Letters from Bulgaria

Life in Bulgaria can be frustrating, sometimes uncomfortable, and constantly mysterious, but sit down to one of their wonderful meals, or walk along an ancient stream and across a stone bridge built by the Romans, or look up at a sky full of stars with the Milky Way as solid as a road across the sky, and you wonder what America really has to offer that could top all this.

Rel Davis, Letters from Bulgaria

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Sample Letters from the Book

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Letter Number 1 from Bulgaria¹

June 25, 2001

Hi everyone!

This is to get you all up-to-date on how we're doing. I think I'll begin by quoting from my journal for the past few days:

Sunday, June 24, 2001. Panagyurishte, Bulgaria. 8 am

We have just completed our first full day with our host family. They are Georgi and Petya Seferinkini, and their daughters, Milena (14) and Anna (10).

Georgi and Petya are in their late 30s (37 and 38). Georgi is an engineer in the local mine and Petya is a teacher at the local high school.

Milena studies English and is an artist. Anna plays the accordion. Georgi likes to fish and Petya enjoys literature.

The learning curve has spiked!

Edith and I went to our staging event last Monday, June 18, in Washington, DC, along with 54 other Peace Corps volunteers.

We stayed that night at the Georgetown Holiday Inn and flew out Tuesday via Lufthansa, leaving around 4:30 pm Arrived in Frankfort, Germany, Wednesday am about 5:30 (11:30 pm our time).

Edith and I checked into the Sheraton for 2 or 3 hours sleep and a shower (cost $100 but it was worth it!)

Flew out via Lufthansa again on Wednesday afternoon to Sofia. Then by bus to the small town of Strelcha, 13 km E of Panagyurishte.

We had two days of orientation and shots. Got our first "walk-around" money (105 leva², about 7 leva a day.) About 2.1 leva per dollar.

Friday evening, we left by bus for Panagyurishte. At the school where our training is to take place, we met with our host families.

The Seferinkinis live on the sixth floor of a soviet-era apartment building about 15 minutes walk from the school. Very nice apartment -- hot shower and all.

Petya is a great cook -- stuffed peppers the first night -- and Georgi is very helpful with the language.

We walked around town twice on Saturday. Visited the pazar (outdoor market) and Petya bought groceries.

Met a lot of other PC volunteers walking with their host families!

Saturday evening, we walked to the Internet Store, where we e-mailed for the first time. Georgi is trying to arrange Internet access from home here.

We found a street full of linden trees (“lipa” pronounced leepa) full of blossoms. I want to pick some for tea!

I'm glad I studied Bulgarian so diligently earlier, although I still feel quite inadequate. Edith needs to do a lot more studying.

Today we are supposed to go on an outing to a nearby city. Tomorrow, we begin classes.

Sunday, 6/24/2001, 4:25 pm

We went to the town of Hisar³ today, mainly to get mineral water for the family. The water comes from deep in the earth. We drank water from 400 meters down and 2000 years old. The water is quite hot when it emerges from the earth.

It’s all free. We filled up a half dozen containers to bring back.

Hisar is an old Roman fort and bath. The ruins of a great wall remain – built in the fourth century by the Romans. It was destroyed after the 1876 Revolution because it was then a Turkish fort.

Ruins of Roman springs are there as well – begun in the 3^rd century.

The town is beautiful. We saw more linden trees and picked a bunch of blossoms for tea.

On the way to Hisar, we stopped where people were picking cherries. We picked some off trees and ate them. They are a sour variety used in canning and compotes, but quite good. We also saw people cutting herbs by the roadside and harvesting linden blossoms for market.

We had tarator (cold cucumber, garlic and yogurt soup) for lunch, and carp (caught by Georgi, of course). Delicious!

I’ll send more later. The food here is wonderful. Fresh fruits and vegetables and home-made yogurt, ice cream and preserves. The city cut off our water for a couple of days – but that’s what Peace Corps volunteers have to expect, right?

We are really enjoying the experience. Wish you were all here.

Love,

Rel

Letter Number 11 from Bulgaria

September 6, 2001¹

Hi!

