LG's Excellent PC Adventure

One of the first things I heard about Bulgaria, before I arrived, was how cold the winters are here. I was told to prepare myself for truly brutal cold. I'm from Chicago so I'm used to fairly unpleasant winters. Chicago gets a weather system that comes down from Canada and is known as an "Arctic Air Mass". This is a hammer of extremely cold dry air that pounds into town on an express train of a wind. It is so cold that any exposed surface of skin hurts like it's been burned and then just goes numb. There is very little snow but what snow there is comes in flat and level and blinds you. Sub-zero temperatures are the norm, sometimes for more than a week at a stretch. So, until this week, I haven't been too impressed with the Bad-Boy Bulgarian Winter. Okay, so it seems there's also a "Siberian Air Mass". Who knew!? Just like home, the cold air arrived on a strong wind that swept down from the nearby mountains and froze Stara Zagora like a marble statue. Much of the country has been buried in snow but we didn't get more than an inch or so here. Instead, we caught the wind and the sub-zero temperatures. The wind was so strong that it blew over a tree near my apartment. At home, I had central heating and once I was out of the wind and safe inside I sort of enjoyed listening to the weather rattle the windows and the shake roof. I could turn the thermostat up to seventy or so and sit by the fire and 'brave the elements'. In most homes in Bulgaria, heat is provided by either a small wood burning stove or by electric radiators and heaters. No matter what you use to heat your home you can usually only afford to heat a small part of it, a room or two at the most. In the hardest months of the winter, people tend to collapse their living space down into one or two heated rooms and to seal off the rest of their home. I have an electric radiator that is mounted on wheels and can, therefore, be rolled from room to room. I tend to keep it in the living room where I sit and read, and now, eat my meals. I also have a small open electric heater in my bedroom which does little more than keep frost from forming on my floor. My kitchen is unheated and a pork roast I took out of my freezer and set on the counter to defrost took three days to do so. My bathroom is also unheated and cold plastic toilet seats provide a most unpleasant wake-up call. The bathrooms don't have separate showers, just a shower head that comes out of the wall and rains down onto everything in the room, sink, toilet, you, etc. The drain is set into the floor. Although my shower drains pretty well, there is usually some water lying about on the floor and it's been frozen solid all this past week. It's a very unusual feeling to be standing in a scalding hot shower and sliding around on ice at the same time. The "Siberian Air Mass" is supposed to last until the middle of this week. It isn't quite as bad as the worst of winter in Chicago, but here it's harder to find a warm place to sit and enjoy the foul weather.

I finished an application for a SPA Grant last week. SPA, as you may remember, is a Peace Corps funded program that offers small grants for community development projects. The process is very competitive and the application takes quite a bit of work to complete. A somewhat common theme of our experience as PCVs in Bulgaria has been the unending pressure by our organizations to "get us a grant, get us some money". My second day in Stara Zagora, I was asked to begin applying for a SPA Grant. Mind you, we didn't have a project in hand yet but there was money on a table somewhere and we should begin reaching for it. So, many months ago I looked around and began to think that the women in the Home for the Disabled might qualify for some SPA assistance. If we could get them set up as a small business, it appeared that this might be what SPA was created to fund. So I began working on designing a project that would help the women turn their knitting enterprise into a self-sustained business completely independent from outside funding. The Municipality and the Home were approached and agreed to dedicate an unused room for the exclusive use of the business. It was also agreed to classify the women's knitting as "Work Therapy" which would exempt it from a 70% 'tax' on income that people living in the Home have to pay to help defray the expense of living there. A large part of the project will be to select and train an individual to manage the business once we step back. The application form is seven pages long and forces you to consider your project in graphic detail. I was able to fill in all the blanks except for the budget. My language skills aren't up to getting price quotes yet. My colleagues said that they'd do the budget with me so I shouldn't spend any time on it. Our project has three main components; first, we'll renovate the room into a nice comfortable workspace for the women; second, we'll select and train an individual in basic small business management skills; third, as part of the development of a business plan we'll develop a set of marketing tools. The bulk of the money we're requesting is for the renovation of the room and the purchase of a computer, printer and software. The justification for the computer is that we're designing a website to take orders and we also need it for general business record keeping and accounting. Applications were due by email on Friday and on Thursday we were working on the budget. I had added a coffee maker and a radio/cd player to the equipment list to make the room a more inviting and comfortable place for the women to work. I noticed that a couch, tv and coffee table had also been slipped onto the list. "Why are these items being requested?", I asked. The women are all in wheelchairs and can't use a couch without a great deal of physical assistance and they are going to be using the room for knitting, not watching the soaps. Oh, they might have 'visitors'. It also turned out that the computer would not be installed in their room, but in the main computer room of the Home for 'security' reasons. After a mildly heated discussion I realized that the room would soon become a staff lounge and the computer would be available for the general use of the population of the Home. I explained that this was fine as far as worthy objectives went, but it wasn't the project we'd been working on for three months and that we'd have to miss this deadline and re-do our application to more accurately reflect our new goals. Diplomacy, as Will Rogers once said, is the art of saying, "nice doggie", until you find a big stick! So now we have an agreement about the use of the room and the computer, both will be dedicated to the exclusive use of the women. If their enterprise simply fails to become self-sustainable then the Home will enjoy the use of a nicely refurbished room and a decent computer and that's not such a bad thing either.

A word or two on cooking. I have become quite a good maker of pots of soup. On Sunday I generally whip up a large pot of one sort or another of wholesome delicious soup and eat it throughout the week. Yesterday I made a pot of chicken and rice soup with onions, carrots and a hint of garlic. That was the intention anyway. First, I popped four boneless chicken breasts into the oven to cook. I rubbed them with garlic to give them a little flavor. I remembered to pull them out of the oven when the smoke alarm kicked into panic mode as black clouds of chicken tainted smoke billowed across my ceiling. No problem, I just cut them up and threw them into the pot charred skin and all. Upon reflection I should have scrapped the black crusty bits off first. Anyway, as the soup started to simmer the odor of burned stuff began to permeate the apartment so I crushed a couple more cloves of garlic into the soup to initiate a direct frontal assault on the wretched burned chicken parts. I added more water and another onion and let it simmer for some time, then I smashed in a couple more cloves of garlic, just to be sure. I wanted a brothy soup with a hint of garlic and I ended up with a stewlike soup that has driven all the vampires and werewolves back into Romania. I added some pepper and another onion and even though it brings tears to your eyes, it isn't half bad. An added benefit is that after eating a bowl or two for lunch, I have a much larger personal space at work in the afternoon! I call it "Burned Chicken with a Whole Helluva Lot of Garlic" soup and the recipe is yours for the asking.

I'm completing the editing on a short movie about the Habitat Day and hope to have it posted by the end of this week. So, from Bulgaria..stay warm, stay healthy, and "find us a grant, find us some money!".