The new group of volunteers arrived in Bulgaria at the end of March. There are about 40 of them (my group had 80) and they will be in training until mid-June. My second time meeting was on Wednesday this week. It was strange being at a pre-service training event as a speaker. My arrival doesn’t seem that long ago, but, at the same time, I feel so different than I did then. The first session I participated in was on PACA tools and Bulgarian municipalities. PACA – participatory analysis for community action – tools are what the Peace Corps uses in training us for development work and the government stuff I shared was mostly anecdotal. This time I talked about tourism development.
Afterwards, I rode the old, green bus with the mildewy seats and heavy gasoline odor to Kravoder to visit my host family. I feel bad, they are so wonderful, but I don’t get to visit nearly often enough. I had these illusions that I’d have all sorts of free time in the Peace Corps during which I’d knit gifts for friends, visit my host family, write essays, and perfect the conditional mood cases of Bulgarian grammar. This, alas, has not come to pass and I hardly feel that I have time to keep up with my normal tasks at site. Kravoder was great, of course.
On Thursday, some of the volunteers from my group who work on tourism related activities held a tourism workshop in Vratsa. Our goal was to try to define what our role would be with the new group and as a volunteer ‘taskforce’ in the year to come. I think it was productive. We came away with a few really good ideas and plans on how to combine and streamline our efforts to make tourism development at our various sites more effective and collaborative: sharing brochure templates, creating a database for online tour vendors, combining eco-trail maps for a hiking book, etc. Hopefully some of these will work out.
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