3-14-01

Ahhh, spring. It’s finally here. Spring in Silistra, spring in America, spring in Ohio. The warm weather is making the trees open up like a hungry baby’s mouth. The old men with their old labor coats are outside of our block, sitting at the broken picnic table, talking, eating bread. They stare at me as I walk past. Cafes are opening up out on to the sidewalk. People start their café-sitting in the mid morning. More people can be seen at the bazaar – not shopping, but talking and mingling. Young mothers with their baby carriages walk down the sidewalk, stopping to chat with friends. The sun rises between two blocks that are across the street and I see it out our window every morning when I get up to teach my 7:30am classes. There are so many people out at that hour of the morning – men and women carrying their small bags to work and children with their fake Nike and Adidas backpacks. This morning, I passed through the bazaar and a car was parked near the end of it with a cage of chickens attached to the roof of the car. A woman was sitting motionless inside of the car, staring into nothing as one chicken perched itself directly in front of her, on the windshield wiper. Behind it, on the hood, was a pile of, well, you know . . . And I kept looking at her to determine if she was staring into nothing out of tiredness or despair, but after a few moments she caught my gaze and I decided she was only tired. It was a strange scene. I thought: That’s a poem, song, or painting waiting to be captured . . . Spring – our porch windows are open, the doors to our porch are open, and some music, in English, from another apartment is trickling in. The blossoms of trees and bushes in white, red and yellow can be seen from our porch and the buds of a small willow tree droop like small limes. The birds are sometimes circling above and we even get to hear the sound of seagulls. The stray dogs and cats stroll more openly on the sidewalks. They don’t curl against the walls of buildings, with their protruding, bony hips, as they do during the winter, wondering who will be the next human to mistreat them. Their fear is still very real, but they have made it through yet another winter, living on these streets, growling and barking for the scraps, and they have every reason to openly celebrate their survival. My winter coat is hanging, unused, on our coat rack, and the wind chime that Kate got me for my birthday is finally being blown in the wind on our porch. Bulgaria is opening up.

Winter officially ends this weekend and I’m glad to be rid of it. Winter is the penance for all our wrongs and mistakes – I pay for them by becoming pale and growing dark circles under my eyes. I learned the lesson of winter growing up in Cleveland. If I moved to a place without winter I would start to think that I never made any mistakes . . . .When the sun comes, however, my skin drinks it up and it becomes the new blanket that keeps me warm and content. And I look around at this country, with all the buildings that are old and decrepit, I walk through our hallway that is damp and dark with peeling paint, to our apartment door, wondering, will this ever change? Another PCV, who is now back in America, told me during the summer that if Bulgaria wanted to really change, they should start by demolishing all these blocks. It is entirely impossible to do that, since most Bulgarians have no choice but to live in these buildings, but they strip any Bulgarian town or city of its uniqueness. They sit on the fringes of the towns, rusting and cracking, holding their drying clothes on their porches. On the entrances are large, black numbers that label and remove any distinctiveness. And the trash dumpster outside of our block, a rusting hulk of rust, with trash blowing all around it, holds the three fat cats that have claimed it as their food dish. They watch me, wondering if I’m going to steal their rotting cabbage.

There will be a concert this Saturday at the theater in the center of town by the student from our school. It is the concert for the first day of spring. Some of my students have been asking to be excused from class to go practice for the concert. Spring break is in three weeks and Kate and I will be going to Greece. But the time between now and spring break is even shorter for us since we have an IST (in-service-training) the week before spring break in Kazanlak, a town located in central Bulgaria. We’ll also be going in for our mid-service health and dental exam. So we only have two more weeks of school until we leave on our spring break. After the break, we’ll have ten more weeks of school until the summer break. It will feel good to have one year of Bulgarian school under our belts. And yes, we’re missing home. The winter penance is tougher in a foreign country. We miss the familiarity of everything, the opportunity to speak English with everyone, the cleanliness (well, relatively speaking), the permission to say “hi” to a stranger without getting a confused look. It makes us long for greener grass . . . The next group of volunteers will be arriving here in just three months, and the B-9’s (PCVs who are the 9^th group to be here – we’re B-10’s) will be leaving. Spring is finally here.

-Josh

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