so words are always previewed in my inbox. It read:

“Dear Daniel, I am very pleased to be able to attach the following letter! If you have any…”

My heart skipped a beat. I’d been thinking of the school all week. The temperature here in Bulgaria had recently plunged, transforming my relatively mild walk to work into an antarctic expedition. Attending a top graduate accounting program in sunny Williamsburg seemed like a dream belonging to another world. Yet, here it was. I clicked on my email.

“Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have been accepted to the Master of Accounting (MAcc) Program at the Mason School of Business at the College of William and Mary.”

And just think – I wasn’t even considering graduate school a few months ago! Life really is magical. I never could have imagined as a kid that I’d get far outside of Chicago, much less attend schools across the country and work in both Taiwan and Bulgaria. I’m excited to see what else is in store; the world is an endless oyster for the curious mind.

I hope that my students can share in that sentiment, too, and yearn for the vastness that awaits outside of this country. As human beings, we tend to operate in paradigms. The notion that “this is just how things are” is comfortable, seductive in its safety. But we have so much more potential; we are the universe experiencing itself. I can’t exactly fly dozens of Bulgarian teenagers around the world, but I can bring a little bit of the outside world here.

This past weekend, we celebrated Chinese New Year. I bought a bunch of ingredients and invited a fellow volunteer and several of the older students to my house on Saturday morning to help prepare food to share with my girl scouts. We started by cleaning the big table in my living room to make a big working surface; then, I started going around and setting up stations to get an assembly line going for the potstickers and philadelphia rolls that were on the menu.

For the potstickers, we had different people rolling the skins, adding in the meat, folding the pouches, and frying everything up. For the sushi, we had people working on the rice, slicing ingredients, and assembling the rolls.

It was a great experience. The process was a bit slow, but a lot of laughs were had. Mistakes were made, but we adapted and each batch of dumplings coming out of the pan turned out better than the last. We arrived at the activities center about two hours behind schedule.

Unfortunately, the inclement weather had resulted in most of the scouts being absent. Luckily, the day was saved because I have a class full of young boys (Saturday morning English) and they were definitely up to the task of helping us clean the plates. I tried to eat as many of the ugly potstickers at possible, to protect my ego. I also brought some sesame snacks and seaweed crackers. I had shrimp chips, too, but I forgot them while rushing out the door; it looks like I’ll just have to… take care of them myself.

All in all, this was a good month. My visit to Romania went well and it was great to see the hostel owner, Roxana, again. I’ll probably return once more in a month or two because I forgot the cord for my electric shaver there. Besides that, though, I think that the new few months should be relatively predictable. Apart from our Peace Corps Close-of-Service conference at the end of March (administrative duties, hooray), most of my time will probably be spent in town, running the programs I’ve started.

Anyways, as always – thank you, everyone, for your support, especially through the past few (well, 21) emotionally-trying months. I’ll be seeing you soon!

Daniel

This has been an eventful month, so I unfortunately have another completely unedited post. I promise I’ll start getting my act together as soon as I finish my grad school applications; I’m just so sick of writing and editing at the moment. I lent my Canon S90 to Jackie for the remainer of service so all of my photos from now on will be shot my iPad. The iPad sports a 0.7 megapixel camera, so my photos will look mildly hideous from here on out.

I went to Bucharest, Romania a couple of weeks ago to take my GMATs. The score report is back and it’s mostly good news: I passed the 700 mark! However, it was a little shy of my goal so I’m heading back there in January for a retake. I’m hoping for admittance to the College of William & Mary to pursue my master’s degree in accounting. My application is almost completely assembled, so wish me luck!

My original travel plan had been to take the bus into Bucharest, take the test, and then take the bus out. However, the city turned out to be far more interesting than I anticipated and I ended up spending a full week there. The first thing I learned about Romania was that it, despite sharing a long border with Bulgaria, is not Bulgaria. The language, food, and architecture are all completely different. I was hopelessly lost when I arrived at the bus station because people spoke neither English nor Bulgarian. I was eventually saved by dumb luck when, after deciding to just walk in a random direction, I wandered into the city center and found a WiFi hotspot.

A lot of the architecture in Bucharest was influenced by Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Neoclassicism. You can see the same influences in Sofia, but Sofia has much stronger Brutalist influences from its time under Communism.

