July 15, 2001

Sitting this morning with a cup of strong coffee from Italy and some German muslix with some Bulgarian yogurt and fresh peaches. Not a bad breakfast for Peace Corps. Kate and I are trying to make reservations at hostels for our summer trip coming up in a few weeks. Sometimes the phone lets me call outside of Bulgaria and other times it doesn’t. And it’s hot here. Every morning the sun shines brightly into our apartment with an eastern exposure.

We finished our eco-arts camp on Friday. Tomorrow we begin setting up the exhibition in the Gallery in the center of town. One of the artists who helped out for the week works at the gallery. The building is probably the most beautiful in Silistra and it just got a new paint-job from the “Beautiful Bulgaria Project” that just came through Silistra to help improve the appearance of much of Bulgaria. The building almost looks like an old palace or mansion, with an old clock on the central tower. Only a part of it is useable for exhibitions and one wing of it has been turned into a movie theater where Kate and I see a lot of movies.

So the camp was interesting. Kate and I did a lot of observing and hanging out. We knew going into the week that most of our work was over – we had written the grant, provided the idea and vision, and now it was the job of the Bulgarians to make it happen. The camp was six days – Monday through Friday, at a lodge about 40 kilometers outside of Silistra. We were directly on the Danube and the mosquitoes were crazy. During the day it wasn’t so bad, but at nighttime it was almost impossible to be outside for more than ten minutes before you started slapping yourself silly. Basically, the days went like this: Breakfast was first, of course. After breakfast, the students were supposed to find one of four artists to work with. Two of the artists were specialized in drawing and painting, another in sculpture, and another in fabric dyeing. Rosen and Yordan, the painters, hung out close to the lodge and directed the students who wanted to pick up a pencil or brush. Georgi went down to the river, where there was a lot of mud, and made casts and molds using the mud and gypsum. Some kids even put their faces into the mud and then made a cast using the gypsum – other kids just stuck to their hands and feet. Yonka, the fabric artist, worked in the basement making extremely colorful pieces of cloth stretched over a frame. She used a technique using wax, but I didn’t exactly catch what it was all about . . . After the morning session, we had lunch. After lunch was sort of free time where we went down to the “beach” and swam in the river. I wasn’t so hip to the idea of swimming in the Danube River and I never got in much deeper than my stomach. It was hot and it did the job of cooling me off. Other kids just went right in and had a great time in the water. We also had kayaks that the scouts, who joined us for the week, taught us how to use. One of my students from the past year taught me how to kayak. Afterwards he told me that I was a good student and I told him he was a good teacher. When people started getting tired of the sun, we started heading back to the lodge and started the next session of art making, which lasted until dinnertime. Dinner was always an event for the adults. While the students were inside, eating their typical meal, we were outside nibbling on salad and drinking rakiya. Dinner was typically late, so we never really ate until 8pm or so. But until that time, it seemed that it was just a given that the adults were supposed to hang out and shoot the breeze while we drank rakiya. Eventually the cook brought out our meals and we ate as we continued to drink and talk about nothing important. Soon it became dark and almost unbearable with the mosquitoes.

A lot of the time, Kate and I walked around and watched what the students were doing. I took a lot of pictures and we also created some art. There was a lot of downtime, which is what Kate and I weren’t used to from our camp experience. Kate and I both have been camp counselors and we’re used to a 24-hour schedule of events to keep the kids occupied and out of trouble. We’re also used to more group-time, where we get to know each other much better. But the kids were always left to their own devices and could stay in their room to “draw” and, aside from a few games that Kate led, we rarely got together for a large group experience, like songs, campfire, stories – all the stuff that we’re used to from our camping days. So we were a little frustrated that the students were out on their own and not really having a “camping” experience like we know. And I was always trying to figure out how much of our own agenda we should push and how much we should let the Bulgarians do it. All the Peace Corps talk of “transfer of skills” isn’t an easy concept to put into practice. Most of the time, I think their skills are being transferred more to me than the other way around. There were also a couple of girls who wanted to leave halfway through the week. One girl, on our Wednesday hike to the Biosphere Reserve, “Srebarna”, called on her cell-phone (can you believe this???) for her parents to come and pick her up. We couldn’t really stop her, could we? So she left. She rarely left her room to mix with the other students and learn from the artists and she was smoking like a novice on her porch. I think she had in mind more of a party than a week of art making. Another girl, who showed up for the two-hour hike through the mosquito-infested forest to Srebarna in a little black dress and pumps, decided she wanted to leave also but she ended up staying. The hike leader yelled at her a bit for not having the right kind of shoes and clothes to walk through the forest, but she tried it anyways, and turned around early.

The rest of the students took advantage of the week. After all, it was practically free. The supplies, the lodging, meals, and artists were all provided free of charge. They only had to pay for their transportation to and from the lodge. They had to be motivated to create art all day long and many of them were. There hasn’t been anything like this camp – something this accessible, for quite a long time. The money just hasn’t been available. My school doesn’t even have money for any art supplies – even the art school in town doesn’t even have enough money for art supplies. They learned a lot of new skills. Some painted with oils for the first time and others created works of art out of found materials for the first time. The artists are great people and they were happy to hand on their experience to the students. We hiked to the Biosphere Srebarna (did I mention that there were mosquitoes?), which is on UNESCO’s World Heritage List. We talked about litter, local herbs, and the water quality of the Danube. And by the end of the week, new friends were made and skills, I think, were transferred. Now we have the job of putting the exhibition together. My hope is that this exhibition will help inspire people and give the students something to be proud of. Hopefully it won’t be a pride that is individual, but a collective pride that can have great impact on the future of Silistra. All that stuff is completely and totally immeasurable and I won’t be able to tell you if it really happened. But there will be a tangible exhibition that will display about 100 pieces of art made by 24 students last week at the lodge in the village of Vetren, about 40 kilometers west of Silistra.

-Josh