Прoшка = Forgiveness

Words of the week:
Прошка
Сирни Заговезни (Sirni Zagovezni) - the last Sunday before Lent



Last Sunday, I spent the day at Nelly's house with her and her family to celebrate a holiday called Proshka, or forgiveness. However, this word is very similar to the word prashka, which means thong. I confused these words, and it made for an interesting week.

Anyway, we all had a wonderful time celebrating and eating lots of food and talking. I usually go to band practice on Sundays at 4, but I was having such a good time that I didn't go. Goshko, Nelly's youngest son, was very excited about playing a special game with a sweet called halva. A small piece of halva was tied to a string and usually this string is tied to a fan so that it will make the halva swing around. But there's no fan in Nelly's apartment, so instead Nelly and Mitko (Nelly's husband) took turns swinging the halva. While it was swinging, the children and I attempted to catch it with our teeth. It's a pretty funny game, as you can imagine!

Sonya mentioned this holiday before when Heather asked if Bulgarians had a holiday like Thanksgiving. Well, there's a lot of similarities between this and Thanksgiving. However, this holiday isn't so much for people to say thank you, but rather for children to ask for forgiveness from their parents. I didn't notice Nelly's children ask for forgiveness, though, but figured maybe they did it when I wasn't there. I thought I'd inquire more about this, so I asked some children that I met with on Friday whether they celebrated Prаshka (which, remember, means thong) and if they asked their parents for forgiveness. Well, the kids were really good and didn't laugh at my mistake, but they all said they forgot to ask their parents for forgiveness. So, I would say that Sirni Zagovezni is like Thanksgiving in that your supposed to think about and say something meaningful, but really it's just a fun time to get together, eat really good food (but not turkey), and watch a really good game (but not football).

Sirni Zagovezni is also the last day before Lent. I was a little surprised about this because we celebrate Lent starting on Ash Wednesday. So I told them about how people in American protestant churches celebrate Lent, and I told them about Fat Tuesday, too. However, my Bulgarian friends are like me in that they know about the 40 day fast of Lent, but we don't really actually fast.

Bulgarian Babas

Words of the week:
баба (baba) - grandmother
мартиници (martinitsi) - things made out of red and white string to celebrate the first of March and the coming of spring.

Dancing - Always
This week wasn't nearly as exciting as last week, but at least it ended with dancing. I now know five horos, but I only know the names of the first two. I'll have to pay more attention when the teacher is talking. I tend not to listen because I assume I won't understand, but I want to learn the names. This week's lesson was particularly exhausting for me. I ended up dropping out of the last dance two minutes before it ended because I was so tired that I kept making mistakes and couldn't get it right. I'm so glad to have something so athletic to do. I've befriended one of the ladies who works there, and she seems to think that I dance pretty well. Last night she asked how long I'm going to be staying in Bulgaria and said that after two years I could go back to Boston and start my own Bulgarian Horo school. So, Emily, you get free lessons at my school when I come back :-)

Valentine's Day
So, Valentine's Day was this week, and the youth volunteers had their competition on the theme of Valentine's Day, the Day of Lovers, and Safe Sexual Practices. A lot of volunteers wrote essays and they all read them out loud, though I have no idea what they were about. It was good, though, and the three best essays got prizes. The organizers of this competition also read a little about the history of Valentines Day and I think they also talked a little about safe sexual practices. I was excited about this because it got people focused on the poster I made about contraception and reading the things I took so long to write. I celebrated inside about the success of my humorous endeavor.

The youth volunteers have also been making valentines that we gave out to people in the municipal building, the police department, and other places. Then we all went out to a cafe and talked and had fun. I really enjoyed being with the youth and taking their pictures at these events. They're a really great group of kids.

