LG's Excellent PC Adventure

The Peace Corps has done an excellent job in bringing us to Bulgaria and training us to do our jobs. We've been taught and trained and given ample opportunity to learn through exercise and experience. During staging in Philadelphia we were given a broad stroke introduction to the Peace Corps experience and introduced to each other. Then, as a group of 59, we were brought to Bulgaria and taken straight away to a Training Complex in a town called Strelcha. There we were given some basic language lessons, a lot of orientation material and our agenda for the next ten weeks. When we were thoroughly comfortable with life in Strelcha and its routine, we were divided into training groups and sent off to live in twelve "satellite" towns with Host Families. So, for the past seven or so weeks I've been living here in Saedinenie with Veneta & Stoil and experiencing intensive immersion type language training. It hasn't been all language lessons, however, as we've been given various assignments designed to teach us to travel, order food, ask directions, find information on specific topics, etc. But during our time in our "satellite" towns, our primary focus has been on language.

The Peace Corps has one of the finest language training programs in the world. Thousands of individuals with just as many individual learning abilities have been taught to speak and understand a plethora of languages. We have four or five hours of formal class a day, we live with non-English speaking families in small towns where English is considered a foreign language (can you imagine?) and we participate in exercises designed to force us to use our new found knowledge and skills. It's awe inspiring.

Some of us, however, are proving to be resistant to persuasion and are progressing rather slowly. In fact, one of me is progressing so slowly that the incredibly talented team of PC language teachers is now trying to determine whether it wouldn't just be easier to change the official language of Bulgaria to English than it will be to teach me Bulgarian. For example, we've just learned future tense and other than having Veneta's aunt read my coffee grounds and tell me what's gonna happen, I'm not all that interested in talking about the future. Next week we learn past tense which is supposed to be the most difficult part of the Bulgarian language. There are no simple rules for changing verbs to past tense and I have a lot of trouble with tenses that have simple rules. So, I've decided that I will deal with the past tense by ignoring anything that happened before right now. See, that didn't just happen and I won't talk about it.

One of the outside exercises we took part in this past week was a trip into Plovdiv to see a show at the Roman Forum (yes, another Roman Forum!). This show was called "This is Bulgaria" and it represented the various regions of the country as well as their history in song and dance. It was really interesting and the dancing was truly wonderful. The only small problem was that we were sitting on hard cold marble steps the width of curbs and there wasn't even a five minute intermission during the three hour show. The feeling still hasn't returned to my butt.

I've got a lot of work to do this week but fortunately we're going to be in town for the next couple of weeks. Then on October 22nd, with any luck at all, we'll be sworn in as full fledged Peace Corps Volunteers. All I have to do is pass the language exam. Maybe they'll have it in English??