This week I want to talk about all the things that are different about Bulgaria. Now that I’m living here, it’s sometimes hard to remember exactly how different things are here than in America. There are a few of them after my usual news items.

Our new home. We are getting settled in this week. Today (Thursday) is a national holiday (Unification Day, when Bulgaria was reunited with Rumelia, the short-lived nation that covered that part of Bulgaria south of the Balkan Mountains.) So, of course, we had the day off (and tomorrow as well.) We went to Yambol (the regional capital) this morning to buy a TV. Quite a trip.

We met Ditchko, a young man who works in the JOBS office here (JOBS is a business incubation program financed by the U.N.), downtown by the bus stop at 8 am The bus, of course, never showed up. Holiday, you know. After awhile we realized the bus wasn’t going to come. Ditchko got on his cellphone and called a friend of his, who pedaled over on his bicycle. For 12 leva, he’d take us to Yambol and bring us back. For six bucks we jumped at the chance.

He got his car and we drove to Yambol, about 30 km away. There we found a small, inexpensive TV (about 280 leva). There were cheaper ones, made in Turkey, but only a few leva cheaper so we bought the better quality (an Aiwa.) We did some more shopping before coming back. On the way back, the young man (Valentin) spent the entire 12 leva to buy gas for his car.

When we got back, Ditchko called around and got the cable people to come over. They came in and hooked us up (dropping a cable down to the apartment from up on the roof.) At least now we have CNN – in addition to about 32 other stations, mainly Bulgarian but with a French and German station thrown in for good measure. (MTV is German here.) Hookup will cost us 20 leva (less than $10) and monthly cable service will cost 9 leva (about $4.)

Community Needs. Yesterday, Yordan (the assistant mayor) took me around the community for a tour. We drove to a couple of small villages to see some of the municipality’s industries. There is a ceramic factory (bricks and tiles), a pipe factory (for irrigation), a small canning plant (they don’t have enough of a market to maintain it at full capacity), and lots of agriculture – grapes, wheat, truck farming, tobacco, and even a water-buffalo farm. There are also a lot of empty factory buildings around the area. A large arms manufacturing plant collapsed soon after communism fell (it was making arms for the Soviet bloc) and put a great many people out of work. Many of them are still out of work.

We drove through the Roma “ghetto” to the north of town. The Roma population is growing rapidly while the Bulgarian population is getting smaller. What were fields a few years ago are now filled with houses built by the Roma (squatting on public land, of course.) No utilities. No electricity. No sewage. The municipality’s resources are already stretched to the limit and there are no funds for putting in such amenities. There are legal problems, as well, of course. Illegal residents who don’t pay taxes are a sore point under the law.

I drafted an English language proposal for a JOBS project yesterday, one calling for a large herb farm to be built in the municipality, to provide jobs primarily for Roma workers. It will require grant money and I hope we can find such money somewhere. If anyone knows of a foundation that might be able to help -- the project involves ecology, minority support and small business development—please let me know.

Also yesterday, I talked for a while with the mayor of the municipality. He talked about a serious problem they are having with education. In the municipality are 22 small villages, ranging from 300 to 3000 in population. Young people are moving away and most of the villages today are almost half retirees (and a retiree over here makes around 50 leva -- $25 – a month.) The big problem is that the few children left are often insufficient for keeping a school operating. In one village, first through fifth grade children are all being taught in a single room.

Why not consolidate? They’d like to but they simply don’t have any way to get the children into the city or into a larger village. With a severely strained budget, they can’t afford to buy school buses. What they need right now are two used school buses. Again, if you have any ideas about where we could find donors for used school buses, please let me know.

The problems here are enormous. My task – trying to find some way to help – is looking more and more difficult!

Okay. Here are some ways that Bulgaria is different from America:

Doors: No knobs. Just handles. Every door. It’s really convenient when you have an armful of groceries and have to open the door. Just nudge the handle with your elbow.

