A chronicle of my experiences as a Peace Corps Community Organizational Development volunteer in Bulgaria.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Happy Holidays

On Saturday I'll take the early bus to Sofia and get off at the first stop on the outskirts of the city. There I'll grab a cab and take it to the airport. In the early afternoon I'll fly to London where I'll transfer to a flight to New York. All in all the trip will take about 20 hours but getting to see my family and friends at the end of it will make it all worth while. Besides, I didn't have any other plans for Saturday.

Things have been reasonably quiet here for the past month. There is only one group working on a film at this time. Nikoleta is determined to make her movie which will include animated ghosts and a spontaneously appearing hotel. During the first round of film projects I advised all the kids to keep their movies simple, to keep the stories short, to keep the casts small, to keep the dialogue to a bare minimum and to work in a group of four or five students. Nikoleta wrote a script about a spaceboy who performs a couple of 'special effects' miracles and then beams back up to his own planet, complete with flashing lights and sound effects. She had a cast made up of half the tenth grade and filmed in three different locations. One of her lead characters dialogue sheets were eight pages long. She never formed a group to help her and she was also the only one who actually finished her movie.

This time around I've said that anything goes except animation, we just can't do animation. Nikoleta is pushing the frontier ever farther by combining animation with live action and a cast that includes six individual speaking parts and three ghosts. I'm helping her develop a more coherent story than she started with and I'll help her with the cameras and editing when the time comes. She's on her own for the rest of it. We had a cast meeting this week to read through all the speaking parts (three girls and three boys) in order to begin to work on the dialogue. The meeting began with Nikoleta and her production team (she has succumbed to my nagging) and the three actresses but no boys. Finally, one brave kid showed up and was immediately assigned a part. After waiting about fifteen minutes, he was sent out to recruit or shanghai two other boys. He returned to the room about ten minutes later with a couple of his friends and received a standing ovation from the girls. The kids only had time to read about three of the twenty pages of the script before the bell rang calling them to class. Nikoleta is very very very persistent and we're going to run through the script again on Friday.

Handknitcrafts.com started out well but has since fizzled somewhat. We received a few orders and the website gets a lot of hits, but we haven't done much in the way of business lately. That is mildly disappointing but not disastrous because we still need to do a lot of work on setting up our procedures for processing orders. I am supposed to be interviewed by a couple of reporters from the States in the next few days and if I can get a plug into some papers back home it should help. The women aren't using the room to knit in unless I go out to see them, then they all come rolling down to the room and we sit and chat for a while and they knit. As soon as I leave, however, they all return to their own rooms to knit. It turns out that they are just used to knitting by themselves in their rooms and, more importantly, they sit and watch their soap operas while they work. Now I'm working with them to try to convince them to use the room to knit at times when the soaps aren't running. Putting a TV into the knitting room isn't the solution we're looking for, because a) we don't have the funds b) it would require installing cable and the monthly subscription fee and c) the staff would soon take it over.

It's become colder lately in SZ. We really can't complain though because it's milder here than anywhere else in Bulgaria. We're protected from the bitter weather that comes down from the north by two mountain ranges. It certainly isn't as cold as either Chicago or New York have been this past week! On the other hand, I'm out in it a lot more here. I don't have a car and my apartment doesn't have heat. I use a single electric heater to heat up one room and the bill for doing that can run as high as 300 leva a month. It's just the way things are here and spring is only three months away!

Further to my adventures with appliances, my refrigerator fell down last week. Actually, it didn't make it completely to the floor because a kitchen wall got in the way. Apparently, two little foot type things on one side felt that after 40 years of holding up the refrigerator (a Minsk 16) they'd had enough. I'm not sure how they fell off, but I came home to find the fridge slumped over against a wall like a man feeling the effects of too much rakiya. My best guess is that the feet simply vibrated off after years of supporting a cooling unit that turns on and off with the quiet smoothness of a cement mixer. I was surprised to see that even on its side, the fridge did its job and the inside was still cool. At its best, the inside is still warmer than the rest of the kitchen during the winter. So I propped it back up and jammed the feet back in. It never missed a beat!

The Christmas lights are up in town and it looks really wonderful. The double rows of trees are strung with small white lights and the Obshtina is festooned with all sorts of decorations done in lights. There is a big Christmas tree in the main plaza and a row of temporary shops set up on Tsar Simeon Blvd. to sell all sorts of Christmas junk. SZ is a pretty town anyway, but the Municipality does a really nice job of lighting the place up for the Holidays. I'll be back here for New Years Eve and I'll have a ringside seat from my balcony for the fireworks display. Then I'll have to round up another project or two for the next few months. I'm considering something devoted to appliance repair.

Happy Holidays to all of you, and I'll see you next year!
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