My new home

I just got home from a visit to my permanent site in the Rhodopes. It was an overwhelming three days! Here are some pictures to set the scene:

This is my counterpart Ramadan sharpening his scythe before cutting some grass. He is the librarian and his wife, Rufie, is the principal of the kindergarten. I also stayed with them during my site visit.

The town sits on this steep hillside and extends a little further up the mountain.

And my favorite picture…this is Rufie and her neighbor Fatima taking me for a walk. They were pointing out which plants can be used to make tea.

Overall, I’m very excited about living and working in this village. I don’t want to make premature judgments or generalizations, but I can say with certainty that I am living in an absolutely breathtaking place. I am IN the mountains with a river down below, amazing caves on either side of us, and bears and wild goats roaming throughout the area.

The site visit itself wasn’t very fun…it involved long days of travel on buses, being overwhelmed with meeting new people, and an exhausting amount of Bulgarian and Turkish speaking. Also, since I ended up staying with my counterpart I had very little autonomy or space for rest (especially mentally). Coming back to Pudriya was such an encouragement because it felt like home! I realized that we have built a level of understanding with people here. I have a routine. I have a room. And, communication in Bulgarian was suddenly SO much easier. The best part is, I know I will eventually get to that point at my permanent site too.

Site Announcement!

We are officially half way through training and today we received our long-anticipated permanent site information! I found out that I am headed to the Rhodope Mountains in the Devin Municipality (which is pretty close to the Greek border).My site is a Muslim Turkish community of around 1,000 people and I will be working for the cultural center. For the next two days we are in Vratsa getting to know our counterparts (the people who are planning to work closely with us at our sites). After that, we will have three days of visiting our permanent sites! My counterpart is very outgoing and relaxed. He doesn't speak English, so we spoke primarily in Bulgarian and threw in a few Turkish phrases occasionally. He is excited to help me work on my Turkish, but since I've been studying only Bulgarian it's hard for me to switch gears. There is a peace corps volunteer currently serving in this community and she'll be there until October (but unfortunately I won't get to meet her this weekend because she's using some vacation time).

The needs expressed by this community are not overly specific. They include organizing cultural events, working with youth, beautification of the village, and developing tourism opportunities (e.g., helping create a village web site, networking with other villages, and opening guest-houses). So far, this all seems to be a good fit for me. I think I'll be able to write more about my first impressions and feelings after I've actually visited the site.

Team Dynamics

It’s the end of my third week in Pudriya. At this point in our language lessons we’re finally getting to make correct sentences (using the definite article, prepositions, etc.), but we can still only speak in present tense, lol! Here are my training team mates (minus Swain) with our language teacher, Momchil when we first got our group assignments:

This is us posing with our community mapping assignment:

And last night we had a cooking assignment…here we are making moussaka and banitsa at Momchil’s house:

I am truly thankful for this team. As we encounter so much that is unfamiliar, it’s really great to have people who process things with you and who make you laugh. And there’s a lot to laugh about when you’re making as many mistakes as we are!