Ask the Peace Corps Volunteer/TEFL teacher in Bulgaria.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was beginning to hijack my postcard project thread something crazy, so I’m just going ahead and starting a new thread. There were requests awhile back for an “Ask the TEFL teacher”, which Hazel Nut Coffee did, but my experience is pretty different from hers.

Peace Corps: PC is the American international volunteer service organization. There are currently 7,810 Volunteers serving in 75 countries.

Bulgaria: For those who’ve forgotten their high school geography, Bulgaria is in the Balkans, bordered by Romania, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey. It also has a Black Sea coast. People here speak…Bulgarian.

Me: I live in Pavel Banya, Bulgaria, pop. 3,000, where I teach English as a Foreign Language in the local elementary school.

Getting the geeky question out of the way (I know you guys): No, I have not met Viktor Krum, but if I do, I promise to get his autograph.

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What did you have to do to join the Peace Corps?

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Are you suprised about how little coverage the Nurses’ Crisis involving Libya gets in the West?

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Fill out mounds and mounds of paperwork, and go to about fifteen doctors appointments (I’m exaggerating…slightly) to prove that I’m healthy.

You also have to have to be a university graduate to join (unless you have incredible outside experience) but I was planning on doing that anyway.

The average length of time between application and departure is about nine months, I am told. It took me about a year and a half. I was actually supposed to go to Central Asia in August of last year, but I couldn’t get medically cleared in time. (I have a very minor, and unimportant problem with my spine that was the root of the problem. PC Medical is very strict.)

Well, I don’t know. I don’t pay a whole lot of attention to Bulgarian media, so I don’t actually know how much play it gets here. When I was living with my host family, my host mom and I saw some stuff about it on the news once, and she told me about it (which reminded me that I’d read about it somewhere previously), but that’s the only time I’ve ever heard anyone talk about it.

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Are you enjoying your stay? How big of a difference is the quality of life from what you are accustomed to in the West? Have you run into any anti-American (or anti-Western. I’m kind of assuming that you are from N. America or Britain) sentiments?

And also I am a little jealous :smiley: My husband is from Romania, and all of his family is still there. We have kicked around the idea of going there for a year or so to teach English if I don’t get accepted into grad school, but I doubt we would ever follow through with it.

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For those readers (whose numbers included me, until a few minutes ago) unaware of this story, here is a link.

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I thought Bulgaria was a 1st-world country. Is it poor? Do the Bulgarians have any nostalgia for their royal family? How is bulgarian wine these days-I loved Trakia! And, is the language like Russian?

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Are there any other volunteers to hang out with in your location?

What sort of things will get you kicked out of the Peace Corps?

Are you able to do much traveling on the weekends?

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I am enjoying my stay, but of course it can be frustrating and lonely. The quality of life in BG really depends on where you live…development hasn’t been particularly even. If I lived in Sofia or Plovdiv, quality of life wouldn’t be that different from the US. The biggest difference in day-to-day life is the food you can get…you can basically only buy the vegetables and fruits that are in season at the moment. Forget buying anything exotic, like limes or avocados - although you can get these in big cities. And different ethnic foods? No way. There are three Indian restaurants and a Thai restaurant in Sofia. Most big cities have at least one Italian restaurant. That’s it. My town has about ten restaurants and they all have basically identical menus.

Peace Corps is limited to American citizens, so I’m an American, of course. I haven’t run into any anti-American sentiment, although I also haven’t looked for it. As a non-political organization, PC Volunteers are forbidden to participate in Bulgarian politics, and it’s recommended we remain neutral on American political issues, too. Maybe if I went around talking about how George Bush was a war criminal, I’d hear more.

Yes, Bulgaria is very poor. Unemployment is high. The average monthly income is $200. Most of the basics of life are correspondingly very inexpensive, but stuff like electronics and international travel and nice clothes, that sort of thing, are about the same price, or more expensive, than they would be in the US. Most Bulgarians (that I know, anyway), have never left Bulgaria - which I understand is about the same size as Tennessee. My living allowance is almost exactly ten times less than when I made as a cubicle slave back in Chicago, and I’m paid twice what the regular teachers are. (That’s 100 euro a month; I have no idea how they live on that.)

Bulgaria is, though, probably the most developed Peace Corps country (along with Romania). We all have cell phones, most Volunteers have broadband internet at home, we can take hot showers (most of the time), etc., etc.

I don’t think there’s any nostalgia for the royal family. Communism, that’s another story.

I’ve had some decent wine here, but I have yet to have anything really great. Of course, I haven’t tried any of the pricier stuff, I make a Bulgarian salary!

Bulgarian is a Slavic language, like Russian. I don’t know Russian at all, so I can’t compare them really well, but I don’t think they sound much alike. Bulgarian has trilly rs like Spanish and sounds more sparkly than Russian, which always sounds to me like it’s being formed at the very back of the mouth.

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Sort of. I’m the only Volunteer in my town, but there’re two Volunteers in the neighboring larger city, although one is moving soon. There are 150 Volunteers in Bulgaria, and it’s not that big a country, so we’re all relatively close together.

