A walk through the village

3-10-01

Yesterday we took a walk behind our block building and up a little hill through many little village homes. It is a strange walk to take because it kind of feels like you are a caged dog between all of the chicken wire and fences. Many of the fences are homemade out of sticks and wire or easily destructible, but nevertheless there to claim the land. The paths are very narrow between the tiny farms, but you get to see all kind of village houses and land. The houses are usually very small and rundown. They looked to me like some of the houses I have seen in Appalachia on one of the mission trips taken there with Howland Unite Methodist Church. We saw many wells, garbage, fields for grapes, for lettuce and more.

Because we walked on a Friday afternoon there were not many people out and about. Most people go to the village to work on Saturday’s and Sunday’s so it was relatively quiet. We saw a few older people working, a few animals, a goat, some chickens and a rooster. The rooster tried to peck Josh to pieces for taking his photo and it began making loud crowing sounds as soon as the picture was snapped.

After we had walked though many little village houses on the small trail we decided to climb the hill where we saw a clearing. What we discovered was actually quite a bizarre shock. Thousands of large, white headstones. A very large graveyard was at the top of the hill. This graveyard turned out to be the most recent graveyard in Silistra. As we walked around the graveyard we notice how most of the graves and grounds were not taken care of. Which is actually quite normal for Bulgaria, but because it was the newest one it was not quite as overrun with weeds and trash. We saw a few graves that had no headstone and were only marked by a wooden cross; we saw many graves with large white headstones on one end and large life size headshots of the deceased on the other end. It was comforting to find some of the graves having flowers on them or taken care of in some way. I suppose I feel this way because in America most cemeteries are taken care of, if not all the graves the grounds surrounding are kept nicely. The graveyards in Bulgaria though would be even scarier to walk through at night! A kind of an R-rated Scooby Doo I think.

We continued our walk down the hill on the road and we discovered a bus ran to this graveyard from the center. We were met by an older man on the road inquiring where we had been and then shortly after asking where we were from. It helps to take these kind of walks but makes you realize the differences in scenery we are experiencing here. We are all under the same beautiful sky, but with very different surroundings.

-Kate