I heard that much of Bucharest’s city center was leveled by Nicolae Ceaucescu, the former Communist leader in Romania, when he leveled dozens of historical buildings on Boulevard Unirii to recreate the Champs-Elysees in front of the parliament building. It’s a terrible loss. The area near Unirii is chock-full of beautiful buildings, but city’s heart was torn down.

Besides the parliament building (the largest administrative building in the world), there isn’t very much to specifically see. Bucharest isn’t like Istanbul, with destinations; Bucharest is an experience, the culmination of mixed architecture everywere coupled with delicious Italian food.

The best part of my trip was meeting new people at the hostel. The hostel owners themselves were wonderful; one of them, Roxanna, greatly encourages camaraderie by putting together dinner outings and trips to the mountain. The other guests were great, too. I met three very polite Canadians, four Americans, one Turk, four Spaniards, two Bulgarians, and a Frenchman. One of the Americans gifted to me a hammock which I’m going to be rocking in as soon as the weather warms up.

The food was also very good. Apart from the perfect Italian food, there’s a real variety of restaurants in the city. My “adventure meal” for the trip was fried pork brains while eating at a Hungarian restaurant. I also had gulyasleves, a goulash soup and the Hungarian national dish of sorts, and kurtoskalacs, a type of chimmney-shaped pastry.

I had a lot of free time in the late evenings, so I played Internet Hangman with Crystl.

Overall, the trip was a blast. It also gave me some time to unwind and mentally prepare myself for writing applications and organizing Christmas activities for my students. I also made a ton of eggnog to share; it was a big hit and I think I’ve created a new generation of eggnog-addicts in this part of the world. I had a hilarious time visiting different schools to see their Christmas celebrations. One of the all-boys high schools had Christmas karaoke and an eating contest.

I’m in good spirits this winter. My apartment is warm. The doctors have concluded that I don’t have a brain tumor. Most of my students behave, and none of them are ever truant. I had spinach & artichoke dip on Christmas Eve. I have a place to go for New Year’s. This concludes a crazy year in which I’ve been to Thailand and Istanbul, lived at two different sites in Bulgaria, and worked at dozens of programs around the region. I’m blessed for everything I’ve managed to experience and am looking forward to launching into a strong finish as I wrap up my time in the Peace Corps, plan for my vacations in Barcelona and China, and prepare for graduate school.

I hope you all had a merry Christmas. Have a happy new year!

Daniel

P.S.: Mrs. Collier, I haven’t gotten your card yet. However, I’ve gotten some mail at my address already this year, so I’m sure it’ll arrive with time.

My computer is solar powered and the sky was cloudy all month, and that’s why I’m sitting here on November 30 without even so much as a first draft of my month’s blog update written. Wait, no, correction! Maybe I did write it – and terrorists stole it! Yes, yes, that seems quite reasonable. I fought back, of course (gallantly), and nearly had it back in my grasp. But then a cat ate it. And a dog ate the cat. It really was an unfortunate chain of events that ended with an old lady and the draft, I’m sorry to say, is quite unrecoverable.

So, procastination? Me? Don’t be silly.

Because of the time crunch, this will be the first blog post I submit without any revision. In anticipation of your groans of disappointment and knashing of teeth as your miserably trudge through my paragraphs laden with errors, I offer you these honeyed words to brighten your journey: You, friend, are kind, brave, merciful, not-judgemental, and rather good-looking. And thanks for taking an interest in what’s going in my life. Tu lege ergo sum.

Last month’s post left off right before Halloween and I’m happy to report that the festivities all went well. I was especially proud that I didn’t have much credit to take; The kids made everything come together by participating with costumes. As Halloween isn’t a Bulgarian holiday, it probably took a lot of faith for them to dress up in costumes. I also told them to stick their heads in bowls of water to pick up apples. I know I would have been highly reluctant as a kid to do someting like that on the word of a stranger, so I’m glad my students trusted me.

About two weeks after the Halloween celebrations came my budget crisis. Traveling back and forth between my village and the town was expensive and reimbursible by the Peace Corps, but we usually don’t see the money until the end of the third week of the month, paid in a lump sum with our stipends. This meant that, despite having a huge reimbursement awaiting me, I was broke. And, because I hadn’t used my credit card for ages, I forgot my PIN and couldn’t get a cash advance. I was tapped out, without even the money to buy a train ticket into the town to accept a Western Union wire transfer.

