Studeno Mi E

Sorry about the lack of any sort of update between New Years and now. I appreciated all the awesome holiday wishes from everyone, and thanks for the compliments on the blog. The lack of recent updates could be because talking about my daily routines probably isn't really that interesting. I want to start doing more culture posts, but there has been a lot of stuff going on around Preslav the past few weeks. I’ve done a bit of traveling around during the weekends. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. But there’s been another factor that I think has been taking away from my motivation to do much of anything:

I am cold.

No I’m not cold. I’m freezing. When I went to sleep last night, I turned off the heater (which I’ve done every night so far) and huddled under what is now several layers of blankets on my bed. I slept pretty well, regardless of the fact that I have started to wear a sweater, long pants, and 2 layers of socks in bed. When I woke up I could see my breath inside (which actually isn’t that rare). I looked up the temperature through the magic of the internet and it read 1 degree. I didn’t freak out until I realized that I still had the site set to Fahrenheit. That’s -17 degrees Celcius for those keeping track. This is by far the coldest I have ever been.

The outcome of this story is not only the realization that I should start leaving the heater on overnight, but also that I’m becoming accustomed to things to which I never thought I would have to become accustomed. Before I came here, if somebody told me (a Florida boy who has never lived through a snowy winter) that I would sleep through the night in an uninsulated and unheated concrete apartment while the temperature outside drops to 1 degree Fahrenheit, I would have laughed and laughed. But there I was – shivering and hunched over my laptop reading the number 1. And it wasn’t so bad.

It’s funny how things change.

People around town often ask me about life in the orphanage. Aside from the extremely annoying question “Do they listen?” (topic for a future blog post), a popular topic for orphanage related discussion has become “Is it cold there?” This kind of caught me off-guard the first time I heard it, and I answered with some form of “no of course not… they have radiators, and the windows are new,” but as I started to think about it, it’s very cold in the confines of that concrete building. In the hallways, there is some sort of breeze that comes through somehow, making everyone want to stay in either their room, the tv room, or the supervisor’s room.

But it’s not so much the physical cold. The children here have been cold their entire lives. Denied of their parents’ love by circumstances out of their control, they live a cold existence. There are children given up because their parents can’t afford to take care of them. There are children abandoned to the streets who have never even known their parents. There are children whose parents have committed unspeakable crimes, and so have been placed into a system without being told why because they wouldn’t be able to handle the truth otherwise. The kids have been dealt a hand in life from a deck stacked against them. They are cold, and they take and take and take because they have to in order to find any sense of warmth in their lives.

“I could find another dream / one that keeps me warm and clean / but I ain’t dreaming anymore, no, I’m waking up” read the lyrics of one of one of my favorite songs by The Drive-By Truckers, one of my favorite bands around right now. They have this ability to write lyrics that take simple moments in peoples’ lives and craft amazing stories from them. For that, they get a lot of hits on my iTunes…

This particular lyric, however, has taken on a new meaning for me over the past couple of months. This dream of mine that I’m living is much more than I could have ever imagined. I come away from work in the cold orphanage every day only to walk into a cold house, dirty from the kids’ often grubby hands (not to mention the fact that sometimes I physically can’t take a shower because my bathroom is freezing and I forgot to run the boiler), and drained, but somehow it seems worth it every day. It’s not just a dream that I’m now living… I really feel that I am finding my notch in this world, and seeing how lucky I am to have been dealt the cards I’ve been dealt over the years.

I find myself complaining sometimes that I have to wash clothes by hand, or that I don’t have central heating, or that I have to wait weeks for packages to get into town, but mostly as a joke. “These are the sacrifices I make in the Peace Corps” I say… The fact is that even as I found out that I spent the night without heat as the temperature outside neared 0, it doesn’t really even matter in the grand scheme of things... It's not so bad.

It’s funny how things change.

Until next time…