Down the lane the raspberries are ripe as are the wild strawberries, all red, tiny and seeded. Each is a drop of sugar for my tongue. In the meadow the red-backed shrike is feeding half-grown babies and young chaffinches flutter from ground to tree to bush, learning to fly.
At 6:30 in the morning the world is mine. It belongs to me and the newborn sun just recently crested over evergreen mountain. Gaudy chickadees, yellow-bellied and blue-winged, are noisy in their twittering business while the jays and nutcrackers are loudly proclaiming their right to be king of the tallest pine.
By 7:00 the less-wild world is awake. Dogs are trying to outbark their neighbor’s bark and the mountains echo back the harsh sound. Behind me the slap, slap, slapping of sneakers on gravel announces the first of the morning joggers. The redstarts and crossbills sit on chimneys to watch these Nike-clad bipeds run by, breathing more heavily than normal because of the altitude.
By 7:30 it’s time to put away the sights and thoughts of sky-reaching mountains. It’s time to put jeans and hiking boots aside and dress for breakfast, dress for work. After all I’m not here to be a nature-watching tourist. I’m a Peace Corps trainee and this is my third day on the “job” here in Bulgaria.
It all started last Thursday near Washington, D.C., in a hotel just south of the Pentagon. There we had two days of meeting new friends and fraternization, two days of lectures and class participation, two days of new rules and regulation, two days of fun and motivation, and two days of eagerness and anticipation. And suddenly there we were. We were no longer Peace Corps invitees. We were now Peace Corps trainees, with a nametag to prove it.
Now came the big wait and sit. First we waited in the lobby and then we sat on the bus, 40 miles to the airport. We waited in the hour-long line at the Lufthansa check-in counter and then we sat two hours in the airport waiting area. A cup of Ben and Jerry’s fortified us all and then it was back to another sit, this time eight hours on an overnight flight to Frankfurt. A three-hour layover brought another wait and an Egg McMuffin in the airport golden arches. Another sit put us on another plane. This time it was Frankfurt, Germany, to Sophia, Bulgaria, where miraculously all our luggage arrived on same plane we did. One more sit took us 90 minutes by bus up into the beautiful Rila Mountains to our hotel on the edge of Rila National Park. So with a wait, sit, wait, sit, wait, sit, sit we rolled 21 hours off the clock.
After a traditional Bulgarian welcome of bread, salt and honey, a good night’s sleep to ward off jet lag carried us into our first training sessions. Bulgarian language, community skills training, technical training, health, safety, emergency action plans, and more Bulgarian language have occupied all of us for the last three days. In between sessions we’ve learned to dance several versions of the hora, Bulgarian line dancing done in circles with everyone holding hands.
Now tonight we’ll party with a Bulgarian folkdance group to entertain us and then we’ll dance the hora again.
Tomorrow our stress level goes up. We’ll move out of our sheltered cocoon of the hotel and move in with local host families, many of whom speak no English. Shirley and I will live with separate families but in the same small town. But that is a challenge for another day.
Right now I'll remember my early morning walks through the strawberries and past the ripe raspberries. The first bird on the first morning was a spotted nutcracker, a lifebird, a bird I’ve never seen before in my life. What a good omen it was to have my first bird be a brand new bird. Thirty-five more species have since followed and three more have been life birds.
Now I’ll sleep, my last night in the hotel. Will I dream of quiet lanes with raspberries and chickadees or will it be the wild dancing and music of the hora?
Welcome to Bulgaria!
What a large volume of adventures
may be grasped within this little span of life
by him who interests his heart in everything.
Lawrence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
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