Those were long days. The Peace Corps staff was on vacation and couldn’t help me. I resigned myself to bunkering down in my apartment and digging into my pantry. I called it “The Neverending Pasta Bowl” because that’s exactly all I had to eat. It wasn’t bad at first because I still had some ingredients and cream for making alfredo sauce and other things, but I eventually transitioned into eating plain pasta with salt. And every morning, I would go to the ATM to see if our stipend had arrived. It was the first time in my adult life that I didn’t have any money accessible at all. As an accountant, I already had a deep appreciation of money, but I never really had a firsthand perspective of precisely how powerless one can feel without buying power. My purchasing decisions usually involve weighing whether or not to splurge on small luxuries: bread, or ciabatta; plain oats, or fruit muesli; frozen chicken, or ground beef. My final purchase with my October stipend involved two Bulgarian levs (~$1.35 USD) and figuring out whether eggs or cream would give me more calories for the money.

Fortunately, I’m fine now. The November stipend came in just as I was winding down to my last two boxes of pasta, a jar of mustard, and my leather shoes. I treated myself to a good meal, bought a train ticket into town, and got back to work – and pasta week became just another week in Bulgaria. It also won’t happen again. Last week marked my final days in Samuil as I packed up and moved to the nearby town of Razgrad. I have new assignments and a new apartment. I feel vulnerable again, a green outsider once more, but my command of the language is far better this time around and I’m wielding my “Asian-guy-in-Bulgaria” star power heavily to get things done.

I have mixed feelings about my new apartment. On one hand, it is definitely an upgrade. I have a separate living room, two heaters, a washing machine, and four beds. There are five good restaurants nearby and the library is only a few minutes away. The catch is that it was filthy when I moved in. The previous tenants were bachelors, smokers, and bastards who didn’t bother to clean up anything when they left. I spent hours throwing out trash strewn across the floor and scrubbing down every surface in the kitchen with bleach. There were grimy ashtrays and empty beer bottles everywhere, lying under beds, left to rot in the sink, and stuffed in the closet. I think I need to put in another four or five hours to finish the job. I’d rather waste my time doing something else barely less idiotic, such as writing a screenplay sequel to “Titanic”. The silver lining is that I like cleaning to the sound of music and there’s little I like more than Christmas music. I could probably merrily decontaminate a meth lab to the tune of “All I Want for Christmas Is You”.

If I can make my apartment shipshapen by Sunday, I will be ecstatic. It’ll probably be my last warm day of the year here because I’m going to Sofia on Monday for more medical work. This time around, we’re doing a MRI. To be entirely honest, I’m actually a bit excited. Magnetic resonance imaging is a wonder of modern medical technology and I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to be run through one of those machines. I just hope that everything will come up normal and that it’s “not a too-mah”. And assuming the news is good, I’ll be traveling to Bucharest directly afterwards for a few days to see the sights and sit for the GMAT.

Yes, you read that right. I’m taking the GMAT. I’m going to (apply to) grad school.

Besides the CPA exam now requiring 150 credit hours, a re-entry into academia would give me a good foot in the door with recruiters at public accounting firms. And, failing that, a masters degree in accountancy would let me start at the GS-9 level instead of the GS-7 level if I wanted to work with the government. One extra year to ride out the poor economy also wouldn’t hurt. Still, the decision is still in the works. Who knows what I’ll want to do a year from now? Will I even be an accountant? Astronaut, house-husband, male model of the year, beanie baby auctioneer: the possibilities are endless. It’s just good to have options, even if I need to travel to Romania to open them.

By the time I get back from Romania, it’ll be mid-December and attention will be turning towards Christmas celebrations. I even caved in to buy a Christmas tree. Life’s too short to save twenty bucks forgoing a Christmas tree for the year. I’ll probably spend some good evenings on my bed, bottle of hard apple cider in hand, reading books as the Christmas lights dance in the background. Add in some Skyping to my creature comforts and the distance won’t be all too bad. I miss you all and I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

Daniel

How things have changed in only a month! Work has completely turned around and I now almost have more tasks than time. I work with two schools, a kindergarten, a tutoring center, private tutoring, a reporter’s club, a cultural center, two groups of adult English learners, a book club, scouts, and a municipal administration center. I want to complain about the workload a little, but I secretly love working with so many groups and organizations because I get to color code my planner.

The entire country has been lively with the elections coming up. Bulgaria has four major political parties and many smaller ones. They are ГЕРБ (conservatives), КБ (socialists), ДПС (liberals), and Атака (nationalists). There’s been a lot of ГЕРБ campaigning in my area and they even hosted a song/dance event in my village.