Martinitsi
In addition to making valentines, the volunteers have also been making martinitsi, which are essentially bracelets or little figurines or anything made out of red and white string. I knew that this was to celebrate a holiday, but I couldn't remember exactly what holiday it was and how the martinitsi were used. So I asked Nelly, and she explained that this was to celebrate a holiday on the first of March in which everyone exchanges martinitsi and wears them until they see one of two birds (I forget which birds). When they see one of these birds (the first sign of spring), they hang the martinitsi on a tree or put it under a stone. If you put it under a stone and you see an anthill there, then you will have good luck for the rest of the year. There is also a symbolic figure related to this holiday called baba Mart (grandmother March). I forget exactly what she does, but I think there is a story in which she gives martinitsi to everyone as signs of spring and I think that she is the one who brings this season to the land.

Traditional Babas
Talking about baba Mart led to thinking about all the various babas in Bulgaria's traditions. There's baba Zima (grandmother winter) from Christmas time who helps father Christmas pass out presents. She also has a white dress and in the winter she cleans her dress by shaking it out. When she does this, white flakes fall from it to the earth and that's how the first snow comes. She hasn't cleaned her dress yet in Bulgaria this winter, though, and I'm really doubting that she will. Then there's also baba Yaga, the scary baba who is a witch and flies on a broomstick. There's a story about how she lives in a house made of candy and sweets. Children are attracted to this house to eat the sweats, but then baba Yaga comes out and eats the children! I think there's at least one more traditional Bulgarian baba, but I can't remember who she is.


The Real Babas
In real life, though, the babas (grandmothers) can often be found sitting on benches in the center of town, talking and watching the people go by. Peace Corps volunteers have coined these benches the "baba benches." This name is a bit misleading, though, because the dyados (grandfathers) also come out and sit on the benches. I think it's fun that the babas and dyados have such a visible part in the culture. The babas are known by Peace Corps volunteers as a great source of the sought after home-made slippers that are super warm and comfortable and great for the winter. During pre-service-training, Peace Corps volunteers are told to make friends with the babas because they are so generous and willing to help, providing amazing home-made cooking and other things like these slippers. I can't say that I know too many babas, but I have received a pair of the slippers from a baba in Kraynitsi, my training site.

Our Project
To digress a bit from Valentines Day and the babas, this week was also the start of this big project that I keep saying my organisation has received funding for. The project is to help teach the youth of Lovech about the court system. We will be inviting students who are interested in pursuing careers in the judicial system to participate in a series of training sessions in which they will learn about the way the court system works in Bulgaria, the way the regional and national court systems interact, basic civil rights and how to apply them, ecological legislation that's been passed in Bulgaria and more. As part of the training, we'll take the students on field trips to the Lovech court house to view a court session and talk with people who work there. At the end of the training sessions the students will perform a mock-trial in the court house that will be open to public viewing. We're also opening the project up to all the schools in Lovech, inviting each of them to bring their students on a field trip to the court house. The court will be open for one week to take the students on a tour and talk with them about the work that goes on there.

This week we had the first meeting with our partners to introduce the project and talk about how to begin implementing it. There were about 40 people there, including school directors and students and I'm not sure who else. We had them break into three small groups to give ideas about various topics regarding the implementation of the project. I couldn't tell you much about how the meeting went, but Sonya says that lots of new and good ideas were presented, and to me that indicates a successful meeting.

I was the official photographer for the event. Actual, I'm the official photographer for all of our events. I bought my first camera before coming to Bulgaria, and I'm really glad I did. But now I sure could use a photography course. I'm finding that I really like to take pictures, but I don't really know anything about taking particularly good ones. Maybe I'll look into it when I come back to America.

In the meantime, tomorrow I will continue to take pictures as best I can while we celebrate this Bulgarian "Thanksgiving" holiday. I don't know much about it yet, and I forget what it's called, but Nelly invited me to her house tomorrow to celebrate with her family and friends. I'll tell you more about next week!

A Busy Week!