Getting kicked out: breaking a Bulgarian law, participating in Bulgarian politics (ie, participating in a political rally, that sort of thing), breaking any of Peace Corps’ myriad safety rules (no riding a bike without a helmet, no riding in a donkey cart, no boating…), leaving your site overnight without letting the office in Sofia know, leaving the country without permission will DEFINITELY get you sent home, and driving a car in country will get you sent home. (If you rent a car on holiday in another country, that’s okay.)

We can travel overnight two weekends a month, within the country. (If you leave the country, it counts as vacation and you have to get permission ahead of time.) Some people travel a lot, some are homebodies. I’m kind of in the middle, I like to take day trips better than overnight. It helps that I live in the exact geographical center of the country, so I’m relatively close to everything.

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Medieval Bulgarian was the language that the Bible was translated into back so many centuries ago. It is nowadays called Church Slavonic and still used in Orthodox churches in Russia. According to a Bulgarian teacher I had, Russians tend to find Bulgarian very “cute” and “endearing” because of this. Apparently it sounds quite quaint to them.

Nowadays, Bulgarian and Russian are substantially different. My Bulgarian professor had to study Russian for a decade. So it was easier for her to pick up than, say, Chinese, but she still had to work at it.

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Riding in a donkey cart is against safety regulations? Good heavens, how could that be dangerous under any circumstances?

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God knows. I actually went to a Donkey Festival recently that included donkey races (OF COURSE I got a t-shirt, it’s of a checkered flag with a running donkey superimposed over it), and a volunteer participated. He had to get special permission to do it.

And proseltyzing. I forgot that, witnessing will get you kicked out of the Peace Corps too.

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Can’t be from Britain. One requirement is that you have to be an American Citizen - not even a resident. Or at least it was that way in '93, when one of my cousins tried to join but couldn’t because he didn’t have citizenship yet.

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Isn’t Bulgaria’s President its king? Or was last I paid any attention… instead of trying to retrieve the crown, he ran for president and got elected by a high margin. Reminded me a lot of “The Apple Cart”, my favorite G.B. Shaw play. Aha, a quick google shows that Simeon Saxcoburggotski (that’s Saxe-Coburg for us non-bulgarians) was the previous president. The current guy is socialist.

So now the king is the head of one of the opposition parties. Still quite funny in my book.

16

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that…the “king” is the head of a centrist party. But he recently got in trouble for…something. I didn’t quite get all of it, I think he tried to sell off valuable lands he inherited in some kind of shady deal. Taped calls were released and it was a big scandal. (Sometimes I feel like I can understand only about 1/4 of everything everyone says. I wonder why that is.) So, he’s the king, and people call him the king, but he isn’t really the king and there’s no move to reinstate the monarchy.

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Hi! I hope you’re still checking this thread, because I have a job interview with the American University of Bulgaria, in Blagoevgrad! :: is excited :: It’s for a faculty position teaching literature and composition.

Do you know anything about the institution or the city? What are Bulgarian students like in the classroom? Are classes mostly lecture over there, or is student participation normal and expected?

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Oh wow! There I was, pottering around the SDMB, and suddenly I saw one of my old threads had been revived!

Anyway, as a matter of fact I do know something about Blagoevgrad. My first three months or so in Bulgaria I lived quite nearby and visited it on several occasions. Blagoevgrad is one of the nicer cities in the country and the university has an excellent reputation. It’s generally considered the best university in Bulgaria, maybe in all of Eastern Europe - people come from all over the region to study there.

As the university is quite multicultural, you wouldn’t just be teaching Bulgarians, but people from all over. In my experience, Bulgarians tend to be more lecture-oriented, not much with the classroom discussion. Their entire educational system is pretty much based on memorizing facts. The idea of doing something like research papers is rather foreign, although I know this is changing. (I actually just heard a higher-up in the Ministry of Education talk about this the other day, and was really pleased to hear about all of the changes they want to make, but of course it will take awhile.) However, the students at AUBG would largely be from the elite - it’s much too pricey for most Bulgarians - and they are much more likely to be exposed to foreigners and new ideas than your average Bulgarian.

One negative is that Bulgarians, by and large, do not speak English. You’d probably be okay in Blagoevgrad and Sofia, but unless you want to take up Bulgarian study, travelling would probably be difficult and frustrating. Almost all bus and train stations have timetables only in Bulgarian (ie, in Cyrillic). Now that I think of it, I think I’ll offer to translate my town’s bus timetable into English.

Anyway, good luck! Wow, there could be another Doper in the BG! Who wants to go to PlovDope?

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Well, yeah, I figured learning Bulgarian ASAP would probably be necessary if I’m actually offered the job :slight_smile: And yeah, PlovDope sounds excellent, so keep your fingers crossed for me!

20

Hi, me again :slight_smile:

It looks like there’s a chance I might actually be offered the job! I hardly even know what to ask, but anything at all you can tell me about what it’s actually like to live and work in Bulgaria would be most welcome – cost of living, weather, transportation, all that fun stuff. Does the Peace Corps provide housing, or did you have to arrange your own (and if so, how difficult was it?) I’m assuming Internet access isn’t too hard to arrange, since you’re posting here, but how expensive is it?

How difficult was it to learn the language? (I speak a little Czech, and I’ve traveled in Croatia and Bosnia and found that it really helped, so I’m assuming some of the vocabulary would be similar, but I’ve never tried to learn any language with a different alphabet before.)

What were the hardest cultural adjustments? Is there anything about customs / etiquette / what-have-you that I should know?