Bulgaria is a unitary state, which means that power is centralized at the national level. There are still administrative divisions in the form of regions and muncipalities, but the politics function very differently from those in a federalist state. The political culture is also very different; Bulgarians are very politically active, with parliamentary elections seeing voter turnout rates of over 60%. Ironically, despite the high participation rate, Bulgarian suffers from high corruption. At a corruption perceptions index of 3.6, Bulgaria is barely more “clean” than China, Moldova, and Mexico.

Still, things can change. Children are the future and my students are fantastic. On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, I work at a kindergarten in Razgrad. We learned about animals last week. It’s frightening how quickly young kids can absorb information; We hardly were through the stack twice when some of them began trying out their spelling. They’re going to love the national spelling bee in the Spring.

I also work with young kids through the scouting program. One of the organizers brought me to a ravine in the nearby village of Poroishte to show me his vision for a park. It’s hard to see in the picture, but to the left lies a steep slope up to a forest. To the right is a slope opening up to a dirt road lined with dry hay. Descending just a few meters down dropped the temperature enough to preserve the snow from earlier in the week. Even though it’s a bit late in the game, I’m holding out some hope to put together a project and pull together funding before I leave.

At the far end of the ravine is a small cave that leads to an ancient Thracian healing spring. Some of the carvings in the wall date back over two millenia. The place was unreachable for years until a group of boy scouts from Belgium recently came to manually scoop out the mud that had covered everything. They hope to make the trail to the cave accessible for the young scouts to hike through someday.

Some of the scouts also participate at the activities center. This Friday was part one of our Halloween celebrations. Next week, we’ll watch The Nightmare Before Christmas on the projector and have a costume party. We’ll also have to go bobbing for apples. I wish we could go trick-or-treating, but I think we’d just end up scaring the old folks who don’t know about Halloween.

Even as Bulgaria chills and people bunker down in their homes, work only continues to heat up for me. It’s great and I’m finally getting good sleep. Idle hands can’t rest and I’m enthusiastic about putting that Peace Corps tagline “the hardest job you’ll ever love” to the test. I remember the feelings I had when I first read that; I’d like to go back to that place now.

Have a happy Halloween, everyone!

Daniel

Give a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to teach himself to fish and you’re in the Peace Corps.

We are facilitators. Now, the problem with being a facilitator is boredom if there is nothing to facilitate. A man who doesn’t know that he wants fish doesn’t know that he wants to teach himself to fish. Thus, integration plays a key role in the work of us volunteers. We align our perspectives with those of the community, evaluate them in the context of our American experiences, then try to figure out what’s needed. Because the community has to be the originator of the idea for it to own and sustain its creation, the step after figuring out what’s needed is trying to have the villagers spontaneously reach the same conclusion. We’re playing small town “Inception”.

Or, at least, other volunteers are.

I am deeply unsatisfied with my service here in Bulgaria. I know I’ve written before that I’ve been staying productive, but I think it would have been better phrased as staying busy. The feeling really hit home during the annual village festival when I found myself unable to join in on group conversations because people kept switching back to Turkish after a couple sentences with me. A side effect is that my Bulgarian also receives little practice, exacerbating the problem further. I still had fun at the festival and I love the people here, but this relationship just isn’t working out well.

Fortunately, Dimitar from the program staff has been helpful and will be visiting my site next week to help work things out. He has a NGO in the nearby town of Razgrad that he’ll be setting me up with. There may or may not be a site change; Despite my overall failure in this village, I still want to help out and get something done to show for all my time here. The wedding hall project is still in the works, but I’d like to get maybe one or two more projects in the pipeline before leaving. To be honest, a new apartment would be welcome. A pipe broke this morning and flooded everything, and my patience for dealing with these things is wearing thin.

Last week, I took a medical trip to Sofia where I received mostly bad news. I also had my annual dental exam where I found out that one of my fillings had fallen out, so it looks like I’ll be going back around early October to have it redone. The money I spent on the trip for travel & lodging will be reimbursed, but I’ve been living on approximately $2 for the week and a half until the disbursement date. I’ve been pulling food out from my emergency rations but I could use something fresh. My cherry tomatoes are starting to bear fruit, but they’re not yet ripe enough for eating.

