Zdraveytey everyone!
Sorry about the long delay but here's the first post of 2 or 3 (I haven't quite decided yet) about my summer camp experience with the kids from my school. The following paragraph is an actual entry from my 'journal' that I wanted to keep. It's essentially me writing on my observations of the first day and what happened. I would also like to stress that the last two sentences do not actually describe how I feel about the kids now as it was merely the first day. They WERE, however, the feelings I had the morning after. Also, I grew to like the camp after a few days. I just felt that the first day was the most sensationalist of my entries. I also wish for you guys to understand that the kids don't have many other places to go for vacation, if anywhere else at all. And it wasn't just a big party, like I may imply. There were facilities for sports like badminton and tennis as well as a nice table tennis table. There was also a nice pool to swim in nearby. And as for the alcohol, it wasn't as bad as I make it out to be. I just want to stress that what you see written here were my feelings by the morning of Day 2.
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Day 1
What the hell am I doing here? I started the camp off by standing in the middle of the driveway alone for 30 minutes because I had no idea what was going on. The kids are all in their own little cliques and I’m just off to the side confused. Then I was moved into a room with 4 other guys. I expected this. I just didn’t expect one guy to drag one bed out into another room and another to be a dickface. There’s a certain satisfaction from calling him a dickface. Probably because this is the best thing to call him... The food isn’t bad. Nothing outstanding but it’s better than the food we got in Panichishte. The problem is that there is no option for seconds. At least not one which doesn’t make me feel marginally guilty inside. We went into town shortly after. The entire place is on a hill and so when I realized the entire trip into town was downhill, I dreaded the trip back up. It wasn’t so bad actually but more on that in a minute. When we got to the center it was boring. Nothing to do because the only people I knew were my counterpart and her sister. I was actually falling asleep at their table because a bunch of them were speaking in Bulgarian and after a long period of listening to another language it turns into a hypnotizing droning noise. Anyways, as I was saying the trip uphill wasn’t so bad. I was able to talk to the first really curious kids here: a group of 5th grade girls I might be teaching in September. They asked me a whole bunch of good questions and since there were like 5 of them they were able to do a sort of hive mind English recollection. It was quite entertaining to watch them chatting amongst themselves trying to remember words like ‘pool’ or ‘England’. When I arrived back I was accosted by another young boy and his friend. I think they were older but I couldn’t tell. Regardless, he seems rather interested in me and while I can appreciate the company, he’s always coming into my room. At least that’s something. Dinner was good. Bedtime was a completely different story. The days here are like a giant party. This place is less of a summer camp rather than a summer house, if you know what I’m saying. The loud music was playing deep into the night and all the kids (I stress the word kids) were drinking beer and vodka. Then when my roommates/charges returned to the room they saw me getting ready for bed and wouldn’t stop talking in their normal voices regardless. Then they started shouting and people started coming into the room. I am starting to hate them all. That night sucked.
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So you get the idea. I apologize for the short-ish entry this week but the last two were unusually long so I'll just give you guys a nice little break. I'm working on posting some of the pictures to the galleries. Look back here later this week to see if I've actually followed up on that.
This is the Peace Corps and I think I might like my students. Well maybe except the one guy.
-Zack
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