Toilets: Most public toilets are Turkish ones. “Turkish toilet” is a euphemism for a hole in the ground. Period. What distinguishes a Turkish toilet from a latrine is that the Turkish toilet usually has two raised footprints strategically placed. Schools. Businesses. Restaurants. Yep. All Turkish. In fact, many volunteers choose their restaurant from among the few with real toilets in them. Many homes (including our apartment) are equipped, however, with western-style toilets. Note the words carefully. Not western toilets. Western STYLE. They look superficially like western toilets. They even flush – in a manner of speaking – thanks to a tiny water tank suspended up around the ceiling and a string hanging down from it. But they are highly inefficient instruments. For one thing, they can’t handle toilet paper. So, in every home, you find a small wastebasket next to the toilet. This is for your used toilet paper. If you make a mistake of trying to flush some paper down the toilet, you will have a plugged toilet, and you can imagine what happens next. In Turkish toilets, it’s usually a bucket for the paper. They are also inefficient.

Bathrooms: Bathrooms in Bulgaria are exactly that, places where you take a bath. In the better homes, the bath and toilet are two separate rooms. (Like the Seferinkini apartment we lived in in Panagyurishte.) But in other homes (like our apartment here in Straldja) the two must share a single room. In Bulgaria, a “bath” is usually a shower. Kind of like in the States. Difference is, no shower curtain. Everything can get wet if you aren’t careful – toilet, toilet paper, etc. You get used to it.

Cheese: No cheese. They have two products we would call cheese, of course. One is cirene, which is like Greek feta cheese. The other is kashkaval, which is a yellow cheese kind of like Monterey Jack. Both are delicious, but that’s all the choice you get. Now in the big cities (like Sofia) you can get other kinds of cheese, I hear, but in most of Bulgaria, it’s cirene and kashkaval.

Coffee: It’s really strong here. In cafes, you get espresso coffee. Strong espresso. If you want something like American coffee, you ask for “dulgo café,” or “long coffee.” This is the same as espresso but with twice the water. It’s still strong by American standards. At home, Bulgarians don’t drink espresso. They drink Turkish coffee. Five or six large scoops of coffee in a little more than a cup of water – boiled and perked at the same time. Even stronger!

Tea: To Bulgarians, tea is something you drink when you are sick. There IS regular black tea around (called cheren chai) but most tea is herbal (called bilkov chai). All kinds of herbs. Several varieties are wonderful curatives, but when you ask for tea they think you must be sick or something.

Oatmeal: Oatmeal is not consumed by adults in Bulgaria. Only by infants. For this reason, you can buy it at your local pharmacy or, if you happen to have a supermarket in town (Straldja doesn’t), you can get it from the baby food department there. In supermarkets, Muesli is beginning to be sold nowadays.

Calendars: Calendars here start with Monday. The last two days of the week, Saturday and Sunday (subota and nedelya) are on the right and usually colored red for the weekend.

Water heaters: Although they look much like ours, they tend to be quite different. For one thing, they don’t come with thermostats, only emergency escape valves. So you need to turn them on about an hour before you need hot water. And turn them off after about an hour so you don’t get steam all over the place. I think the newer ones are more efficient, but we’ve only used the older ones.

Refrigerators: Refrigerators in Bulgaria are called “hladilniks.” Literally, “coolers.” For good reason. They don’t keep things cold. They keep them cool. They are also tiny. Which is just as well. If they were bigger, you’d put more stuff in them and it would all eventually go to waste. Three days ago, I put an ice tray of water in the tiny freezer compartment (about the size of one ice tray.) After 2 days we had a bit of ice in the back of the tray. As of now, there is still water in the front of the tray.

Odds and ends. Fruit juices and fruits sometimes have very strange names. Some are oriental and some are Briticisms. We were looking for jam the other day and saw something promising on the shelf. “Shipka” marmalade. We bought it. On the label, in English, was “Hip Jam.” And that’s what it is: rose-hip jam. The British word for it is hip jam. (“Ship” is a thorn in Bulgarian and “shipka” is the word for briar.”) I saw some orange juice (portocalov sok in Bulgarian) and bought it. Turns out it was a mixture of orange juice and something else. It even had the name in English on the label: “Orange Maracuya Juice.” Never heard the word before. The label has a picture that looks like a passionfruit on it. And the juice tastes like passionfruit. I’m assuming that’s what “maracuya” is. Does anyone know?

That’s all for this week.

Love, Rel