In terms of victories, I am proud of the progress made on the English resource I’ve been working on during the summer. My students keep asking me about when they can learn more from it. Lessons will have to wait, though, because school is back in session and I’ve moved to coodinating with the new English teacher, Mrs. Dencheva. She’s a strict disciplinarian, so I might get to play “good cop” to my students this year. She also has a toddler grandson who sometimes accompanies her to class. His name is George Michael.

Cooking without money has been slightly more interesting than I anticipated. I refined flour into wheat gluten last night to make a humble approximation of 油麵筋. I’ve also made pancakes from my fiber supplements, which I top with honey from my coworker’s beehive. I’m afraid of bees, so I have yet to accompany him on collection. These little things are helping me stay sane until I have money for real food again. Don’t worry about me though; Even on my ultra-tight budget, I’m still managing to get enough vitamins and protein to prevent wasting away. And pretty soon, far from wasting away, I’ll be fattening myself up to prepare for winter.

I did get a slight headstart at the village festival. It’s the only time all year that I’ll eat ponichki - deep fried donuts topped with chocolate, sprinkles, or fruit syrups. They come out piping hot and lovely. The process is fun to watch, too, as the machine “poops” out batter into the oil and the lower conveyor belt drags and flips the rings until they reach the end, ready to be eaten.

As always, I miss you guys. Skype with me to see my beautiful face before I get pudgy.

Daniel

Summer is nearly over and I am sad to see it go. I might visit the beach one last time next weekend for a tan and a swim, and then it’ll be time to begin bunkering down against the cold season. Good-bye, cargo shorts; Hello chinos, jeans, and scarves.

The past couple months have been highly productive. Besides my English program’s successes, my work with the municipal administration has started a project to furnish the village wedding hall. It’s used for weddings and cultural events, but could be utilized more comfortably and more often if it had air conditioning, heating, and seating. The proposal is still underway, but completion is only about half a year away if we’re lucky and secure funding quickly.

I hope for the project to be a success. I’ve seen the children perform cultural shows there before, but the school year runs right through winter when the hall is unusably cold. There’s a magnificent view out of the rear window. As far as infrastructure projects go, working on this hall is exactly what I had in mind when I looked for something the community could sustainably use for years to come. Maybe I’ll even use it eventually for some of my own projects.

As for personal life, a few new health issues have arisen lately. I’ll put up an update once I know more about the situation, but it’s unclear even to me right now what’s going on. I’m thankful for the level of care the Peace Corps provides, though; Medical insurance is a wonderful thing, even if having to use it is not so much. I’ll probably take a vacation during the autumn or the winter when there’s less work to do, so don’t feel too bad for me. Before you know it, I’ll have pictures of myself drinking sangria and eating tapas in Barcelona.

Sorry for the short update, but I’ve been short on energy. Bayram, the village holiday, and the Chinese Mid-Autumn festival are all coming next month, so I promise to make the next update a good one. I wasn’t at site last year for Bayram due to a Peace Corps conference, but I’ll be here this year to see the sacrificing of the goat.

Daniel

One year is all that remains between now and homecoming. My close-of-service date is set for the 20th of July, 2012, and I can already sense the mood of everyone’s work taking on a more urgent tone. The sea legs are gone and we volunteers are spending more time in productivity than in the butchery of good Bulgarian grammar.

It won’t be long before the sun sets on our service and for Peace Corps Bulgaria as a whole. We’re packin’ up and movin’ out. Two years from now, no one will truthfully say “I am a Peace Corps volunteer from Bulgaria” and maybe that’s a good thing. I hope the world one day doesn’t have need for any Peace Corps volunteers.

I taught English to the bar owner’s daughter today. As I was leaving, her mother insisted on paying for the lesson. I explained that I am a volunteer; I work for free and I’m not allowed to recieve money for my services anyways. They’re not the first to be surprised; I’ve been called a “hero” a couple times for working free of charge. But we’re no heroes.

You know who’s a hero? Indiana Jones. Optimus Prime. Oprah. Iron Man. I don’t want to live in a world where volunteerism is seen more as extraordinary than extra ordinary. By enjoying the benefits we’re born into, we accept the civic responsibility as Americans to propogate them to our children and, as world citizens, to share them with the have-nots.

And Bulgaria, although not a third-world country, has many have-nots. Something that personally saddens me is the lack of palette development in my students. Their world of food is mostly populated with cucumber salads, poorly-grilled meats, and french fries. I wish I could bring them all to Taiwan. I’d show them how to eat fried bees.