Word of the week:
средство против забремениаване (sredstvo protiv zabremeniavane) - contraceptive
well, ok, it's three words, but together they mean one English word

Playing hooky
Well, if last week was a complaining session, this week was great! It was pretty busy, which I enjoyed. It started off with Sonya emailing me on Saturday and telling me that Nelly's Birthday is on Tuesday. We decided to go shopping together to find a birthday present that would be from everybody in the office. Unfortunately, the only time we had to go shopping was Monday afternoon after Sonya finished teaching school. This presented me with two problems. First, what do I tell Nelly when I leave the office so she doesn't get suspicious. "Uh, Nelly, Sonya and I are going... out. I'll be back soon." Not very convincing. I ended up not saying anything and left while Nelly was on the phone. The second problem was that I teach an English lesson at 4:00 on Mondays for my coworkers (including Nelly), so I told Sonya that we had to be fast. Well, we went shopping and had found and bought everything within a half an hour and finished right at 4:00. But then Sonya grabbed me by the arm and took me out to look for flowers for the party and go to a cafe for coffee. (yeah, I'm a coffee drinker now!) It was so funny! I felt like a school girl playing hooky, and I never played hooky in school.

Well, I showed up at work a little later than 4:30. I had no idea what to say when I came in and saw everyone sitting in the office waiting for me. They were all silent and looking at me. I should mention here that Nelly's my friend, but she's also the boss, so this silence when I entered made me a little nervous. I expected her to be inquisitive and maybe give me a little chastisement, but instead... silence. So, I said (in Bulgarian) well, let's get started. And that was it, everything went back to normal and we had a pretty good lesson I think.

Making the cake
So on Monday night I bought candles (I won't say how many :-) and made a chocolate cake. I also tried to make frosting, but it didn't work. I don't know why, and I was thinking how awful it would be to have a cake without frosting. So I called mom to fix everything, like moms are supposed to, but her advice didn't work. So I tried to make it again from the start with fresh ingredients. Again it didn't work. :-( So I threw some confection sugar on top of the cake and hoped that the sugar with the candles would be enough. To my delight, the next morning everyone loved the cake! They liked it so much they all wanted the recipe, so I went home and tried to write it in Bulgarian and later I took it to my tutor for editing.

The celebration
Anyway, back to the party. Usually, we begin the day with sitting at our computers, drinking coffee, and talking for a while. On Nelly's birthday, though, we all sat together in the larger room (where there's tables to sit around) and watched her open her present (which was a bracelet) and blow out the candles. Nelly had brought a ton of food and goodies for us to eat, too, so we sat and ate and talked for quite a while. We finally did go back to the other room and sit at our computers to work. But shortly after lunch, two more of our coworkers came and we went back in the larger room and had more cake and food, and this time we opened the rakia too! (We didn't really drink much, though. It was more just for the tradition of having rakia at celebrations I think.) And then we stayed there for the rest of the day and talked. I really like how Bulgarians tend to be much more relaxed about taking time out from work to celebrate and relax.

Taking a walk
Speaking about taking time out from work, Nelly, Ani (a coworker), and I went for a little walk on Wednesday. Sometimes our office is really, really cold, even when it's warm outside. So we go for a walk to be outside (where it's often warmer) and to warm up through the little exertion of the excursion. Well, the highest point in Lovech is near the TV tower, and you can see the whole city of Lovech from there and farther. It's beautiful up there, I love it. So, I decided to see if I could get my companions to hike up there for our walk. Nelly, at first, was resistent because she figured she wasn't wearing the right clothes to go up there. But she finally gave in. On our way up there, she kept talking about the different plants and telling me what they are and what they're good for - making tea or using as a spice. (It's February, but the plants are starting to bud and flowers are coming out - it's insane!). Walking with her reminded me of how my brother, Abe, always does the same thing when I go hiking with him. But some of the plants and flowers are really different. I think Abe and Nelly would have a good time going on hikes together and talking about the plants. As it is, I enjoyed it very well myself.

