LG's Excellent PC Adventure

I enjoy playing around with my video camera and then making little movies on my laptop computer. The PC encourages us to get involved in our communities outside of our primary assignments. Most PCVs find secondary projects that involve working with kids. My Bulgarian tutor is a teacher in the local high school so I put all this together and asked her to speak with her director about having me start a Film Club. Once the ball was rolling, I met a volunteer who lives in Pazardjik and told him about my plan. He said that he had already started a Film Club for high school kids in Pazardjik and invited me to attend a meeting to see what they were working on. So, on Wednesday I trundled off to Pazardjik to meet up with Josh and visit his club. Within five minutes I knew that I was in way over my head. I make little home movies and put some sound with them and a title or two. When I get real tricky, I add a plug-in special effect. Then I sit back and wait for the Academy to call. Josh worked on Jackie Chan's "Rush Hour" and has a degree in fimmaking. After listening to him explain 'master' and 'coverage' shots, I knew that I don't really know anything at all about making films. Which, of course, makes me eminently qualified to teach others. If all goes according to plan, my Film Club will begin with the new semester in February. I'm out looking for jodhpurs, riding boots and a monocle now.

Then on Thursday night I attended a performance of "Rigoletto" at the local theater. The Theater is the prettiest building in town, in my opinion, and stages plays, ballets, concerts and operas. Until Thursday I'd never been in it but the Agency has some kind of membership card that gives us discounts on tickets so I ponied up all of three leva and joined a hardy group of culture lovers at the opera. The performance was a lot of fun to watch. The Theater is quite small and beautifully maintained and every seat has a great view of the stage. Because the stage is small, the set was pretty ingenious and the costumes were terrific. The singing was good but the whole experience was great. I'll probably become an opera buff before I leave Bulgaria.

On Friday I went to Plovdiv to meet up with Brian and Kate to go together to Sofia the following day to work on a Habitat for Humanity project. We had dinner and then, because we had to get up at 5:00am the following morning to catch the bus, Brian and I realized that the only option we had was to immediately call a cab and head for the bowling alley! Kate, having retained most of her sanity, declined to join us. The Plovdiv bowling alley is a very modern facility with Brunswick automatic scoring, free shoes, and black lights with glow-in-the-dark bowling balls. After bowling, beer and cigars, Brian and I headed back to his place where we got a little sleep and then woke up in time for the bus. Kate wasn't feeling well and the weather was lousy so Brian and I went by ourselves to Sofia. We met Sara at the bus station in Sofia and the three of us took a cab to the Habitat project site. We were the first of about twenty volunteers who showed up to help and the turn-out was surprising considering the weather. The freezing sleet was coming in horizontally on the brisk Bulgarian winter wind. After signing in, we were assigned tasks that we felt comfortable taking on. Brian, for example, built an interior vent wall (sort of a chimney-like affair) out of bricks. Sara and I were handed strange looking tools and told to dig grooves in the walls where ever there was a black line. Very little wood is used in construction here. The interior walls are made from some sort of soft cinderblock and then covered with plaster. Electricity is run to outlets on flat wiring that is laid into grooves in the cinderblock and then plastered over. Our job was to dig the grooves for the wiring team that followed behind us. Aside from hauling firewood in from the woodpile, it was the least technically challenging task being assigned. However, when anyone asked what we were doing, we simply stated that we were "groovers" and soon everyone else wanted to be "groovers" too. By the end of the day we decided that we had earned a promotion to "master groovers" and are considering beginning our own union. Actually, with the good turnout, we got a lot done on the building. I also got to meet a man who has commited to buying one of the eight units. All the families who will eventually live in the building are required to put in a minimum of 500 hours of their own labor and it was really nice to meet the man who took obvious pride in the work he was doing on his own home. At lunchtime, Habitat had Subway sandwiches delivered and we all were given as much food as we could hold. By the end of the day, it was too late to catch a bus back to SZ so I went along with the others to one of the two Hostels that PCVs use in Sofia. The good news is that it only costs 12 leva (the Sheraton costs 170 Euros), the other news is that there are three rooms with beds covering every square inch of floor space. They had three empty beds and Brian, Sara and I ended up in three different rooms. My room had nine beds filled with an assortment of college aged people, all of whom went out at about ten o'clock for a night on the town and then proceeded to come home in shifts beginning at about one in the morning and continuing until five or six. Hostels are interesting places and I'm glad I experienced it, but there's a definite reason they're known as 'youth' hostels.

Project applications for PC funding are due on Friday and mine is nearing completion. I am requesting money to renovate a room in the Home for the Disabled so the women who are trying to start a knitting company will have a warm and comfortable place to work. The Home has donated a specific room and we're still trying to help the women get their business going. Applications for PC funds are highly competitive and take quite a bit of work to complete. Whether our application is funded or not, it's been a learning experience just getting it ready to submit.

So, among the skills I've come to Bulgaria to learn are: film making, teaching film making, opera, home building (specifically grooving), hosteling, and filling in government grant applications. My horizons are expanding so fast, if you aren't careful they might knock you down.