One of my former students in Taiwan emailed me yesterday, asking me to come back. She told me that I should return because I like beef noodle soup and, well, Taiwan has beef noodle soup. It makes sense. In fact, I’m tempted to go back to Taiwan plainly because all of the food is delicious whereas the food in Bulgaria is incredibly not very delicious at all.

I remember spending two hours on the bus, train, and on foot to eat this bowl of pho. It turned out to be the best pho I’ve ever had in my life. The same restaurant also served an astronomically good banh mi.

And of course, there are the xiaolongbao, little bite-sized dumplings that are partially filled with soup. The kitchen at Din Tai Fung, one of the top destinations for top-notch xiaolongbao, is paneled with windows for the customers to observe the cooks’ nimble fingers frantically folding in each pouch’s creases.

My first experience with prosciutto pizza was in Taiwan, too. It was at a restaurant called “Fifteen” – a homage to Jamie Oliver’s restauant in London.

Anyways, that’s er… quite a bit of a tangent I’ve gone on. Ha! So… last year in Bulgaria… I hope everything goes smoothly and that we end up leaving a meaningful legacy for the Bulgarians to enjoy. The Peace Corps organization deserves to be more than merely a shibboleth among young, idealist twenty-somethings; It was formed with a purpose, and I hope we are successful in playing our part in it.

Daniel

My summer English program began yesterday afternoon and I’m happy to say that it’s gotten off to a strong start. Without the breath of national exams on the back of my neck, I’ve been able to shift into a more deontological style of teaching and wage a war of attrition against student disobedience. The cosmic irony is rich, considering the historical political ideologies behind America and Bulgaria, but the preliminary results have been promising: The class average on the test was 97%.

In Bulgaria, a “C” is awarded at 59%, and the typical class average is around 65% even though tests are entirely multiple choice. My test was mostly non-multiple choice and I told them that any score under a 90% would be considered failure. The building block nature of language learning demands much stricter passing requirements than other subjects. The kids resisted, of course. You’d think I’d asked them to wage a land war in Asia or go up against a Sicilian in a battle of the wits. But I took that horse, shoved it to the water, and dunked its head under; I’m teaching on my time now, not the school’s, and I’ll run things as I please.

I want to break part of the deterministic culture here that people use to absolve themselves of responsibility. The political state of Bulgaria, its problems with organized crime, and the existence of its post-communism bourgeois have little direct bearing on my students’ ability to academically perform. Yet, these issues are often cited as excuses for why the country is troubled; The Ottomans may as well be blamed for every stubbed toe in the country. The real problems, embarassing as they may be, need to be uncovered and addressed if we want to make any real progress. Some of my students are naturally quite bright, and it’s enraging to see those talents squandered because of unrealistic class pacing and loose grips on classroom management.

The time I have over the summer to teach will be helpful, but I can’t really commute to teach any of my students living in the neighboring villages. I miss them. I chaperoned the 1st, 3rd, and 5th graders on their end-of-the-year field trip to Veliko Tarnovo and it was great to hang out with them outside of school. We visited the fortress Tsarevets and took a few million pictures. That place is huge and a joy to climb. (Probably not a joy to invade, though, I’m sure.)

This country really is one of the most naturally beautiful places I’ve ever visited. There are just so many problems that the society has to collectively conquer to make sure the children of this generation will be given a country in which they can enjoy its wonders. I’m thankful that yesterday gave me the shot of hope I’d been scouring for, and I hope that the good times are here to stay.

Daniel

I’ve hit the one-year mark and the slow thaw of spring has suddenly turned into this burst of activity. Some of the new challenges are proving to be difficult to handle and I’m regularly asking myself if I should stay or should I go. Even though perseverence has won out so far, I feel these stressors chipping away at my will to stay in this country.

Meanwhile, progress is being made on my work and I feel compelled to stay and see things through. I regularly work with every class between the first grade and the seventh grade. The opportunities for observation have helped me put together plans for English programs this summer that should greatly improve my students’ speaking and listening fluency. If it’s effective, maybe I will be able to convince other teachers to rethink their approach to the classroom.

If you’re interested in how the Bulgarian school system works, read on; If not, skip down three paragraphs. Classroom discipline is extremely poor and fistfights often break out during classes. Many students don’t bother to listen and will outright refuse to participate in activities they deem uninteresting. Truancy is a problem at all grade levels, but is especially serious at the later grades with entire classes occaisionally missing from class. The grading system has adapted to this, and many students still earn a 5 (American “B” grade) despite performing solidly in the F-level by American standards.

