February 23, 2002

I don’t know how else to call this day other than the resurrection day. Usually winter gets me down, but this past winter has been especially harsh, minus our great trip home to see our family for Christmas. A few times over the past weeks Kate and I have noticed the air get noticeably smoky, even smoggy as evening sets in. From all the coal-burning heaters, burning trash, diesel, diesel, and more diesel, and just smoke from seemingly every nook and cranny of this town, it has been sometimes difficult to breathe on the way down the street and into our apartment. Our hair and clothes smelled of burning coal and trash. The trees were barren; stories of no money and no work, and our own longing for home; for something familiar, all began to pile up. My journal entries have been slim lately – I’ve been hoping to spare you readers from my fleeting frustrations.

But today was different . . . the weather was beautiful and the whole feeling of Silistra seemed new and alive. We began the day visiting an orphanage that we had never visited before. This one was especially for babies and toddlers – actually we have a link to a site about this orphanage on our site, under the page about the information about Silistra, Bulgaria. We were absolutely amazed when we entered the building and saw the immaculate rooms, rooms full of toys and great baby-stuffs, and the sheer amount of babies that filled the nurseries. We saw two sets of twins; one set was just twelve days old. The doctor, a mother of one of Kate’s students gave us the grand tour. We entered the nursery for toddlers and the room was swarming with children who just stared at us and were especially afraid of me, a scary male. Caregivers were attentive and happy with the babies and the whole orphanage seemed top-notch. To tell the bigger story, we were there because two Americans were in town, visiting their soon-to-be son, whom they will come back and officially adopt in about twelve months. Already they have his sister in America. They had spent the week in Silistra, visiting people and beginning to pick up a little of the language. We were invited to dinner with them a couple nights ago, along with the doctor and her family, which included a student of Kate and a student of mine. When visiting one of the rooms, the caregivers started pointing at different children, telling us which country each child was bound for – France, Germany, Italy, America . . . Because of the costs the adopting parents must pay, the place was somewhere between a business and a care facility, though it was clear that the babies were getting fantastic care while they were there. I was glad that we were invited to see part of such a process that seemed to make everyone into a winner.

After the orphanage, Kate and I took a walk down by the river and stopped at a restaurant for a lunch of soup and salad at our favorite restaurant, Nikulden. The bean soup was really good, in case you were wondering. For the rest of the day, we continually bumped into acquaintances that we have accumulated over our time here. A former teacher from my school last year was buying birthday cake candles for her son’s birthday cake and he was working on his fourth year from about my kneecaps. A parent of one of my students at a bookshop told me how much her daughter likes my classes. Various students of ours were out and about, saying hello to us and enjoying the great day perusing through the town. As we walked back down to the riverfront, near the archaeological sites, one of my students excitedly came up to me and wanted to show me some “human bones” she found at one of the sites. Yeah right, “human bones”, I thought. So we decided to humor her and go look at some chicken or dog bones that were probably lying on top of the dirt, possibly still in some foil. But instead we found ourselves looking at what seemed to be actual, human bones, probably left over from the graveyard that surrounded the old Proto-Bulgarian church on the riverside. The earth had been excavated and showed all the layers of accumulation and though they may not have all been human, some looked convincingly human, and made sense with the church ruins nearby. If I was reading this a few years ago, I would have probably been wide-mouthed at this point, wondering why these church ruins that are about 1500 years old are left unprotected and vulnerable. However it just doesn’t make sense to put your money into something like preserving a graveyard when there isn’t even enough money to pay the teachers from my school for January, and for December and January from Kate’s school (at least according to the local government’s version). (I still don’t understand why the teacher’s keep teaching when they don’t get paid, but I admire it tremendously.) Anyway, we started yanking out pieces of pottery and vertebrae out of the dirt and it almost became humorous, in sort of a strange way. My student was intensely interested in every find, and tried to give her opinion on the various objects . . .

We sat down on a park bench and along came the Spanish teacher, from Spain, who is also in Silistra for this year and teaching at my school. She was with a friend and they were out on a walk. A few of our students also passed by. They said “Hello!” to us, and “Ola!” to the Spanish teacher. We commented on the various people we had seen during the day and had some different news about this person and that. We began to make our way back home and ran into the father of the four-year-old who was having his birthday today. He was munching down a snack and on his way to the birthday party. A brief conversation and he invited us to “make an interview” with him for his new, local newspaper. Of course we agreed. We stopped at the store to pick up some food for tonight’s dinner and the other Peace Corps Volunteer in town happened to be in the store. We ended up spending the evening together and she gave us her water distiller since ours had a little explosion last week.

I’m not exactly sure what happened today, but it was good. We eventually made it home this evening . . . our dumpster was ablaze and we ran through the smoke and into our block. I can still smell it as I sit and type near the window. I used to think something like that was an emergency.

In any case, it was the people of this town that made me feel like a part, albeit very small in regards to the ruins I was examining today, of life here in Silistra. Wherever you are, people still make the difference.

-Josh