since i've been gone

today is july 1st, i'm posting from my school. i just finished skyping with mom, which happened in spite of the fact that i couldn't figure out the day difference, and asked her to skype me on wednesday. well, it's wednesday here but there it is still just tuesday. i guess i have two years to get used to that.
in the past few weeks a lot of things have happened; i found out my permanent site will be on the other side of bulgaria, a lot closer to the black sea but very far from sofia, from my host family, from all the things to which i am accustomed now. the village is mostly turkish bulgarians, which is something that i had not anticipated. the first night during my visit there i heard a muslim call to prayer for the first time. it was beautiful, and i was informed that it was being sung live, which is unusual. i felt sort of upset with myself for my ignorance of this part of the country, of this culture, but grateful at the same time to have the opportunity to learn more about this particular slice of the population.
the village is not so different than my own, except that by the end of this thing i will probably be speaking a bulgarian dialect that includes a lot of turkish words. here's the first one i learned: ana in turkish means mother.

once i returned i realized how much i had missed my little village, my baba and her facial expressions that i still can't decipher, my host father's jokes and my host mother's compassion. of the four volunteers in my current site, we were all pretty much placed at extremes within the country, as far as distance from each other goes. if bulgaria was pennsylvania, we were placed (by permanenet sites, i mean) in philadelphia, gettysburg, eerie and scranton (that's me, of course, my life references to The Office never end). i have to keep reminding myself of the relativity of it all; one can cross pennsylvania in less than a day.

there are so many small pleasures that i see every day that escape my usual summaries, but here are a few: we now have 27 baby birds. 13 are turkeys for sure, but the rest are too little for me to distinguish. they look like chicken biddies to me, but what do i know? i grew up driving next to chicken trucks and had friends with chicken houses, but still can't tell the difference at all. we are sponsoring a model school for english this week, and the barman at our local cafe hung up our large and brightly colored poster without a minute of hesitation. yesterday 24 students showed up to participate, we were blown away by their enthusiasm.
there's an election coming up, on the fifth, and all the political propaganda is entertaining and interesting. my family supports the gerb, a newer democratic party, and every time they're on the tv everyone gets quiet and listens attentively. i'm still looking up words on the screen in the dictionary, the one i looked up yesterday translated to "withdrawal", as in
"USA Withdrawals from Iraq". is this true? the whole world around me seems to have stopped spinning, the news trickles down slowly and i never really know what's going on back in the states.

all the best to you, and happy fourth of july.