Rodopite, Part 2

The ride from Smolyan to Stoikite through the Rodopi countryside is one of the most beautiful I’ve experienced in this country. It’s just tiny village after tiny village tucked away into little notches in the mountains, which seem to just wrap themselves around the little groups of houses. Every once and a while a little church will come along, standing alone atop a hill and looking over the valleys beneath.

Unsurprisingly, European tourists have started to notice this beauty as well, and many of these tiny villages are now home to million-euro houses from rich Germans and Brits. I was told that places in the Rodopi mountains are being sold as “the next big ski destination.” This is a bittersweet fate for the region – good in that it’s bringing jobs and money into a corner of the country that has been isolated and underserved, but unfortunate in that this often comes at the price of either tons of acres of forest, or destroying the authenticity and tradition of some of the villages. Pamporovo is an example of this. Once just a ski run in the middle of several surrounding towns, it is now a major ski destination with monstrous resort hotels catering to business travelers, advertising not only skiing, but also paintball and crappy Chinese food. A gigantic ugly tv tower now dominates one of the tallest mountains in the region, and this eyesore is visible from most places in the area.

Little Stoikite itself just became home to a brand new ski lift this summer, but is still in the category of villages that are still pretty much untouched and underserved. There are a few nice homes here and there and a couple of restaurants, but for the most part this town of around 200 keeps to itself. It seems to be as “Peace Corps” a site as you can get here in Bulgaria, a far cry from other assignments in well established cities with over 50,000 residents in them. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone (and everything about everyone), in a pretty literal sense.

The local Boarding School for Truants (the place where the volunteer works) is a major presence in the town and dominates the scene. The local school is attended only by the children there, and really there aren’t many other children in the town in the first place. Despite the fact that it’s in such a small town and that it struggles for funding (like many other similar institutions in this country, including mine), it’s a nice establishment with a surprising amount of resources to work with. There is a game room, new TVs in the televisiorna (tv room), computers, a gigantic kitchen with anything a cook could ever need, and plenty of activity space.

While there, I just kind of hung back and observed her go about her daily business, occasionally lending a hand in her English class, or giving a talk to a few kids about America (and specifically Florida). I was incredibly impressed – and she has her day scheduled down to a tee. She also has a good amount of control over the kids, and they seem genuinely interested in what she wants to do. A supportive staff at the institution definitely helps, and luckily I got to sit down with the director and talk with her for a bit as well. The activities the volunteer there does give her more leverage over the kids control wise, and makes the kids themselves more motivated to be good throughout the day. She has implemented a nice, simple point system relating to these activities, and it’s having a positive effect on the kids – so positive, in fact, that the staff has approached her to try and expand it.

Most importantly, it’s given the staff there some confidence in themselves, and it’s something that they continue when a volunteer isn’t there, which is the ultimate goal of any project we do here (PC buzzword – “sustainability”).

Ultimately, the visit gave me a ton of great ideas for my own site, and a new sense of the things that are possible in my time here. I basically retraced my steps back to site, and this gave me a lot of time to write up a lot of notes on what I wanted to do at my orphanage and how to go about doing them. It was the first time since I had arrived a month ago that I was so excited to get back and start working. My first goal has become to forge the ever-elusive relationship with the staff that will make things easier to accomplish, and will give me a person to pass the torch on to. This will be the hardest part of my assignment, and I have known this since the beginning. However, now that I have seen just how important and rewarding it can be, it has become a big focus of mine.

Overall, my visit to the Rodopis was an incredibly productive one, and the good times along the way were just a perk. I had a short stop over in Varna (3rd biggest city in BG, beach town, has a gigantic megamall) too before heading back home, but that is the subject of yet another post sometime later.

Until next time...