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!