LG's Excellent PC Adventure

In just a couple of weeks the next group of PC volunteers (B-17's) will arrive in Bulgaria. They'll spend their first week sequestered away in Strelcha and then be dispersed to their various training communities and homestay families. All of a sudden we won't be the Newbies anymore. We're making progress. We've been integrating with varying degrees of success into our permanent communities, we've been learning to speak Bulgarian..again with varying degrees of success and we've begun to tackle a community development project or two. Of our original group of 59, six have ET'd (early terminated) and we've had one medical separation. Two of our group decided to marry each other and many of our group have formed less permanent attachments. A couple of us have moved from our original sites to new communities and we've all survived our first Bulgarian winter and probably deserve some sort of patch for our jackets.

The incoming trainees/volunteers are TEFL's (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and will all be assigned to schools throughout the country. In August, the next group of COD's (Community Organizational Development) trainees/volunteers will arrive and we'll mark our one year anniversary. One of these two groups will have some of their number sent to Saedinenie for training and Veneta & Stoil will soon be introducing a new volunteer to Bulgaria. I'm happy for them but I've stressed that the new guy can't have my room!

I'll be going back to Saedinenie to visit for the weekend of April 30th - May 1st. That's Easter weekend here and it also happens to be Tsonka's (Veneta's daughter) birthday. So I'll travel to Saedinenie, hop into the Lada and ride to Asenovgrad, eat and drink at Tsonka's birthday feast, ride back to Saedinenie, sleep, then eat and drink all day Sunday for Easter. On Sunday evening I'll roll onto the bus back to SZ and not touch food for a week!

SZ has turned green and beautiful in the last two weeks. Flowers are up and trees have their new leaves. Of greater importance, however, is the fact that the Raffy Ice Cream stand is once again doing business in the Center. Progress is measured in small steps and this year it can be seen in the addition of at least four other ice cream carts set up to compete with Raffy. I firmly believe that there can never be too much ice cream, so this is a welcome example of a free market economy responding to the laws of supply and demand.

The funding for my SPA (knitting) project came through today so we'll begin kicking it off this afternoon. I'll be posting photos and videos as we go along. The Film Club has been on Spring Break and will resume meeting next Tuesday. I'm sure the kids all spent their holiday working diligently on their scripts! I'm as busy as ever at work but still can't really put my finger on exactly what it is that I do. Oh well, I'm having fun and Bulgaria is beckoning, so I'll start getting out there and seeing some of it soon. Petya is going to England in May and Darina is going to Finland. I'm thinking of Bojhentsi or Kazanluk and maybe a hike in the Rhodopi's.

The only 'hardship' I am currently suffering is that both the elevators in my apartment building are broken. No one seems to know when or if they will ever be repaired and my eight flights of stairs seem to get longer every day. I was whining about it at work and Rumyana just said that this is for 'fitness' and some people pay a lot of money to go to gyms to workout. She's right but I'm still going to whine about it until they're fixed!!