May 12 & 13, 2002

Time is sort of going by in a weird way lately. Everything, for us, is leading up to the day that we finally bring our service here to a close and go home. It’s now five weeks away. I’m never really sure exactly what the date is, but I can probably tell you how many weeks until we get on the plane.

We took a walk today up behind our block and through the villas, which dot the side of the hill and are filled with people who are weeding their vineyards. Some cherry trees were already turning their cherries bright red and it was a definite sign of summer’s approach. When we first arrived in Bulgaria I remember going out on to our host family’s porch in the back and plucking off cherries for a snack. By the time we arrived here, the cherries were already sparse and we had to pull braches down and sometimes climb higher just for a single cherry. Soon they will be sold in the bazaar in little bags for about one or two levs.

Our adventure is coming to a close and we’re filling out our end of service PC forms. They make you put your accomplishments down on paper . . . a little daunting for some of us. As I was grading some of my students’ journals last night, I came across a personal letter from a student to me. It hit me in an unexpected way. Other students write notes to me in their journals explaining why they don’t have a certain entry or some excuse, but this was a personal letter to me. I wanted to type her exact words in here but I don’t think that’d be fair to her and besides, I gave the journals back today.

She first told me that she hates the high school and feels that the teachers there take out their difficulties on the students. Then she told me that she won’t ever be like that, in fact, she’ll be the “happiest girl in the world” when she graduates. She likes only two of her teachers and she told me that she felt she could trust me and tell me the problems of her life. She closed her letter by telling me not to change what I think about her and then wrote on the bottom of the page, “THANK YOU!!!!!” I sat there, with the notebook in my lap, stunned. I felt like I connected with someone, which is what I had hoped to do when we signed up for this thing. I didn’t expect her to thank me and I’m not really sure what I did. Hers is the class that is still dealing with the suicide, which I wrote about a couple months back.

Sometimes I sit and watch my students as they work and I hear them laughing and enjoying each other. And I see them a little confused by the negativity that they see and experience. Teachers here have an incredibly difficult, thankless and sometimes, pay-less job. There probably is a little truth in my student’s idea that teachers do take out their difficulties on their students, but I know too many kind and concerned teachers here to take what she said as completely true. When I first started teaching here my words were important to my students because I was the American. Now that I’ve gone through two school years here with them, some students think my words are important because they’ve come to know and trust me. What a big difference. And how difficult it is to build that elusive rapport.

I handed her journal back to her today with a smile. I didn’t want to say anything to her and her to think that I changed the way that I thought about her, but I have. I’ll remember that she cried uncontrollably in class a couple weeks after her friend’s suicide and I ended class early. I’ll remember that she offered to give me her only copy of a National Geographic a few months back, but I told her to keep it because most Americans have about ten years worth of National Geographics in some lonely box in the basement.

So as I try to fill out those “quantitative” end-of-service PC forms, there’s no box to check for “unexpected and touching connection with student.” In fact, many of those boxes seem a little barren. Most of my ideas for projects never really got off the ground and I find myself racking my brain for sustainable projects, which I started and can be continued by students and/or teachers. I’m thankful she decided to put into words her positive thoughts and pass them on to me. I have just as much a reason to thank her also.

-Josh