Well, Nelly was right about not wearing the right clothes for the hike. We had to do a little rock climbing to get to the tower. It wasn't hard, but it was actual climbing, and sitting and crawling. It was great watching them climb! I had been up to the tower before, so I knew the way, and when I started up the rocks, Nelly started laughing. But she's a good sport and followed anyway. I wish I had brought my camera! Oh well. When we got to the top, we all looked out over the city and Nelly and Ani started pointing out where everything is. It was a lot of fun, and I felt particularly content with life.

Contraception
Eventually, though, we had to return to the office and go back to work. A large part of my work this week has focused around a competition in which the youth volunteers at our organisation have been invited to participate. The theme of the contest is Valentines Day, the day of lovers, and safe sexual practices. I'm not sure what the day of lovers is, but I think it's self explanatory enough. For the competition, the volunteers can write an essay, make a painting, and/or create a collage.

Sonya suggested that I participate in this competition too, to give me more practice writing in the Bulgarian language. Being a Peace Corps volunteer, and being 22, has put me in an interesting position within our organisation. I'm not really one of the youth volunteers, but I'm within their age range (11 - 24), and I am a volunteer, so it's generally acceptable for me to participate in their competitions and events. However, I also hold a more administrative role and I am supposed to be a leader with them too. I do hold the power to give or deny permission to use office supplies and monitor behaviour, but the language barrier makes it a little difficult for me to lead a meeting with them still. I hope to do more with them in the future.

In the meantime, I thought this competition would be a good opportunity to create a visual educational device. I decided to create a poster about various types of contraception, their effectiveness, and how they're used. Well, trying to translate this made for interesting office conversation. After a lot of laughing and an explanation of what I was trying to do, I asked about what kids already know and if they have sex ed in the schools. Apparently they don't, and talking about sex seems to be taboo. But my coworkers seem to be supportive of the idea that that needs to change. They all helped me try to translate things, but it was hard because they didn't know about several of the forms of contraception I wanted to include and so they didn't know how to translate them either. A doctor who specializes in sexual reproduction came to the office and I asked him for help too. Then I went to my tutor and she had a book about this stuff which was super helpful. I finally finished it on Friday and it looks really good. It doesn't actually hold that much information, but I hope the kids actually read it and find it interesting.

I feel like, though, you really have to talk about this stuff to make it effective. Our volunteers have already had an educational session with the afore mentioned doctor about AIDS and have talked a little about sex from that. I think it would be so great to expand on this and have educational sessions about STD's in general and contraception. Maybe in the future sometime I can work more towards this. We'll see. One step at a time, I suppose.

Billas
Anyway, I'm going to completely change the subject now. This week, a really big grocery store just opened up in Lovech. It's a chain store called Billas, and it's huge! Well, huge for Bulgaria. It really only has about two aisles of food, one aisles of dog food and that kind of stuff, and another aisles of cleaning supplies and stuff. I went with Nelly and her family to go shopping there on opening day. I forgot what it was like to shop in stores that are big enough for shopping carts and that have aisles. It was a bit overwhelming, actually. I'm so used to the small stores and limited selections. But I got super excited when I saw they had salad dressings and barbecue sauces and mozzarella and parmigiana cheese! Oh, it was so great. They still don't have boxed stuffing, but I can get by. The store was insanely crowded, though. We spent about 20 minutes shopping and and hour waiting in line. The lines wound through the aisles all the way to the back, and when we finally got out, we saw security guards standing at the doors preventing people from entering until the lines died down. There were so many people waiting just to enter the store!

Well, more happened this week. A meeting with the mayor, no dancing on Friday :-( , interviews with applicants who are applying to work at our organisation, an event supporting the nurses in Lybia, I could go on and on. But I think this is enough for one week. Chow for now!