University entrance admissions do not require a CV or teacher recommendations. Placement is determined by entrance exams, so there isn’t a direct connection between good marks on high school coursework and admission to a university. I’ve heard that the university-bound rate at my school is in the ballpark of 5%. Those who do graduate from a university tend to leave the country in search of better job prospects, either in Europe or in the American Midwest, resulting in a brain drain the country already cannot afford.

Primary and secondary schools have progress measured by nationwide tests. The tests for English are inappropriately difficult for non-native speakers and are given at short enough intervals that teachers are forced to cover material faster than even the best students can reasonably learn. Because of the rapid course pacing, students retain little information and need to relearn much of it the following year. The 5th, 6th, and 7th grade textbooks all introduce students to the past continuous tense, but good luck finding even one student able to form more than two sentences correctly with it.

The current system is broken. And unfortunately, because the greatest problems are trickled from the top-down, real change is unlikely to come by the work of any number of Peace Corps volunteers. At the same time, passivity isn’t the answer because well-educated young Americans oughtn’t stand by idly while the young Bulgarian generation suffers from the Ministry of Education’s ineptitude. A futile effort is only a hair away from no effort, though, and it’s infuriating to work on a horse that doesn’t want to drink.

Personally, the frustrations are exacerbated by racism and unacceptance. I’m regularly called a “motherfucker” and flipped off, sometimes by the very students I am teaching. Some people, after I walk by, will call after with a “konnichiwa” and mock Asian-speech. A few kids thought it would be brave of them to shout “fuck you” from the school’s 4th floor window while I was working on outdoor activities with my 4th graders. I grit my teeth. The insults bother me less than the thought that these kids are part of Bulgaria’s future, a future that I’m making my own sacrifices to build but they would put so little investment in and have so little appreciation for.

This past week had already been extraordinarily trying. Without going into too much detail, it involved a mafia taxi, spoiled groceries, some rope, stepping on metal shards, kicking down my own door, and a hangover. The problems here just don’t take a rest. If it’s not a broken water heater, an electrical fire, or a medical evacuation to Thailand, it’s something else. It’s clear now why everyone in town tells me to find a girlfriend and get married: Fixing everything alone in this country is well on the path to insanity. (Well, also that many marriages here occur around 18-20; At 24, I’m kind of the village’s male spinster.)

All that said, there have been a lot of bright spots in my work here. I had a lot of fun at the annual May 1 village picnic. I ate a ton of food, played ultimate frisbee, and had a chance to meet some more high school students. Hanging out and socializing helps people understand that I’m not some sort of strange, alien foreigner. I eat Bulgarian food, I speak Bulgarian, and I can get along well with Bulgarians. The vice-mayor was excited to have a picture taken of him cooking some rabbit. I asked him where he bought rabbit meat and he told me that he caught a rabbit in his yard. I guess that should have been obvious to me by now.

I also challenged a Bulgarian teenager into seeing who could eat a larger serving of “Dave’s Naga Jolokia Hot Sauce” – a sauce 300 times spicier than tabasco that I had shipped over from the states. He didn’t know, of course, that I’d been building up an immunity to the sauce over the past several months and that a normal serving is one drop, not one tablespoon. There was much hollering, then much drinking, then much laughing.

And working at the school, as sisyphean a task as it is to teach English while adhering to national testing standards, did help me build enough of a relationship with the director to receive permission to use a room and a projector over the summer. I’ll be starting a weekly event for watching American films in hopes of sharing some of our culture and teaching some basic English phrases. I’ll also get to start an independant English class, unencumbered by the national tests, and I’ll probably be bringing some American foods to share more culture and bribe kids to attend.

The program my kids are the most excited about, however, is my fitness program. I’ve made it clear that we’ll be focusing on calisthenics and that there absolutely won’t be any kung fu, but all of the boys have still promised to come. I figure it won’t hurt to give the boys an outlet for their pent-up energy, and I can just download a Tae Bo video and have Billy Blanks take over if I can’t keep up. I hope I’ll have a good chance to talk to the kids about smoking. They’re all still too young to smoke, but maybe they’ll think about their health more carefully before making that decision someday.

Official classes end in about two weeks and I’ll probably have a lot of free time then. I’ll have to start putting my webcam to good use over Skype, again.

Daniel