A Tough Week

Wow, so, this was a really emotional week for me. It started off with a small thing of me trying to cook Bulgarian food during the weekend. Most of the time I just cook American food because I'm used to it and Peace Corps provided us with a great recipe book with recipes from previous volunteers that includes mostly American food. There's lots of good soups and casserol recipes in there. But I wanted to learn how to cook Bulgarian food for three reasons: 1) because it's part of the cultural experience 2) I like Bulgarian food and 3) so that I can host my coworkers over and serve food that they are used to and will like. Unfortunately I've never been able to successfully cook something Bulgarian. On Sunday I tried to cook sarmi and stuffed peppers, which I've eaten before and know that I like. I bought a whole head of cabbage to make them, and so I made a ton of sarmi, but they tasted awful. I ended up going out to eat every day this week because of it. I think this officially ends my attempts at cooking Bulgarian food.

Then, on Monday, a member of our staff left us. This was really sad, and now the dynamics in the office have changed a bit. Mostly this means that it's a lot quieter now because it's just Nelly and me during the day, and I don't talk much because I'm an introvert and because I still don't know the language that well. :-) (I like to blame everything on the language and the culture differences whether or not the blame is accurately placed there. It's a good coping strategy because it helps take the pressure off of me... and it's also often true.) The person who left was our youth leader and accountant, so now we're lacking a person to fill these two roles and we just won this big grant and there's so much work for all of us. Hopefully we'll find someone to replace her soon. Actually, we just had an interview with someone on Friday for the position, but I didn't understand what our final decision was or if we even made one. Talking about the language barrier segues nicely into my next frustration.

So, Nelly and I recently went to a big seminar that all volunteers in my group had to go to. The last day was just for volunteers and it was a language session day. I took the language proficeincy interview (LPI) during this time to see how my Bulgarian is progressing. I think I did all right... I found out on Monday that I received a score of intermediate-mid, which is one level higher than I was three months ago. However, I was receiving so much encouragement from everyone, and my lpi interviewer, after the test, said that I may be in the intermediate-high to advanced-low range, so I was beginning to hope for a little higher. But I'm content with my score. What I'm frustrated with is that I am so close to understanding conversations, but I'm still just not there yet. I understand the general idea most of the time, but just not exactly what they're saying. And when I ask for clarification I still don't get it because I still lack the vocabulary. I really want to get to the point where I can converse with people naturally. I think it's obtainable, but it's just going to take time.

I think the language frustration led to me being particularly homesick. On Wednesday, everyone in the office was working on a project together that was particularly difficult for them, and they were all super frustrated (they're applying for some type of license to work with at-risk-youth). But they were breaking the tension by making jokes out of their frustration and laughing to the point of crying (which then made me laugh). But it also frustrated me that I couldn't participate with them in it (due to the language barrier), and it reminded me of working with college friends on projects and doing similar things with them... and made me miss my American friends a ton.

So, on Wednesday it all got to me and I called mom through skype to complain and ask her to make it all better the way mothers do. So we talked for a good long while and she sent me a ton of good recipes for normal American food that I can make with ingredients that can be found in Bulgaria (thanks mom! :-)

Then, on Thursday, I had a really good day. I went to a tutor session and it went super well. We went over something I had written for my Bulgarian blog (I'm starting a blog in Bulgarian about American culture for some kids at a local school) and I was impressed with how well I did. I've had writing assignments before, and there was a large and obvious improvement from my last assignment to this one. Later on Thursday, we had a meeting with the volunteers and someone from a local organisation about a competition they were inviting us to participate in. And then we all made martinitsi, which are essentially bracelets made out of white and red yarn, sort of like friendship bracelets. Everyone uses them as part of a spring celebration (I'm not quite sure how they're used yet). We're making them to sell as a sort of fundraiser I think. I'm not sure what the funds will go to. But, the point is, I had a good time making martinitsi with the volunteers and listening to them banter. And then, on Friday, Sonya and Nelly came with us to the dancing lesson, and it was sooo much fun! I love dancing the horo!

So it's not always easy here, but then, it's not always easy in America either. Sometimes it seems there's so much different between the two countries, but I'm still always amazed at the similarities too. Everyone has their good and bad days. People find ways to laugh to make things easier. Kids like to be loud and girls like to make bracelets out of yarn while the boys like to sit back and watch. And, of course, everyone likes to dance!